language maintenance over the summer?

[Ajda Kljun]

Dear Seelangers,

since several people have expressed interest in hearing the experiences of
people who are learning Russian by themselves, here are my two cents on
music and movies.

As far as learning Russian through music goes, here are my personal
experiences: I think the first Russian song I downloaded was Aquarium's
Chai. Apart from the repeating chorus, it only has six lines of text, so
it's no wonder I knew it by heart pretty quickly. Then I started to listen
to Zemfira and found out that there are English translations of several of
her songs on http://russmus.net/. I translated the rest of the songs with
the help of language translators such as http://translation.paralink.com/.
The English text often did not make much sense, but it helped me to get a
fast word-to-word translation without having to look up one word at a time.
The rest I tried to figure out by looking in various dictionaries I found
online. (Have I mentioned that I am the 'likes to climb high mountains' type
of learner? :)) I also love Kino and find Tsoi quite easy to understand.
Since I am a student of classical piano, I have some favorites the average
student might not share. For example, I printed out the complete text of
Boris Godunov in Russian and listened to the opera while reading what
they're actually saying. That was fun.

About Russian movies: I have really enjoyed some of Sokurov's movies. Often,
a sentence of the narrator is followed by lots of silence which gave me time
to realize what words he just said, repeat the sentence in my head and then
move on to the next sentence. Most of the time, I could actually enjoy the
movie already in the second viewing :) I also plan to watch his Russian Ark
with the help of the commentary on this site:
http://www.angelfire.com/ult/cmcdouga/arkhome.htm. Very excited about that!
Changing the genre completely - one time, my brother downloaded Blade Runner
dubbed in Russian (by accident), so we watched it together. The story is so
simple that we could mostly figure out what they were saying without
actually understanding the words. I guess watching Russian soap operas could
work in the same way.

One thing I have to mention though is the fact that my native tongue is
Slovene. So I already understood the way Slavic languages work when I
started to learn Russian, which probably made it a lot easier for me. But
from my experience in learning other languages - Italian, English and German
- I can say that lots of exposure worked in all cases. Also, I found out
that working with texts which really really interest me made me much more
motivated.

Kind regards,
Ajda Kljun.


2008/4/6, Alina Makin <resco at umich.edu>:
>
> I agree that summer language maintenance should be based on fun and
> *interactive* activities.  My elementary and intermediate students this
> year
> had a riot corresponding with Russians at a basic level through
> http://www.vkontakte.ru website.  Beyond reading and writing activities at
> the personal correspondence level, they also got hooked up with some of
> their
> regular e-pals through skype and got a chance to talk, which was extremely
> popular.  Obviously, you need to warn them about possible abuse of
> internet
> communication but this generation of learners seems to have got it down
> very
> well by now.  They all report how much fun and language learning they got
> through it, so I am kind of inclined to suggest it as one of several
> possible
> summer activities.  Obviously, there is no singular answer to this
> question and
> one should suggest a variety of activities appropriate to every learning
> style
> and type of learner, or a mix of them.
>
>
> Alina Makin
> University of Michigan
>
>
>
>
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