You wear a headset, and their immersion/adaptive recall approach requires the student to respond to pictures flashed to the screen, while you point and click at what you hear, or, the program cues you to speak back to it, testing your pronunciation. If someone recorded what we actually sound like, there would be no end to the embarrassing jokes that would ensue. Let me just say that learning Russian is impossibly hard. We have miles to go before we’ll be able to do anything productive with the language.
Russian uses a completely different alphabet – the Cyrillic alphabet, rather than our familiar Latin (Roman) alphabet. So, as you try to absorb a new vocabulary, master pronunciation and learn how to string words together, you also have to learn a new alphabet. Riiiiight.
Take a look at the Cyrillic alphabet, and you’ll see what I mean. Also challenging are the alternate spellings of basically EVERY WORD WE’VE LEARNED based on gender associations, whether you are speaking to a person about the object in question vs. speaking to multiple people about the object vs. just identifying the object. And verb variations? You don't want to know and I wouldn’t even be able to tell you because I still can’t figure it out. We have a whole new appreciation for folks attempting to learn English with all of our exceptions to our rules.
So, while Rosetta Stone is a good program for building vocabulary – such as, what is Russian for “duck” – I’m thinking we’re going to have to resort to our handy-dandy English-Russian phrasebook for the more practical words and phrases such as asking about restroom locations, directions, and ordering in restaurants. Unless, of course, duck is on the menu. :-)
Tonya
3 comments:
Hi, there,
You're brave to even attempt to learn the language. That new alphabet is unreal! Mastering even a few words will be an awesome feat. Good luck! I hope you don't have to eat lots of duck. : )
Love you,
Maddie
WOW!!! It looks very confusing, especially since some of the letters look like our English alphabet. I am glad you have a good program to help you, but I would definitely make sure I had the translation book very handy. Loved your articulate way in describing all that is involved. You are very brave to even attempt it!
Love you dearly,
Mom
In Krasnoyarsk, the first thing we would say when we tried to start communicating with someone was, "English?" Most of the time the person would either know enough to communicate or would go get someone who knew enough. If not, charades can be a great form of communication. It's amazing how much you can communicate using gestures! :)
Also most of the teenagers in Siberia could speak English.(some better than me!)
до свидания
Ronnie
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