A language learners’ forum

Thank you Teango, for all the recommendations! A small goldmine I decided to just start right away and just finished Служебний роман. Really enjoyed it!

brilliantyears wrote:A small goldmine I decided to just start right away and just finished Служебний роман. Really enjoyed it!

IMO, Служебный роман as well as Иван Васильевич меняет профессию is a good choice for a Russian learner . These movies are still widely quoted by natives including web-sites/forums etc. Reading a Russian forum you might find there, for example, this phrase:
- Значит хорошие сапоги, надо брать

I'm sure many of you will agree that stress placement in Russian can be...well...very stressful! Which is why I was delighted to finally find a couple of words marked with an accent in one of my daughter's nursery rhyme books. My jubilation, however, was rather short-lived, after my wife told me that these accents marked incorrect stress placement to simply enhance rhythm and rhyme.

Teango wrote:I'm sure many of you will agree that stress placement in Russian can be...well...very stressful! Which is why I was delighted to finally find a couple of words marked with an accent in one of my daughter's nursery rhyme books. My jubilation, however, was rather short-lived, after my wife told me that these accents marked incorrect stress placement to simply enhance rhythm and rhyme.

No! That's so confusing!

Онегин был, по мненью многих
СудЕй решительных и строгих,
Ученый малый, но педант,
Имел он счАстливый талант
Без принужденья в разговоре
Коснуться до всего слегка,
С ученым видом знатока,
Держать молчанье в важном споре
И вызывать улыбку дам
Огнем нежданных эпиграмм.

Латынь из моды вышла ныне,
Так, если правду вам сказать,
Он знал довольно по латыни,
Чтоб эпигрАфы разбирать
...

А. С. Пушкин "Евгений Онегин"

Normally it's "сУдей", "счастлИвый", and "эпИграфы" Poetry...

Btw, Russians somethimes use the word stresses incorrectly themselves. If I am not mistaken there was an issue with the word подростковый. There was the rule that the word should be pronounced as подрОстковый, but many, most actually IMO, people would say it like подросткОвый. Now the both versions are allowed .

Hey! How is everyone going with their Russian studies? I am... mostly not. But I have finished a trashy novel that I was reading and I am thinking of starting this:

This course on Coursera started this week and goes through studying Master and Margarita. I think it may be a bit beyond me - it's for B2 level+ and native Russian speakers - but I'm going to try! We'll see how fast I crash and burn.

EDIT: Have gone back through properly and you are meant to have read M&M already. I have not and will not be able to manage it in time, so I won't be doing the course. But will leave this here as it may be interesting for some of you! If anyone knows of any other Russian courses, send them my way!

Okay, a slightly more useful MOOC:

This course is aimed at Russian speakers (B1 and above, though they do say that you can give it a shot with a lower level). It's all about Tomsk - history, architecture, etc. It is basically a brochure for one of the Tomsk universities, but it still looks interesting and useful.

My Russian studies are actually going fairly well, considering my classes ended halfway through May. I've been doing a lot of self-study, mostly by studying vocab, watching TV series and movies (and musicals), and reading a bit here and there. I should focus a bit more on grammar though...
... which should happen soon, since I've signed up for the 6 Week Challenge I decided to sign up since the challenge will end right before classes start again in September, so this should give me a nice boost.

Currently, I'm doing nothing except watching one episode of Особое мнение from time to time. The subtitles generated automatically by Google have progressed recently and give a rather reliable transcript of what people say (that I can often correct on the fly when it's not correct). The only problem is when both speakers speak at the same time: Google can't (yet) decypher the soup.
Otherwise I'm following several news channels on Telegram: https://t.me/echomskru, https://t.me/tvrain and https://t.me/fontankaspb (fontanka is the most difficult as it often speaks of detailed local news, the vocab and the abbreviations are sometimes cryptic). I don't read all, just the titles and a few articles each week.
Currently I feel a little stuck, I don't progress. I just try to maintain what I know, nothing more...

I've been doing decent, actually - I've been able to watch some film, and listen to some (very familiar topic!) podcasts with pretty good understanding, and I'm into B1 graded readers (with a lot of lookup, though). I'm scratching that intermediate barrier, I guess - but production lags, given that I don't have the opportunity to produce much.