I am learning Russian

So after a nightmare journey (major delays because of fog) my son finally came home for a week during the Russian Christmas/New Year holiday. I’ve persuaded him to give me daily half hour private tuition (well Ok the money helped with the persuasion!) I’ve really felt the benefit of having individual attention, being able to go at my pace, being able to direct the lesson where I wanted to go and have my questions dealt with promptly.

I enjoy learning online with Duolingo, RedKalinka and I enjoy working on my own with my Take off in Russian CD and book – and I very much enjoy our weekly classes with Svetlana and our weekly conversation classes with Anya. As someone who works each day from home  and whose work focuses on online education, I particularly appreciate being able the face to face contact I get from the weekly classes. It’s nice to share the learning with others and have some rapport. BUT in a mixed ability class you are dependent on the progress of others and the teacher always has to maintain a balance. Plus I guess I might be in a slightly different “camp” from the others, not because I speak other languages – several of them do – but because I know about teaching and learning languages and I know what I want to learn and how to learn it. Private tuition, one-on-one would suit me for a number of reasons. However it’s expensive. Even when it’s your own son!!! That’s the down side and why I probably won’t do it for a while yet. It’s something to consider for the future however. I am off to St Petersburg again in February and I plan to book a couple of stand alone private lessons with a school there which my son knows. Watch this space:)

My two worlds have collided! About time too. In fact, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

I’ve been learning Russian for four months now, from books and CDs, from Youtube and from a  face-to-face course at UCLAN (where they use Blackboard, not Moodle!)

Moodle is my day job, but I did wonder what it would be like to learn -or practise- Russian on Moodle. Now I know..

I signed up to some online exercises from Red Kalinka – note  I don’t know them; they don’t know me; I have no affiliations with them at all, but I have previously bought some of their products and blogged about them here. Well, Red Kalinka, your marketing emails worked, because I was intrigued when I read about the “thousands of questions of all kinds”  so I registered. I knew it was Moodle as soon as I go to the log in page and saw the new user message. It’s Moodle 3.1 (very good) using what I believe is a purchased theme, Kallos30. After logging in you’re taken straight to the dashboard where you clearly see Beginner or Intermediate options. I’m assuming users are either enrolled into all courses on registration, or there is an auto-enrol plugin once you click on an option (course).

There’s the Completion Progress block – wonderful! That said, it’s pretty daunting when you see so  many blue (not yet started) activities there to be done. These activities are all quizzes with a variety of questions. If you pass the quiz, the blue turns green; if you fail, it turns red. You can see I failed the second one in Beginner Grammar and Vocabulary  –  here’s my result:

I got 95% because I put “station” for вокзал instead of train/railway/railroad station. OK, I’m fine with that, but it  does show 95% is not good enough to pass  – you need a clear 100% 🙂

As well as being divided into beginner and intermediate/advanced, the quizzes are divided into grammar and vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension. I liked the Reading comprehensions – read a passage and do some multiple choice questions  based on it. Perhaps I liked them because I found them easier. I was less taken with the Listening because I found them harder: you listen to several clips and have to put them in conversational order. This is a very good task, but I got disillusioned because I’m sure I got a question all correct but it told me I did not! Red Kalinka, if you’re listening, perhaps you can enlighten me?

And, Red Kalinka, if you are listening – I have to say I respect and admire all the hard work which has gone into these quizzes. Someone has put a lot of thought into this site. Having made many Moodle quizzes myself, I appreciate the effort that goes into them, not only devising the questions but also thinking of all the possible alternatives people might put (for short answer questions). All this has to be done manually, by a human… I empathise!

It’s always interesting to see Moodle from a student point of view.  On this Moodle site, there’s no interaction with other participants – the navigation and adminstration blocks have been hidden (although you can still view participants if you know where to look!) but its function is to provide the quizzes, and it does that very successfully and with a professional interface.   Red Kalinka admin,  you might think about enabling mobile access so people could do the quizzes from the Moodle mobile app.  Learning Russian on the move!

I’m going to go back and try a dictation now.. using the Russian stickers on my laptop 🙂

It just is. But of course. I knew that. I used to spend hours, weeks, months (happily) shut in my room obsessively absorbing French.  With this new Russian study, it’s been interesting to see if my ageing brain has lost some of its retentive powers – and the answer is – a bit – but not enough to put me off. The main thing is that I’d forgotten just how much work you have to do to memorise, understand and retrieve/reproduce a new language. I try to do an hour a day – although according to Dukette and Cornish (2009)*, adults can only focus for twenty minutes before needing a break.  I try to vary how I learn: a quick fix of Duolingo which I can do anytime, some reading out loud practice from a RedKalinka book, vocab learning from our UCLAN Blackboard course, another page of  Talk Russian and a personal treat (yes, I know what you’re thinking) of grammar from my Russian grammar book. This way, although I’m doing an hour, I’m actually only doing ten minutes or so of one particular learning tool.

The most successful way I have found to retain the knowledge is to write it down or speak it. The act of handwriting (longhand!) forces your brain to generate words. Speaking is the same to – it’s that retrieval aspect again – but not just conversation classes which we have every Friday with a lovely Latvian native Russian speaker called Anna – but memorising spoken passages, songs and poems. I’ve written about this before, and in our class we’re currently tasked with learning parts from a Chukovsky poem: телефн.

All this IS hard work though – especially when you have a full time job or are a full time student, as some of my classmates are in our UCLAN course. The course is an elective, so they’re studying other, sometimes unrelated subjects and come to Russian out of interest and for a different experience. With  my language teacher hat on, I’d say, even though it’s an elective, it’s still vital  to devote time to learning, if only  fifteen minutes a day learning the vocab or verb endings. And by that I don’t mean simply reading through the class notes. Languages when learned as adults do not permeate our brains through osmosis – we really have to make the effort.

The first hurdle to conquer is the Russian alphabet. It’s achievable, if you take the letters a few at a time. Verb endings, along with genders of nouns, shouldn’t be too difficult if you have any kind of memory of a language learned at school because at least you will have been introduced to the idea that in other languages, the endings of verbs change depending on who is doing the stuff and inanimate words can be masculine, feminine or neuter. (That’s NEUTER, not neutral, OK?) Possibly the hardest thing to master in Russian will be the concept of ‘case’, if you’ve never come across this before. Here, I’m unashamedly at an advantage, having  studied both Latin and German, and so, if my grammar book tells me B takes the accusative case when it means ‘into or to’ and the prepositional case when it means ‘in or at’, I won’t bat an eyelid. Here is where the balance between me and my young student classmates evens out. Their brains are younger and more retentive than mine; my brain is already wired up for varying word order made intelligible by inflected words.

But, together, we’ll get there!

 

*Cornish, D. and Dukette, D. (2009). The essential twenty. 1st ed. Pittsburgh, Pa.: RoseDog Books.

Although I can usually manage reasonably well typing French and German accents on my keyboard, typing Russian is quite a challenge. Until  recently I used http://russian.typeit.org/ which is fine but it does involve copy/paste. On the recommendation of my son, I scoured Amazon and bought some Russian keyboard stickers. (There are several brands and colours to choose from.) Not being particularly digitally skilled, some of mine went on a bit lop-sided, but they’re functional:

So now all I need do is switch my language to Russian and I can practise using the keys on the keyboard – proper typing!  Мне нравится изучать русский язык  (See what I did there?) It’s slow at the moment, having to look for the keys – but then handwriting is equally slow. I feel like a child learning how to write all over again, laboriously.

BUT……

For some reason, my brain has now forgotten how to type in English! Nearly half a century ago (yes, really) my auntie taught me how to touch type and it’s been one of the most useful skills I’ve ever acquired (that and Latin!!)  Usually, I only rarely look at the keys and I can type very fast. Well I could. It seems adding extra letters to each key is warping my brain such that, if I glance down now, I will hit the wrong key, type a Russian B from the sticker instead of the British B I’ve been using for decades -and end up with D. I’m making so many typos in English when I rarely did before. It’s very frustrating but I shall persevere, secure in the belief that brain plasticity will win out in the end. And in the meantime -the solution? When typing English,  don’t look at the keyboard! Ever!

 

I am liking the Ruslan Russian songbook very much.  One easy song to learn is ой, мороз, мороз! (oi! Frost, Frost!) which is about someone returning home in the cold to his waiting wife. He’s asking the frost not to freeze him and his beautiful white maned horse. Coincidentally I was reminded of this song in the last few days when I received a 30 second mobile phone video from my son on his way to work in St Petersburg. Minus the horse, of course…

I love mnemonics! As a French teacher I’d introduce my classes each year to Mrs Vandertramp for revising verbs which take être in the perfect tense.

Since I began learning Russian I’ve been hearing often about the “Seven letter spelling rule “or the “five letter spelling rule” – or even, today the “eight letter spelling rule”. I’ve identified the letters but was hoping some kind soul had come up with some mnemonics to remember them. And indeed someone has! It’s a bit contrived, but then mnemonics often are. It’s fun anyway. Watch this video to get the story behind how “Crisp garlicky hot shrimp with fresh chips was chosen by Jacques for the tsar”…

 

In Dr Brett Andreatta’s book Wired to Grow, she outlines how it is the act of having to recall or retrieve something we learned, rather than repeating it, which helps us learn it. This has a bearing on language learning where you’d think writing out irregular plurals (as I have been doing) repeatedly would make them stick in your mind  – but no – it’s having to bring those plurals back out and into use that makes them stick. Retrieval doesn’t have to be via tests; it could be having to explain them to other people – or even to yourself (or blogging about what you’ve learned!) Conversation classes – which we’ve begun at UCLAN now – are a great example of retrieval in action.

She also says that research shows it’s best to have three retrieval sessions spaced with sleep. Sleep? Because ‘sleeping on it’ really does work – our day’s learning moves into long term memory during sleep.

I love grammar. Of course I realise when learning a new language you need to communicate, practise speaking, gain confidence, absorb and retrieve phrases. But if you’re going to get to any reasonable level you do have to tackle grammar at some stage. Myself, I’ve always preferred to tackle it head on, from the start.  One of my most treasured books from my schooldays is the 1971 edition of Teach Yourself French Grammar (with a 45 pence price tag inside). I remember buying it and literally reading it from cover to cover  – in awe of its power. Then I read it again and again over subsequent months but the message shouted out to me on first encounter: master the grammar and you can master the language.

So I had high hopes of a similar experience when I ordered Teach Yourself Russian Grammar (You Really Need to Know) by Daphne West And I haven’t been disappointed! It’s much longer than its French counterpart, but in the few months since I began learning Russian I can see why. (If this is the length of the ‘Grammar you really need to know’ book, I wonder how long the ‘All the grammar that exists’ book is? 🙂 )

What I appreciate about the book is that everything is clearly explained with exercises for you to do at regular intervals. The exercises are short and although they are usually  of the matching, gap-fill or complete the endings types, I just did a crossword on irregular plurals – timely, as we did plurals in our Russian class yesterday.  I don’t think Russian plurals are any more challenging than German plurals really – and as for the irregular plurals – well – you just need to memorise them. End of.

Although it’s not essential to know why, for example, the word for sugar (сахар) changes when you have your coffee WITH sugar (c caxapom) or WITHOUT sugar (без сахара)   to me, it actually helps you retain the words if you understand the reasons behind the variations.

So I’m on page 26 of 274 (not including the answers to the exercises) Wish me luck 🙂

I blogged previously about my experiences with Duolingo and also about a book I’ve purchased from Red Kalinka. After another week of practice, here’s an update:

Out of the several tools and books I have to help me, I’m still finding Duolingo is the easiest one to motivate myself with, purely because of its bite-size chunks accessible from my phone. If my brain is too tired to tackle the text book or watch a Youtube video, it can still cope with a five minute quick fix from Duolingo -and often that five minutes extends -especially when I am told I have met my daily target, so the incentive is to beat my daily target.
I’m still enjoying the random phrases, but I’m getting more out of the app now since I began in earnest to read the comments against each sentence. (Not being one for reading instructions, I’d only actually discovered them last week.) I find if I have a query about why I got something wrong, the chances are others will have wondered the same, and it will be dealt with in the comments. Good! I guess my next stage is to add comments of my own when required.

Again I like the repetitive nature of the sentences and word groups. It makes it easier to memorise the many different endings if you keep hearing and having to type them in – even when you can’t quite remember which case that was.

One aspect I do miss, however, is the Speaking. I discovered this week that some languages do have that option, although unfortunately it appears that Russian doesn’t (yet) I wonder how good the speaking exercises are? I suppose I could sign up to the French one to find out, but I probably won’t. Anyway, I have the real deal with Svetlana every week at UCLAN 🙂

As for Red Kalinka, I’ve been working through the first couple of texts from their first reading book that I bought last week. I love the simplicity and clarity of the texts, and as I’ve been playing the sound as I read, I realise they are easy to memorise and I can usefully adapt them to myself and my own circumstances. The only thing I wish is that there were a space between each sentence to give me time to repeat , before the next sentence comes along, but I realise they are not really meant for that. I can just pause the sound though – and when I get a bit better, I can try reading along at the same time!

I hadn’t looked further at the Red Kalinki site until today when I discovered they too have an app, so I downloaded it just now to try.

They offer three new words a day: sounds like a good thing to add to my learning Russian box of tricks. I had to smile at my very first word from the app, though:
губы – lips

Nothing to do with the word itself,  but the fact that they’re obviously the lips of an attractive young woman, and in the short time I have been learning Russian and researching Russian teaching materials, I have come to the conclusion that all Russian language teachers are young, female, beautiful, and usually blonde! I plan to back up my conclusion with more research in a future post!
There’s also a weekly dialogue, good, but too much for me along with the stuff I’m using, and a link to their (paid for) online course, which of course is fine. My plan is to persevere with the three new words a day and see how I get on.

By the way – I think Red Kalinka is linked to Russian for free, another site I’ve been on recently.

Until earlier this year, I thought numbers in French were hard – you know, four times twenty, a ten and a seven for 97, for example*. Then when I explored Japanese before going to Tokyo, I discovered that their numbers change according to the type of object – whether long and round or thin and flat. So it wasn’t too much of a shock to discover Russian numbers change too, although it was somewhat of a disappointment …

So… what do I need to know?

1.  один (1) and два (2) change according to gender. That’s OK; I can do genders, even three of them, having learned German and Latin.
2. Nouns that follow any numbers ending in 1 take the nominative singular. OK..
3. Nouns that follow numbers 2, 3 and 4 take the genitive singular. Hmmm…
4. The rest take the genitive plural…

Snapshot from Take off in Russian:

We had a good practice in class yesterday, going around saying our ages and repeating the ages of the people before us. Now ages…

1. If your age ends in 1, you say год : 21 год
2. If your age ends in 2, 3 or 4, you say года: 34 года
3. If your age ends in any other number, you say лет: 57 лет

год ? лет? What’s that all about? Turns out лет  is the irregular genitive plural form of год, which means year. Ok – as long as I know and understand these things, I can accept them! I don’t like to just have to learn something without knowing the reason – even though, as a language teacher, I know sometimes people might prefer simply to ‘go with the flow’.

And not to forget: the person whose age we’re talking about is in the dative case. “To him, five years” And why not? Who are we to presume everyone should express age the same way we do in English?

I found this video helpful for  ages, numbers and the dative case:

*Unless of course you’re Belgian (nonante)