Language Learning Recomendation?
February 8th, 2010 | 
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dios_et_dios asked:
I am going to be spending the next 5 months in a Russian speaking country, and and looking into resources I can use to help me learn the language. I will already be taking a survival Russian course while there, but I figured I can leave it at that and forget everything in a year or try to learn the language and hopefully retain it. Does anybody have a recomendation for maybe some software (or other method) I could use to help me learn the language on top of the class I will be taking. I have heard good things about Rosetta Stone, but from my time learning Spanish (I am mostly fluent in Spanish as well) I have learned that just learning words without an adequate grammar background only allows you to say words, not speak a language. What would be a good way for me to pick up an adequate level of Russian in the five months that I am there? Thanks.
Ways To Learn Spanish
I am going to be spending the next 5 months in a Russian speaking country, and and looking into resources I can use to help me learn the language. I will already be taking a survival Russian course while there, but I figured I can leave it at that and forget everything in a year or try to learn the language and hopefully retain it. Does anybody have a recomendation for maybe some software (or other method) I could use to help me learn the language on top of the class I will be taking. I have heard good things about Rosetta Stone, but from my time learning Spanish (I am mostly fluent in Spanish as well) I have learned that just learning words without an adequate grammar background only allows you to say words, not speak a language. What would be a good way for me to pick up an adequate level of Russian in the five months that I am there? Thanks.
Ways To Learn Spanish
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It would help to know more precisely where you will be (Belarus? Ukraine? Russia? Moldavia? which city? all that makes a difference), but in general the best thing is not to stay at a computer while you are there, but to go out as much as possible and try to use the language. You will of course a lot of words and expressions not taught in your course (a lot of swearing), and according to the country you may have to distinguish between dialects or languages similar to Russian, and you will hear a lot of “uzhas!” and “cashmar!” in reaction to your Russian from people intolerant of your language mistakes, but you can find enough good-spirited people to talk with in a mixture of Russian and English, especially the university crowd and the young professionals. Try to make out the newspaper and magazines, the street signs, listen to others on the bus, and don’t be shy.
Learn Spanish Classes
Save your money for Russia. Here are a few *free* websites that might help. I’ve used all of them to study for college level classes.
BBC online has excellent resources for learning a variety of languages, including Russian. Here’s a link:
Here’s a site with some flashcards and other resources for free online learning of Russian.
And finally, if you go to , and do a search for “Russian” , you’ll get loads of user-made flashcards made by other people like you who are learning Russian (and many other subjects) by using online flashcards. You can also make your own flashcards.
And if you like flashcards– one of my favorites is After you do a search for “Russian”, you’ll see all the sets of flashcards available to use. Smart.fm lets you set goals and helps you reach those goals. It also uses iKnow for the flashcards (with an audio pronunciation of the words) and Brainspeed, a fun game using the same flashcard information. I like this one the best. If these sets don’t have exactly what you want to learn, you can make your own. I’ll warn you ahead of time that figuring out how to make your own cards has a steep learning curve because they haven’t set up a good tutorial or FAQ for this. But once the sets/goals are set up, they are very easy and fun to use. (BTW, they use the words “goals” for flashcards, and “items” for the individual cards.)