This week my head has been tortured with understanding and using the different verbs for learning/studing/teaching:
Изучать / Изучить
учить/учиться
учить / выучить
учить / научить
At the same time we’ve been delving into perfective/imperfective and my brain has been firing on all cannons (argh – dreadful cliché but it does express very well how I feel) Russian is a hard slog at the moment. I know from my studies that we need to pass through this barrier -cross this threshold – and I’ll get a sense of achievement. But I’m not there yet 🙁
Perhaps I need to take a step back and look at what I have achieved: since starting “in anger” last September I’ve reached GCSE standard and A1 on the Common European Framework for Languages. I can speak in the present, past and future and I can understand A LOT. I’ve reached a level in Russian in ten months which I took three years to reach in French and German, and I never got demoralised then. But that’s because it was never hard! Learning French and German I had plenty of time – and they were easier languages of course. Russian is a difficult language, even for the hardened linguist that I am, and to expect to reach a high standard in just a few months is perhaps a bit optimistic.
But wait until this time next year!!!