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WildGinger's Русский log

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2021 5:54 am
by WildGinger10
Привет! Today I started working with Fluent Forever's pronunciation trainer for Russian, so I figured I should start up my log for this journey.

A little background here, I (when COVID isn't a thing) work on cruise ships in the show ensemble and most of our dancers and circus artists are Ukrainian or Belarussian. A few of them speak to each other in Ukrainian but primarily they all communicate in Russian, and I've always wanted to be able to communicate with them in their own tongue. I've also spent a lot of time around the language and really love the way it sounds so I'm pretty excited to start working on learning this Slavic titan. I figure, if I get fluent enough at it and find that I want to learn Ukrainian, it just wouldn't be a difficult leap to make, and Russian is more widely spoken so starting there is fine.

About three years ago I sat down with my Ukrainian friends and learned the Cyrillic alphabet, which feels like a nice head start. At the time, my German was still very new and I did not really understand how to learn a language, so my initial attempt to learn both German AND Russian was obviously doomed to fail, and I stuck with German. But I'd like to get moving on Russian now too.

I'm still very heavily working on my German and will prioritize German over Russian, so this will probably collect a little dust at the beginning. For now, I'm just going to plug through the pronunciation trainer to refresh the alphabet, learn some spelling rules, work on minimal pairs, and begin shadowing to work on the phonemes, and once I feel confident there and have some more time I have an idea to blend Duolingo with my regular self-study program, so I will then be working through the Duolingo tree. I'm curious to see how it comes along.

But that's for the future! For now, спасибо for coming along with me, and I'll be back when there's something to update!