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6 responses so far ↓
Nils // March 24, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I can distinguish most Cyrillic characters in their capitalized form, and have no trouble with such ‘classic tricky bits’ such as how CCCP was not pronounced as see-see-see-pee. LOL. Perhaps a remnant of studying ancient Greek. But it is with the regular, lowercase form that I get entirely confused. Not speaking a single word may also be a handicap there
Josh // March 24, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I didn’t know you had studied ancient Greek. Was that for schooling, or just an interest of yours?
Nils // March 25, 2007 at 6:47 am
Ha! That’s a long story, which in short goes: I took it first year of secondary school and then tried brushing up my Sophocles a decade or so ago with a Teach Yourself book. In both cases I never got very far; at least, I wouldn’t be able to understand much today.
GeoffB // March 27, 2007 at 2:41 am
The reason you don’t fall off your bike once you’ve learned to ride is that you know how to ride as a process, not as information. If you put your Russian vocabulary into sentences, practicing your 3rd person conjugations in the process (!), and then familiarize yourself with the sentences you’ve created, you’ll make something you use – active – instead of something you know – not so active. If you teach yourself sentences like “the cat eats the table,” you’ll have the nominative for cat, the 3rd person for eat and the accusative for table, all built into an image that will bring back the paradigms for you when you need them with a minimum of thought.
Josh // March 31, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Geoff: Thanks for the advice. Good idea.
Steve Kaufmann // October 18, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I do n0t necessarily agree. I cannot imagine making sentences like ‘the cat eats the table” just to learn a language.
I have found that a lot of listening and reading in Russian and deliberate vocabulary study of different forms of the words has enabled me to understand Russian, spoken and written, and to speak, although with mistakes.
This is after about 15 months of listening and reading and vocab study, in other words “passive” learning, if you want, but actually quite active in my mind.