blaurebell wrote:Not to want to scare you, but there is no such thing as easy Russian native materials. Even kid's books tend to have hairy grammar and way too much vocabulary. To prevent disappointment, expect to be reading with a dictionary even after finishing a couple of courses. There are so few cognates in Russian, that there is just an enormous amount of vocabulary to learn! Impossible to put all of it in a couple of courses. Learning with Texts makes reading with a dictionary way less annoying though! I can't imagine what it was like for my dad who was doing the same thing with a paper dictionary
Ah, I'm not afraid. The good thing about approaching Russian as slowly as I am is that my expectations are very, very low, and I have no ego in regards to my abilities, so I won't really be deterred easily. I probably shouldn't have said "native materials" because I'll be reading translations for a while before hand. Actually, I'll likely coax my friend into reading Mangas for me in Russian. Honestly, Mangas and comics are my favorite way to bridge the vocabulary gap between courses and "real" books in the target language. The images allow me to infer the meaning of a lot of the vocabulary, plus if it's a series I've already read then that makes it twice as easy to infer the meaning of vocabulary. Basically, I'll just be reading lots of stuff like this for a while after assimil and Hugo's:
I guess I should have said my plan is more like this: Assimil/Hugos>manga in russian> translated young adult series in Russian> modern russian. That's still a whiles away for me, though. We'll see how I feel once I get there.
Thanks for visiting Lilly. I was actually just reading your log and for a while I thought it was strange how we seem to be interested in the same languages—German, French, Russian, and Spanish—then I saw that you're interested in Japanese as well, which is a language that I actually spent a solid year and a half studying when I was about 18 and I'd love to get into it one day. It's just interesting that we're drawn to the same languages
. If you mention that you're also interested in Norwegian, then I'll be convinced that you're some kind of alternate me from an alternate time line.
Xmmm wrote:I agree with blaurebell. I'm eighteen months into Russian and have read 6000 pages, but when I pick up The Head of Professor Dowell, LingQ tells me that roughly 15% of the words are words I've never seen before. This makes it 'easy' reading for me, because when I pick up Azazel by Boris Akunin, LingQ tells me that 25% of the words are words I've never seen before. Russian has a lot of words!
I think probably the best advice to give someone starting out in Russian is what blaurebell said. When you're done with the courses, get yourself some L/R tool like LingQ or LWT or Readlang. And be prepared to use it for a couple years.
Ah, yes, you do bring up a good point with those tools. The one downfall about using comics and manga to learn vocab is that you can't as easily look up the unknown words as you can with tools like LWT or ReadLang. Although, as I said above, the images from manga and the fact that I'll be reading mangas that I've already read before give me a big boost in being able to pick up the vocabulary. I fully expect to have several problems, though, but I'll cross those bridges when I get there. Thanks for stopping by Xmmm, your log was one of the logs that motivated me to study Russian a while ago, so it's cool to see you around.