Blair
Suggested methods/courses for learning Russian. (Or any language)
Hi all.

I'm curious to know what the best options are for learning Russian. I get that you can just dive in and meet people here, but I like things to be more structured than that. Are there any free courses that are decent? Are there any paid courses that are worth the money?

For background, I'm a hobbyist who would like to learn Russian just because it is there to be learnt.
2019년 8월 17일 오전 9:03
댓글 · 8
4
It is difficult for me to say which method is better for learning Russian by a foreigner. I am not a professional teacher but just a Russian native speaker. Russian is difficult for English speakers and vice versa English for Russians. In my opinion, this is because these languages are different in their morphology. English is an analytical language, and Russian is mainly a synthetic and inflectional language. At the initial stage of learning the language for a Russian-speaking person is difficult to express their thoughts using only rigid grammatical structures of the English sentence. It is difficult for an English-speaking person to express his thoughts using the cases and inflections necessary for this.
So my first advice is that you need to learn the basics of language grammar. No need to cram grammar and solve a lot of grammatical examples. You just need to read a simple grammar book of Russian for foreigners from the beginning to the end. It doesn't have to be a thick textbook. Brazilian Polyglot Lucas Beghetti speaks Russian very well, and his method is that he does not learn grammar, and when reading texts he uses a grammar textbook as a reference. This is also acceptable, but you need to carefully analyze all the strange forms of words and strange places in the text. Therefore, to study grammar, you need to read a lot and listen a lot with the subsequent clarification of all obscure places.
My second advice at the initial stage, you should use only simple grammar and common words, but to work out their application to automatism. The textbook simulator of the English language by Dmitry Petrov helped me. He has the same textbook for learning Russian. (http://centerpetrova.ru/uchebniki) This is a very simple tutorial that allows you to quickly learn the basics of Russian. Maybe this book will help you as much as his English textbooks helped me.
2019년 8월 17일
2
Blair, I know one person who was happy with how her Russian was improving over the first months. And this person never tried to learn a foreign language before. I know many people who conversely are super frustrated:))) 

When you learn something like a Romance langauge you can very quickly learn to maintain some basic "lesson 1" conversations, without making many mistakes. Impossible with Russian (unless you restrict yourself to "my name is" and "this is a pen"). 
If you want this, you'll either lose motivation or you will need to work really hard. 

Read/listen to easy Russian and move towards intermediate. Learn songs by heart. Of course, use whatever textbook you like for grammar.
If you like writing... Play with Russian.
If you're fine with speaking broken Russian, converse.

2019년 8월 17일
1

I studied Russian for several years, but it was at a university, so I don't have any recommendations about online courses.  I will say, though, that Max's comment makes some very good points.  Russian grammar is very different from English, and very complicated, and I think the suggestion of reading through a short grammar book before you actually start using the language is a good idea.  As Max says, you don't need to start memorizing grammar rules right away, but you should have a basic sense of how Russian grammar works, and how it differs from English.  After that, you can refer back to your grammar book when you've got questions.

I think finding some kind of structured course is a good idea.  Learning just from textbooks and recordings will probably work fine at the very beginner level (I've used a few different textbooks and haven't found any of them to be remarkably superior, or inferior, to the others), but you'll probably want at least some amount of feedback from a teacher or language partner once you get beyond very simple sentences.  

2019년 8월 17일
1
Two channels the happy learner mentioned above loved
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCklUqFEcJqFnWKEBozw5p4g
https://realrussianclub.com/tprs-russian-effortless-russian/

What she did is just listening to podcasts like this (while learning some grammar form textbooks in parallel).

As foir your question about structured courses, I have no idea:( A freind of mine liked this textbook
http://bookre.org/reader?file=1374901&pg=2
but it is just one nice "traditional" textbook out of many. A bit dated (like, exchange rate of the Russian rouble has changed a lot:)) but I don't see a problem here.

2019년 8월 17일
1
Hi!
Try to find some books (pdf files). I recomend to search for "русский как иностранный учебник для начинающих pdf" in google or in russian site www.yandex.ru
Also search for some video both in google and http://www.yandex.ru/video "русский как иностранный"
Try coursera. There are some free courses, e.g. https://www.coursera.org/learn/ya-govoryu-po-russki

2019년 8월 17일
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