Russian - Completing the UN collection


On the Facebook page for this blog, I use this little pic with abbreviations of nine languages as avatar. Somehow it didn't feel completely right since I didn't learn Russian so far. But I am fixing that and two weeks ago I started to study Russian actively. With this, I am also somehow completing a language collection: the UN collection. ;-)  The UN has six official working languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. I'm advanced in Chinese and English, intermediate in French and Spanish and now have basic knowledge in Arabic and Russian.

I guess that Arabic will always stay the weakest language in my collection since it is the most challenging one for me. But I'm trying to get Russian on a similar level like Spanish. A year ago, I started studying Spanish, first just writing a couple of notebook entries on italki. After four months starting to take one hour of one-on-one online class weekly. Now I'm roughly at B2. Without much effort and the many distractions by other languages and being busy with work and family. Let's see if I can achieve a similar result for Russian within a year.

Surely I will have to put a little more work into it, but I also didn't start at zero. I could already read the Cyrillic alphabet. I don't remember exactly, but roughly 25 years ago, I watched a TV course for Russian. It was about a family learning Russian: the parents, the kid, and grandpa. Unfortunately, grandpa wasn't a quick learner. It was mainly for him that everything had to be repeated over and over again and it took four lessons to introduce the Cyrillic alphabet. Now I know of course, that it was just a didactical trick and that it was important to progress slowly so that everyone in the audience could follow. But at that time I was upset at "TV grandpa" and thought "Why don't they just get over with it, in the first lesson?" Note, at that time, I could already read the Greek alphabet and the Japanese characters and I wasn't aware that learning another script, isn't that easy for everyone. Anyway, I was bored and dropped Russian, because the progression was too slow for me.

Nevertheless, I'm learning how to read and write Russian again since I didn't learn the Russian cursive last time. I think it's better to learn handwriting the Cyrillic letters because it is difficult to write some print letters like Д by hand. At first Russian cursive is a bit confusing for someone, who is used to the Roman alphabet. 
Look at those examples. The cursive letters look basically all the same to me... They remind me a lot of the German Sütterlin script. Just a bunch of look-a-like letters. But luckily it's easy to get used to it and I just continue doing daily handwriting exercises, feeling like a first-grader again.

Apart from that I'm working with the book Russisch mit System by Langenscheidt (got it from my local library) and listening to podcasts. The book claims to lead to level B1, so let's see, how far it really gets me and when I'm ready to follow a class entirely in Russian, I will start taking online classes. This approach worked very well for me when learning Spanish.

The resources

Like the book, I'm mainly using resources for Germans who learn Russian. I especially like the following.

A podcast for learning Russian: http://www.russlandjournal.de/russisch-lernen/podcast/

A Youtube channel using fairy tales for teaching Russian: Russisch lernen mit Märchen

The music

Like always I enjoy listening to music in my target language. Currently I'm listening to

Cheboza, a Russian "Brit" Pop band
Чебоза: метро

Obe Dve
Обе Две: Гонщики

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