I am trying to help a friend of mine to learn Russian. I have decided to share a number of strategies that I have found successful in learning English, helping others to learn English and tutoring Russian language learners.
Feel free to post your comments on the techniques or share your insights.
<em>1. Vocabulary Lists in Excel </em>
1. I would accumulate around 30 words. I would prepare the list, containing the English word, transcription, the Russian word.
2. Then I would close the English words columen with a piece of paper, read aloud the Russian word and read what I belive to be correct or just move the piece of paper down, see the Engligh word and read it aloud.
3. If I correctly guessed the word, I would not place any symbol in column to the right. If I was wrong -- I gave a wrong answer or I did remember the English translation, I would place a symbol in the column to the right. Then I would use the excel filter to filter in only the "problem" words. I would delete all the symbols from the respective column. I would go through the words once again.
This method enables one to focus on the "problem" words and just avoid spending any time on the words that you have already memorized.
Disdvantages: This is an extremely boring method. I am working a translator from home and I would usually have one run across a group of the words before the dinner (about 10 minutes), before supper (10 minutes) and before I go to bed (about 10 minutes).
<em>3. What to talk about?</em>
As I have written earlier, I am helping a friend of mine to learn Russian. I am not profession tutor, so I am not sure that I know all the cool textbooks for Russian, but what I've seen on the net is just... completely awful.
I am actually coping out part of the American English File (Level 1) and bringing this stuff to the session. We would open the exercise, look thru it (for instance, make the dialogue about what you usually do during your day) and then we would act out the dialogue in Russian))) The point is that it takes time just to make up one exercise to do and if you are going to practice lots and lots of different situations, it's just impossible to "engineer" all those exercises... So, using the English textbook might be helpful.
What Russian textbooks do you use? Why do you like a particular textbook?
I am sure that this is the method I would recommend anyone who's learning the languages.
Comments:
1. If your dictionary does not enable you to record the list of the words you have looked up -- you can just look through the browser history.
2. Russian online dictionaries. What's the best one for the levels from total beginner to intermediate -- lingvo (the above specified). If you are a translator and you need to find out some specifics about a phrase, use multitran, while if you just need to look up such words as "dog", "hilarious", "president", "window", you should actually abstain from multitran, coz it has too many meanings there and you would spend lots of time trying to find out the bes traslation.
<em>2. Look Up Voc During Lesson</em>
Every time you cannot remember such words as "dog", "car", "hotel", "idiosynchrony" (i.e. your basic survival voc) rather than asking your partner just open this dictionary in your browser, type in the "dog" and see the word, use it in the sentence.
This dictionary enables you to automatically record in a list all the words that you have looked up during the session. You have to register in order to access this fuction. The registration is free. So, after the session has been completed, you can copy all the words that you have looked in excel and do any follow-up that you wish to.
What's really good about this method is that I am generally looking up only those words in Spanish (which I am starting to learn) that I need in my sessions. So, there's a 100% guarantee, that these words are the suvival vocabulary to me. Somebody might need some of "their own" vocabulary. I need, for instance, need to learn such words as "simultaneous translator", "forklift", "SEO", "forex", "price", "foreign currency", coz these and like 500-1000 words are the ones that I use to describe what I am doing, what I am interested in.
