Learning Russian from scratch

[Ogrim]

Is 3 months enough time to learn enough Russian, with the help of my friends, to survive in Russia? How should I go about doing this?

A lot of useful advice has been given already, so I don't have much to add to that. I don't want to discourage you, but to the question quoted above I would have to say that, unless you have a remarkable learning capacity and can spend all your hours on studying Russian, you won't get very far in three months. Russian has a complex grammar, pronunciation is not as straightforward as it may seem at first glance (meaning that althought the Cyrillic alphabet in princple is "one letter" = "one sound", there is a lot going on phonetically, in particular vowel reduction), and unless you already know another Slavic language the vocabulary is not very transparent.

That being said, if you can spend a good number of hours studying before your trip, and then keep on actively studying during your time in Russia, you should be able to get to a decent "survival level".

[reineke]

Of course you should do it. If I remember well you also had interest in Uzbekistan. You may need to put some of your sensibilities aside. You learned Spanish, so that should not be too much of a problem.

I don't like speed language learning. I suppose if I had to learn a language fast, I'd look into FSI and similar courses.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 359#p63359

[Dylan95]

I think she was referring to how in Russian schools, grammar drills are emphasized in exams, rather than speaking skills, or wide vocab knowledge. I've encountered this with many Russians, they'll have been tested on every tense etc. but were never taught to really speak. I think this is a problem in schools across the world, but I've noticed it particularly among Russians.

I reacted on the word "discipline-oriented". It just isn't something that I remember about my school years .
But I completely agree that we weren't taught to speak, only theory and wordlists. Btw, it's the main reason why I lost any interest in language lessons practically from the first school lesson.
Besides, not everyone was learning English in school. For example in my school we could choose only between German and French (I graduated in the 90s). So there's a lot of people in Russia who actually has never been learning English at all. They probably know a couple of phrases, but it's all.

I believe German is still a common language choice for students in Russia. Several of my friends in Russia who are all in their early twenties chose to study German over English when they were in school for example.

I think your having lost interest in language study from day one in school is a very common phenomenon. It's so boring and inefficient the way languages are taught in schools around the world. I've even had people tell me that it's impossible to learn a language after one's youth

[leosmith]

I usually give different advice to people based on their language learning history (or lack thereof), and I don't know yours

Yes this is crucial. Also, does he want to study Russian hard for 6 months, 3 months in Australia followed by 3 months in Russia? Or does he want to spend an hour a day 5 times a week for the next 3 months to prepare himself, enjoy Russia but not study there, then drop the language?

Anyway, geoffw has given some excellent advice. First learn cyrillic (don't forget to use audio), then do Pimsleur. There are 90 Pimsleur lessons, which is doable but ambitious. If you want an efficient, quick dose of grammar I'd recommend Michel Thomas. Listening as much as possible is a good idea; you probably want at least some of that to be comprehensible beginner podcasts. It would be a great help to chitchat with your Russian friends before you leave.

I can add to that list if you want more; just say the word.

[Boris Britva]

Hey, they say it's always better to learn language in exact country it's language being spoken and among the people who speak it. And it goes extremely well when you work with native speaker tutors with that, so, for example, you could try Russian language course Kiev to do that.