Fortheo wrote:Nice. I'm looking forward to reading what you think of it after you use it. I've always planned to use it in a year or two once I get out of the A levels.
I'll definitely keep you guys updated on my progress with it. I have given myself a good incentive and will start it as soon as I finish/abandon Duolingo, so probably tomorrow.
With
Duolingo I'm down to the last 9 skills and I've been swearing so much, I think it's become useless! Understanding the Russian is no problem at all, only the damned English translations are. They either make no sense at all or have too few alternative correct answers! For someone mostly used to British English the last stretch of this course is such a pain in the neck. I had to guess both the American vocabulary as well as the strange way of translating whatever weird Russian construction is being practiced! Besides, Russian and English is so far apart that translating from one into the other is just a grim exercise for longer sentences. It's really not a good language combination for Duolingo in general. I think German and Russian would be much easier, but there isn't such a course yet. I'm going to consider Duolingo as finished after the last two grammar skills which I will do today. I have no interest in the final 7 vocabulary skills: It's the kind of vocabulary I will either pick up from reading or not at all. No interest in prolonging this useless suffering! Up until the last checkpoint it's definitely good and fast for getting a grammar overview though! I also make hardly any mistakes in the Assimil exercises thanks to all the practice I got along the way with Duolingo. A good combination for sure.
As for mistakes in producing Russian in Duolingo: I sometimes surprise myself with correct answers on long sentences. However, I think I would cry if I would attempt the Duolingo reverse tree now
It really doesn't help that each sentence has like 3+ opportunities to get a case or conjugation / aspect / verb of motion wrong! Substitution drills would be so much less discouraging! With a language like Russian making just one mistake per sentence seems already like a huge success to me
That's not good enough for Duolingo though, which means that you will have to judge for yourself whether you're improving or not, even if Duolingo marks virtually every Russian sentence you produce as wrong. In my case it definitely helped, I think Assimil would have been really tough without it. I did 100XP per day for 47 days with at least 5 new lessons a day, strengthening for the rest. In total it took 28h so far and it was time well spent. Not quite there yet on my production, but a good start. Nevertheless, it's time to move on to less frustrating drills for a while.
Modern Russian: After looking at the audio in more detail I think it might actually not be as bad as I thought. There are 50h of audio for both Modern Russian 1 & 2 and the whole content in the book is just grammar explanations + a transcript of most of the audio drills. So, how long it takes depends only on whether I need one or two passes to master the audio drills and how much time the workbook exercises take up. The workbook is for writing exercises only and as far as I can see I can probably skip a whole lot of "Answer in English" exercises. Or maybe I try to answer them in Russian instead, I'll see. There is no answer key, so I will check my answers with lang8. My copy has a few pencil markings from someone who apparently reached the end of it though, which is not a bad sign at all! Even with some second passes I expect no more than 100h for the whole course, so with 1h a day I should ideally finish it about the same time as I finish the Assimil active wave that starts in a couple days for me. So, any noticeable progress when I try the Duolingo reverse tree after Modern Russian will likely come from both courses.
And you're right Fortheo, I think Modern Russian would be a little tough for a beginner. The first chapter doesn't look very difficult to me after half of Assimil and most of Duolingo, but it looks like it would have been very very difficult for me right at the beginning. It's a little hard to tell though, maybe it seems more difficult than it is. Listening to Assimil dialogues for the first time also makes little sense and at the end it's all clear and easy. In any case, no matter how difficult it is, I will probably whine a lot about it on my log for the next 3+ months, since it's dry and boring drilling after all, not exactly my favourite activity
I hope there are many sentences about spies at least to lighten things up!