On the Art of Learning

Almost the end of the month. I haven't been able to put in quite as much time studying as I would have liked to, to be perfectly honest. Not so much from lack of time, but simply because I just cannot study for eight hours straight in a day, which was my initial plan. An hour or two, fine, but then my head starts to go mushy. For future projects I will try to avoid things that require too much intense and monotonus concentration. (Soon, btw, I'll reveal the Febrauary project.)

At least I got to learn something. Being able to read the odd sign in Russian and actually spell out words in cyrillic isn't too bad.

Making progress...

This week I finally got my language course from Oxford University Press. So far I have been making do with a couple of school textbooks which, while good, are very text heavy. The OUP course has a lot more audio, and is much more speech-oriented. Along with a mini-dictionary of the 1000 or so most common words, I think I have the material I need to finish this month's project. Let the grinding continue.

I have already decided upon a project for next month, (more of which later), but if anyone has any ideas for March, feel free to comment.

Ham. (Yes, ham)

Have you ever wanted to know what's in a packet of ham from the deli section? You probably haven't, but here we go anyway:

Ham
Sodium Chloride (salt)
Sodium lactate
Sodium ascorbate
Glucose
Sugar
Sodium citrate
Polyphosphate
Sodium nitrite

Sounds good, doesn't it?

(I'm taking a little break from my language studies today, but for anyone interested, "ham" is "vetchina" in Russian.)

Adding stuff

 OK, I'm adding a small challenge for the month. (Spanning from 8 January to 8 February). Don't worry though, this one won't take any actual time, so it won't interfere with my language studies.

So, I'm going to do just the opposite of what Morgan Spurlock did. (Read my first post if you don't know who he is.) Basically, he ate crap for a month and it wrecked his health.

So i'm going to try the opposite and eat only boring (aka healthy) stuff for a month (no artificial sweeteners or food dyes, no monosodium glutamate, no refined sugar, the recommended pound of veggies and fruit a day etc, etc, and see what happens. I won't cut coffee though. That would just be insane.

Oh well, back to eating veggies and learning Russian verb forms.

Getting technical.

Disclaimer: If you are not interested in linguistics and grammar you might want to skip this post.

So, what type of language is Russian? In short, it in an Indo-European, slavic language, distantly related to the germanic and latin languaes. For a learner, that means that there are quite a few words that are similar to ours, but not at all as many as is the case between for example Swedish and German, or English and French.

What are the problems then? The obvious one is the alphabet; even when you know every letter in the alphabet, spelling your way through a word is a somewhat slow process, at least initially.

Then there is the pronunciation. Russian words are not all consonants, although it does feel like that sometimes. The actual sounds are not that bad, but the combinations, especially consonant clusters, can sometimes be more than a mouthful. Also, there are quite a few cases where letters are not pronounced as you would expect. MOCKBA, for example, looks like it should be pronounced "moskva", but it should in fact be "maskva", since unstressed "o" becomes "a". (The Russian language is full of such examples). Why they don't just write "a" from the start, I do not know. Probably just a conspiracy to make my life harder.

Well, 'nuff whining. Next post tomorrow, assuming  feel like it.

In Soviet Russia, blogg reads YOU!

So, it's a couple of days into my first project, and I'm not bored yet. I think I've pretty much learned the cyrillic alphabet (which, incidentally, was not invented by Cyrillus) as well as a few of the more common words, and some basic grammar. I'm still waiting for my "Oxford's take-off in Russian", by Oxford university press. It's a good series of audio/text one-stop-for-all courses. Cheap, too. I'm going to be following it pretty closely throughout the rest of the month, along with some extra vocabulary and grammar. (the OUP take-off series is good, but a little bit too basic for my needs.

So, this will be my main project for this month, but I do have some other projects I'll be working on throughout the year. I will be working on my drawing skills, and some months I might have a drawing-themed monthly project.

Well, that's it for now. Tomorrow I might give some insights into the specifics of the Russian language from a learner's perspective.

Getting started

So I have a blog. Yay. (hold for applause)

I'm writing in English (not my native language) partly because I need to keep my english fresh (writing a few pages a week can't hurt) and partly because the people I know are a pretty international bunch. Feel free to leave comments in Swedish, though. Of course, you can leave comments in Klingon for all I care, but I cannot promise you an answer if you do.

I don't really expect a whole lot of people to read this, but if they should, that's not really a problem since I won't be writing anything that personal.
So, what will this blogg be about? Perhaps some of you remember Morgan Spurlock, the guy from "Supersize me". He had this project where he ate exclusively at a well-known fast food restaurant (wink, wink) for 30 days, and to everyone's surprise (not), got fat. Anyway, he went on to produce a reality show, "Morgan Spurlock's 30 days" , where people did stuff for 30 days to see how it changed them. Or someting like that. It was on pretty late, and I never paid much attention. But i did like the general idea.

Anyway, the idea is for me to take on a series of 30 day projects, and log my progress here. First up is January, or as I like to call it, "Month of learning Russian". (I'm thinking February will be "Month of learning how to draw birds", or something like that. That will allow me to actually publish some proof of my progress)

Okay, it's not like I'm going to learn Russian to a point where I can write lenghty theses on Dostoyevskijan existensialism in the language anytime soon, but I'm aiming for the level where I'm at least able to read a newspaper article. Also, I've always wanted to understand what the bad guys in movies and videogames say.


That's it for today, I've got cyrillic letters to grind.

Da svidanya, comrades!