The necessary tools

Pictures speak a thousand words. Imagine a pair of eyeballs and ears dangling from the sides, and you can argue that organs need to be fed etc, but these are the two most important "tools" you need in language learning. One of them, namely the backbone, needs to be taken metaphorically. Incidentally, did you know that language learning and metaphorical use of language are considered excellent mental exercises which may be beneficial for warding off and offseting certain debilitating diseases? One example of this can be found here

The Right Method Makes all the Difference

Tackling Russian

During the weekend I've been looping two Russian movies and listening to random things.

One of the movies is Skazka o poteryannom vremeni (The Tale of Time Lost) which is appropriate punishment for my laziness. I have only yesterday discovered that the DVD also has Russian subtitles, which is of great help.

Russian

The blog was closed for a while. I thought it was a distraction but I managed to waste much time in many other ways both online and offline. These last few months I spent doing a little bit of everything, from Italian to Japanese and I cannot account for the time spent or the effectiveness of my efforts. Another reason for reopening the blog.

Well, I am officially undertaking learning Russian. I intend to learn it in as short amount of time as possible, since I have little patience for exploring or "savoring" the language or "having fun" while going nowhere with language studies. I have little to no background in Russian.

I started playing with it a few months ago. So far I haven't spent much time on it, useful time especially - most was "dead time" while doing other things. I've mostly been reading online articles and listening to online radio and a couple of old movies. Reading? Well sort of. Staring, really, and trying to catch the cognates. Listening was mostly done to get accustomed to the sounds of the language, make out individual words and overcome the initial disliking for its sound. After some 50+ hours I am happy to report this is no longer a problem. Why did I undertake learning a language whose sound I don't (or didn't) like? I am not picking people's brains why they are studying a "beautiful" language while ignoring other qualities or shortcomings.