не хочу учиться, хочу жениться | Puggy's Russian language log

[puggy]

So, I'll be learning Russian. Why am I taking time out of my day to learn this broken dialect of the proud Ukrainian tongue? Well, as a few people here might be aware, a certain special someone (@Via_Diva) has gotten me to sign up here as inspiration to learn her native language, Russian. I might not be posting here a lot immediately, as I haven't gotten into serious Russian study yet and am a bit fixated on Icelandic right now, but I will once I've gotten more into it.

I like Russian literature quite a bit - Dostoevsky especially. I can recite the first stanza of the Soviet national anthem in Russian from memory. I have recently been getting into a few Russian-language rock bands. But I figure love is as good a reason to learn a language as any, and after all, nothing has inspired men to greater deeds than it has, so learning Russian is surely a worthwhile endeavor for me.

First order of business: I've gotten used to reading the Cyrillic alphabet and know some basics of Russian pronunciation. I tried singing two songs in Russian to my girlfriend over Skype, which made her happy but I'm sure also made her [scream internally] at my inability to pronounce a palatalized R.

[Via Diva]

The OP is too reluctant to post anything, so I'll just share a list from the game called "guess the stress"

Yes, that implies he can read Cyrillic, though not without problems, but still.

[Arnaud]

deleted

[Via Diva]

"Guess the stress" is a torture game strictly reserved to native speakers. :mrgreen:

Unless you're dealing with words like these. The exam which you have to pass if you want to graduate from high school has a question from that game, and oh man it's not an easy one.

[neofight78]

Hence why I always work with text and audio together, including my flashcards. If I know a word, I know how to stress it correctly. Of course, if I don't know a world I'm screwed just like everybody else

One of the things that makes me usual amongst learners of Russian is my dislike of texts with stress marks. I find them most distracting and unpleasant like someone has had a shave and all the bristles fell onto the page.

[Ogrim]

I dislike stress marks as well, although they are certainly useful for learning to pronounce a word correctly. I even prefer that dictionaries indicate stress with the stressed syllable in bold rather than with the stress mark.

In my Russian class we have played "guess the stress" a few times. The teacher would write a list of mostly unknown words on the blackboard and we had to take turns reading them out. Whenever we got one wrong she would pronounce it the right way and we had to repeat a few times to make it stick. It was actually a good exercise and sometimes fun too.

And by the way, welcome to the forum Puggy. Your reasons for learning Russian are as good as any

[Serpent]

Heh. I úsed to think chíldren's books had stress marks in all lánguages

[tarvos]

Those marks you see in Hungarian are different letters!