Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
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Intensive Russian course
By Vlada 27 November 07
What exactly does it mean?
I often have requests for teaching an intensive Russian course but in most cases it turns out that a person wants to do 1 or 2 hours of lessons a week… So what kind of course can be called intensive? Here are the main features of one:
1) Intensive schedule. It can vary from as much as 6 hours a day 5 days a week to 2 hours a day, with a lot of homework. 5 or 6 hour a day courses should be taught by several (minimum 2) teachers, to avoid “having too much” of the same person and teaching style. They can be divided into different aspects of language learning – listening comprehension, reading, discussion, grammar. Such a course requires a lot of concentration and effort from students and is usually done over a short period of time, from a few days to a few months. My personal record is 5 hours a day with the same student, and that is pretty tiring for both sides of the learning process! A “milder” intensive course can be 2-3 hours per day, with homework set to be done in the afternoon/evening.
2) A target to achieve. Intensive courses are good for people who have time to spare before they start some new undertaking that requires knowledge of Russian: a new job, a business or holiday, being posted for work to a Russian-speaking country. An intensive course should aim to get a student to a certain level in the shortest time possible.
3) Commitment. I would advise prospective students to think carefully about whether they can dedicate enough time and effort to doing an intensive course, before committing to it. It’s a time consuming and costly exercise and it will work only if a student is prepared to put in time and work.
4) Continuity. There is no point in doing an intensive Russian course and not continuing learning the language afterwards. Ideally, an intensive course should be a part of a longer extensive one, or followed by an extensive one, to maintain and improve the knowledge acquired in the intensive course. As we all know, when you don’t use a language, it drains away pretty quickly…
Summing up, an intensive course can be an extremely useful step in language learning but it does not guarantee learning a language in a short period of time just because it’s intensive. Learning a language is all about long term accumulation of knowledge and practice, rather than trying to cram too much into one’s head in a short blast!
So are you ready to do an intensive Russian course? Then give us a call!
Business Russian Course
By Vlada 18 October 07
What exactly does it mean?
I often have requests for teaching business Russian, and often people who want to do it are very vague about what aspect of Business Russian they are interested in. The fact is that business Russian is a very broad term, covering a vast range of vocabulary and functions: from telephoning and making simple arrangements for meetings and travel to carrying out business negotiations and handling business correspondence (the latter, in particular, is so specialised that not all native speakers of Russian would be able to do it without previous experience!)
So, if you are interested in a business Russian course, what kind of course can you do?
If you are an intermediate (upper intermediate) student, you will be restricted to fairly simple things: learning how to start a phone conversation, or fix a meeting. You can expand your vocabulary into a work-related sphere. The most common vocabulary areas are: banking and finance, the work of business enterprises, negotiating vocabulary, oil and gas (since Russia is rich in it!), law (a vast field in itself). There are unfortunately no easy ways of learning vocabulary, you’ll just have to make a list and learn it…
If you are an advanced student, or a native speaker of a Slavic language who finds learning Russian vocab relatively easy, you could do all of the above, plus more difficult stuff: working with business documentation related to your work (translating or rendering the gist of documents), writing business letters or e-mails (which requires a very good
command of the language), and participating in work/business meetings with Russian native speakers.
Needless to say, if you are a beginner, you need to build a substantial foundation of general Russian before you can start learning business Russian.
The choice of textbooks in the UK for business Russian is not very wide (as is the case with textbooks of general Russian). I can recommend “Russian for Business Studies” by Svetlana Le Fleming. It gives good coverage of different aspects of business vocabulary, and supplies good texts and exercises for practice and revision. There are a lot of booklets on the subject published in Russia but they are not comprehensive course books, so they can only be used as supplementary materials for reading or translating. Some of them have promising titles such as “A course for business people” but they often just give texts and dialogues with parallel translation.
One problem of all textbooks of business Russian is that the economic situation in the country has been changing so quickly in the last 15 years that texts on business and economics become obsolete as soon as they get published. So it’s much better and more interesting to use “fresh” authentic materials from the Russian press and the internet but that could only be done at a very advanced level.
And finally, I am afraid I have to say that no one learns business Russian for fun (or, at least, I’ve never met such people). It’s the most boring course a Russian tutor ever has to teach, and it’s hard work for students. But if you have to deal with Russian partners or clients in your working life, it will make a big difference and will be greatly appreciated!
10 Tips for a beginner learning Russian
By Vlada 11 February 07
Thinking of learning Russian but uncertain about what that might involve? Is it a challenge or a piece of cake? Here are some tips for complete beginners who are about to start a Russian course.
1. The Cyrillic Script.
Don’t be scared of the Russian alphabet. Yes, it looks different and lots of people starting to learn Russian think it’s going to be the most difficult thing to master. But this is not the case! There are 33 letters to learn and each letter (apart from two silent ones) represents one sound. There are no complicated reading rules, you read what you see! Taking into account the fact that some of the letters are the same as in English, and some are Greek, alphabet learning is not a very daunting task. Most people can read after the first lesson and become confident after a few weeks.
2. Writing in Russian
Once you’ve learned the alphabet (well, more or less), try not to use English letters to write down Russian words because a) it will slow down the process of getting used to the new language; b) English spelling cannot represent Russian pronunciation correctly because the sounds in these two languages are different, so you won’t get a good accent straight away.
3. Russian pronunciation.
Nothing too difficult there. Be prepared to roll your “R”s. (Scottish people usually have a very good Russian accent!) and put together some consonants that are unusual for an English ear. If you can’t roll your “R”s, it is of course not the end of the world. You’ll be understood perfectly well. Some Russian people can’t do it either. Lenin was one, for example!
4. Learning Russian words
There are quite a lot of “international” words in Russian that you will easily recognise and remember (English words borrowed recently with the advance of new technologies, French words that came into Russian in the 18th-19th centuries when French was the language of the aristocracy and the court, German and Dutch words brought by Peter the Great…) but the core of the vocabulary is Slavonic, so be prepared to learn completely unfamiliar combinations of sounds. Unless of course you are a speaker of another Slavonic language already. In which case you will learn Russian twice as fast as speakers of Western European languages.
5. Russian grammar.
Well, this is the most difficult bit. Be prepared to learn a couple of dozen endings for various cases and conjugations. The structure itself is quite similar to Latin, so it has all the same recognisable concepts as Western European languages. The good news is that you’ll still be understood if you get the endings wrong!
6. Word stress (accent)
The stress in a word is unpredictable so it can be on any part of a word. Same situation as in English, in fact. In all textbooks the stress will be marked for you but not in real “grown up” texts. So if in doubt, just try to pronounce each syllable distinctly as if they are all stressed. Russian words are of course longer than English ones. A text translated from English into Russian becomes longer and vice versa!
7. Dialects and accents.
No need to worry about them at all! An educated native Russian speaker from Vladivostok will sound exactly the same as one from Moscow which is 10 hours away by plane. Isn’t that great?
8. Homework – with or without?
That’s up to you to decide (although your teacher may insist on it and will of course be right!). If you want to achieve good results in a short period of time be prepared to do at least 3 hours of work at home outside the classroom. But if you can’t find the time, you’ll still make progress but it’ll be slower. I’ve had students who reached a good standard of Russian without doing any homework – but of course it took them much longer (and their company’s bills were much higher) than people who do regular homework.
9. Just facts
You’ll need to know some Russian if you travel unaccompanied in Russia and other Russian speaking countries, especially outside big cities. According to statistics, only 3% of Russians population speak a foreign language (and not necessarily English!).
Russian is the 5th most spoken language on Earth (after Chinese, English, Hindu and Urdu).
10. And generally…
It’s not rocket science. You can do it!
Plus a quotation
The famous Russian scholar and scientist Mikhail Lomonosov wrote in the 18th century: “They say that Spanish is good for talking with God, French – for talking with friends, German – for talking with enemies, Italian – for talking with women… But Russian is good for talking to all of the above, because it has the grandeur of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the gentleness of Italian, and in addition to that, the wealth and … brevity of Latin and Greek.”
Doesn’t that make you want to learn Russian?!