What makes up a Russian noun is like a candle flame...

[Kenneth E Udut]

Oh Tsuji, many of those most common of things are
automated in my head.  Not all common phrases, undoubtedly
there's probably hundreds of handy little phrases that
start/end conversations, help conversations continue, common
dialogs/typical conversations, etc, and I'm still learning
them.

But I can't work on just one thing at one time.  I switch
around a lot.  I do 1/2 hr of reading something in Russian
that is beyond my full understanding twice a day.  [and it
helps my understanding].  Before work, and after work.
During the day, I have index cards with either a root or
morpheme on it, or a few vocabulary words I want to learn
that day, which I refer to on off times.  There's things
that I read that I *do* understand (70-80% perhaps),
like a copy of the Bible in Russian, for example.
There's tapes with dialogs that I drag out and listen to
while checking e-mail.  A Russian friend has been sending
me a production of The Hobbit, in Russian, that he records
from a Russian radio station in RealAudio format.

So, it's not a stepwise process for me.

And I don't think linguists or teachers have found the perfect
step-wise process for learning a language.

Sometimes I'll diagram a sentence.  Or study a list
of prepositions in a particular case, and write
sentences.  Or I'll attempt to write a few lines of
poetry in Russian.  Or a short dialog.  I have a book
on American Sign Language - sometimes I'll open it up
and learn the sign for a word in English, then say the
word in Russian along with the signing a few times
until it 'clicks in'.

Sometimes I'll take a huge list of Russian words and organize
them by their endings.  Or I'll repeat along with something
audio in Russian, speaking a moment after the speaker speaks.
Or I'll go into one of several teach-yourself-Russian type
courses.  [Language Bridge and PowerGlide are my favorites,
but I also have others].

One day, I took all of the potential common endings for
nouns, all the pronouns and prepositions in each case, and
put together a flowchart that I could stick on
my wall.  It ended up being 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide,
and I only managed to cover *3* of the cases, and the print type
was very very tiny.

So, you have nothing to worry about.  I'm surprised how
concerned y'all are that I'm looking into grammar!

Thanks for listening to my ramble!


On Sat, 22 Jan 2000 10:58:04 +0900 Yoshimasa Tsuji
<yamato at YT.CACHE.WASEDA.AC.JP> writes:
> Hello Kenneth,
>   You don't need to worry about grammar unless you have a special
> need to speak/write as if you were an educated Russian. For the
> overwhelming majority of people what counts is memorizing
> useful expressions like (hello, thank you, please, give me a hand,
> etc.).
> Usage comes first, the definition and grammar come later.
>   They teach you case/gender/number etc. from the very first perhaps
> because they assume that you are well educated and comfortable with
> those categories: e.g. you learnt Classic Greek in an exclusive
> kindergarten.
>
> Cheers,
> Tsuji

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