learning russian
polycounter lvl 11
I want to learn russian because I want something to do. Has anyone here learned russian? i've heard its surprisingly easier than expected, especially because most words are spelled exactly how they sound, and there is a letter for every sound in the language, like ch, sh, and "z" in vision.
I have a friend who is willing to learn with me (who is really interested in other languages) so itd be great to talk back and forth to eachother with complete fluidity for privacy.
What are the best techniques for learning a language (those of you who have) obviously memorization isn't the best way to learn at all, ive heard contextual learning is the most logical way and its how our brain learned english in the first place.
We learned by hearing words we've never heard before being plugged into context with a native sentence. Like "Можно (mohzh-na) go to the bathroom?" you learn Можно as "may i" and immediately remember with the word with the action rather than translating it in your head first.
So what are peoples views of learning languages?
ps I wanted to learn finnish but supposedly its harder than Russian. Dutch and German are apparently the easiest for english speakers to learn but they dont have the most awesome fucking alphabet in the world.
Are there any online games I can play that will surround me with Russian?
I have a friend who is willing to learn with me (who is really interested in other languages) so itd be great to talk back and forth to eachother with complete fluidity for privacy.
What are the best techniques for learning a language (those of you who have) obviously memorization isn't the best way to learn at all, ive heard contextual learning is the most logical way and its how our brain learned english in the first place.
We learned by hearing words we've never heard before being plugged into context with a native sentence. Like "Можно (mohzh-na) go to the bathroom?" you learn Можно as "may i" and immediately remember with the word with the action rather than translating it in your head first.
So what are peoples views of learning languages?
ps I wanted to learn finnish but supposedly its harder than Russian. Dutch and German are apparently the easiest for english speakers to learn but they dont have the most awesome fucking alphabet in the world.
Are there any online games I can play that will surround me with Russian?
Replies
Perhaps just play the Russian-language versions of the games you already do? In the past, some games have had multiple languages available, I don't know if developers are still doing that apart from the region-specific copies, though.
Edit: Maybe Stalker and Metro 2033 come in readily-switchable-to-Russian modes?
Since you already know the game it'll be easy to still know what you're doing. Just gotta learn to read Russian, which honestly isn't that hard.
If you keep at it anything is possible though. I have been living in an area where I am forced to speak Portuguese and am able to converse now without any formal training a year later. I think it is the best way to learn if possible (actually having conversations).
Me and my friend play games often, and if both of us try to not use english and learn words as we need them we will build our vocabulary quite quickly.
It helps if you're interested in what's going on in that country because you'll want to watch / read the news in their language. Pick some easy newssite first and then later move to more sophisticated news sources.
Gaming, movies are also obvious choices.
Russia supposedly also has many home grown web services that mimic popular western services - just like the Chinese have their own version. Find out what websites Russians use for twittering, watching online videos, what chat clients are popular.
I think a major problem you'll have first is that it won't be easy to be accepted unless you have a certain level of conversation skills. Because truth is, it can be rather cumbersome to deal with people who's command of the language is very basic (e.g. if you invite them to your ventrilo server in WoW
If you do decide to go through with it, you will at minimum need these:
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/5000-Russian-Words-Russian-English-English-Russian/dp/0893571709/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327979930&sr=8-1"]Amazon.com: 5000 Russian Words: With All Their Inflected Forms and Other Grammatical Information : A Russian-English Dictionary With an English-Russian Word Ind (9780893571702): Richard L. Leed, Slava Paperno: Books[/ame]
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/750-Russian-Verbs-Their-Uses/dp/0471012742/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327979983&sr=1-1"]Amazon.com: 750 Russian Verbs and Their Uses (9780471012740): Issa R. Zauber, Jan R. Zamir, Sonia Nelson Zamir: Books[/ame]
And a russian dictionary
Most important of all, you will need a russian friend (or friends) who will tolerate your horrible russian.
however, the pronunciation is different from English (closer to German probably), and there's a lot of underlying grammar crap you'll have to learn (we have a fair share of that);
unless you know someone irl who has a decent command of verbal Russian, it will be really tough to pronounce words correctly (I cringe every time I hear someone tryharding to read Russian in movies/vidya)
if you have a local learning group with a few native speakers, it would be neat;
I can't help you with learning techniques; contextual learning sounds legit though.
With Russian there's an added layer of difficulty in the sentence structure - it's not as fixed as one employed in English, so you can have nouns/verbs floating around elaborately. (If you've seen some weirdly composed sentences coming from a native russian speaker, it's the same problem in reverse.)
Did you want to learn Finnish like in go to Finland and communicate there? In that case, Swedish would be a better fit. It's also quite easy to learn;
Finnish is entirely different language group, and it's quite terrible to get into. allods online?
with wow, my friends generally stay away from Russian servers due to enormous amounts of fucktards;
for social networks, try livejournal or vk.com (local facebook rip-off with pr0n and muzak), but beware of morons.
also this. you get fresh made borsch and pirogi as an added bonus, so it's a win-win.
This! One day, if I turn single again, I'll do it
So just in general? Opinions on languages and difficulties?
Tenses in Russian is relatively simple so it seems easy to learn at the first time. But there is too much expectations in that language and gender distinctions for every fkin object which is doubles up the amount of stuff you need to remember,it's very discouraging.
Also identical spelling and sounding of a language don't make it easy,really.Finnish is the ultimate example of that.
If you only want to learn a language for killing time I'd say any Germanic language is relatively comparable with your mother tongue.But I still don't get the point of your intention to learn a new language.
If I didn't have someone learning it with me yes itd be useless but I do and itd be great to just talk in a different language. And just being able to say you know a language like that makes you really interesting.
All you see here in America is English and Spanish, if they saw Norwegian or Russian you'd be surprised.
Someone has told me Indonesian was the easiest language they've learned. How does that compare to Norwegian? Id agree a more widely used language would be more useful, so what language is easiest of the most popular?
Which kinda begs the question. If you have to eventually be in the place where they speak the language, why go through all those years of study beforehand? Why are you interested in that language to begin with?
Hopefully you like the culture. Say you like Swedish culture and you wanna learn Swedish. By far the most practical way to learn it is to move to Sweden and immerse yourself in it. You'll be fluent in less than a couple of years. Anything else doesn't really make sense. You may as well learn Klingon or Elvish.
Actually heres an article that blatantly disagrees with the requirement to be in a country in order to learn http://www.linguatrek.com/blog/2011/07/you-dont-need-to-live-in-a-foreign-country-to-learn
I started studying Japanese for the same reasons as you frell.. one year I spent just studying by myself whenever I had some spare time (busrides, shower...:poly136:), then I moved there for 2 years.. now I have a Japanese wife (not a mailorder one though, thats an awesome idea though! :poly142:) and can get by speaking the language and what not..
good luck with whatever language you choose! and "just becaue I'm bored" is not a bad reason at all!
edit: my mother is Polish, so I speak that as well.. and my wife has a Latvian friend here in Sweden who teaches her Russian... damn that russian :poly127:
I read that learning Norwegian is pointless because most people in and around Norway speak perfect english lol
I still want to learn russian but I dont even want to start with the new sentence forms, completely unrelated and difficult to remember (ish) words, the many cases, male and female all the time etc.
Just that I would imagine that the end goal would be to converse with people in that language, is it not? Well, if you wanna learn Swedish, where do you find Swedish people? In Sweden.
I guess you could learn at home. But then I don't know what you'd do with that knowledge. And keep in mind that learning a language is in some ways similar to learning an instrument. It's a commitment that will take years.
If you have some purpose, like say reading Dostoevsky in the original language, then I guess it makes sense to learn it on your own. It really depends on what the purpose is.
Honestly this is like the 2-3 years I spent learning to program in Java, I never used it professionally it was more of a phase with runescape private servers. Once I started to get decent at it and made my own programs it slowed down, but I never forgot it (the logic at least) but I forget names of packages and their implementations etc.
True fact: I have an english friend who's lived in Sweden with a swedish girlfriend for over 10 years and his swedish is still just mediocre(about the same level as someone who's lived here for 1-2 years). You have to have the right attitude to learn the language. Many swedish people are very fascinated by english-speaking people and whenever they meet one they want to use their english skills so it's easy to fall into that trap.
If you're gonna move to the country which's language you're learning, you have to insist on using it's language. Good luck btw!
While I was going through the han, hun, du, det, jeg, list and pairing it with words I already knew and checked, laere came up as "teaches" when I checked it. Like hun laere norsk, "she teaches norsk"
I have a friend who is native swedish that I talk to almost daily, and he said compared to english swedish was much harder but I found that hard to believe (germanic). In fact, through a quick google quite a bit between norwegian and swedish are the same. Interesting. Provided theyre both on the same difficulty level, I may switch to swedish so I have someone to really be corrected with
Real cool though, thanks for the info!
At the places I've worked so far had lots of different languages, and even if the company language was English, it does help a lot if you know the native language of the country or the people you're dealing with. Kudos to anyone who makes the effort I'd say.
(I'm such a noob with Russian..) but hey Frell, check out livemocha.com. Lots of languages to try out. Initial levels are free.
Internet/text immersion there is always Pravda.ru for news and cgralk.ru for digital art.
While I agree what you're saying, Josh here does have a point. This isn't really related to game art or our industry in any way. Just someone who wants to learn a language.
Had the title been something along the lines of "Which languages are most used in the industry?" or something along those lines, then that'd be fine.
Back on topic, if you really want to learn a language, you're going to have to give it 110%. It's not something you can learn by just reading a bit of this and a bit of that every once in a while. It's something you need to dedicate yourself to consistently. If you're not in an environment where the language is spoken constantly, it will take that much longer to learn. You need to read, write, and listen to this language a LOT. Having the "because I'm looking for something to do" attitude won't get you far.
Look into something that you are passionate about, say, a language in a country you've always dreamed of visiting. And for the love of god, stay the hell away from google translate.
In all honesty, the countries with a culture and history that most interest me are korea, japan, china, and russia. But all of those languages are very hard ( i think ). Although there are entire forums focused around learning mandarin chinese, it would be a great language to learn and I definitely wouldn't be alone.
My biggest challenge (I think) would be, after the alphabet, the sentence structure and just trying to think like them in that order.
Personally I cant wait for the release of the game Gunz 2, and Archeage, both will be in korean for almost a year though
lol my friend wants me to learn gaelic with him
высокие пять братан!
рофл, хороший один.
я тоже похвастаюсь что знаю русский на 100%
ya tozhe pochvastayus' chto znayu russkiy na 100% (what i said above using english letters instead):poly142:
It seems like this is an easy language for some but more difficult for others? The pronunciation is fucking insane, the Irish don't deserve to have an alphabet if they aren't going to use it efficiently lol. But its still interesting, anyone here familiar with it?
I came back just to thank you again, I can't believe how awesome this site is.
Joke aside, I think that learning another language and trying to immerse yourself into another culture is one of the most interesting thing to experience. Ever. Next one for me will be either Russian or Spanish.
Good luck!
-R
i personaly hate it.
i had lessons on russian in school, i chose to learn it, i already knew the alphabet, half of my relatives are bulgarians and still, after half a year i developed a very strong hate for the russian language.
to me the language is way too complicated. i love english though :P and im native german btw.
if you want to learn a language for the sake of learning a language i´d suggest atleast something usefull like spanish, french ore chinese.
chances are you gonna meet lots of people speaking this languages as a game-artist.
also if you are just doing this cause you are bored, enhancing your art skills is something you cant invest too much time in, so i´d personally go for that.
anyway good luck
Whaha, telling someone that Russian is the opposite of useful and then pointing them at a language not existing(Chinese?) might come off as a bit rash and condescending.
Even though I think most people get your point and stance on the question I just felt like correcting some parts whilst disagreeing with you on others! :poly136:
That being said I obviously enjoy the Russian language and I fully support you having a go at it. I also think there will be a strong market for knowing Russia once the real shitstorm breaks lose in Russia and Belarus, and it's secularist society overthrows the totalitarian attitude shown by their leaders and fellow authority. Knowing Russian and Cyrillic will also help you learn other languages neighbouring Russian.
Even though I'm having quite a struggle learning Russian myself I would probably tell you to trying and dedicating some time of the day to fully practice and learn the Cyrillic alphabet, getting a grasp of it seems to help immensely when it comes to breaking up and finally understanding the formatting/grammar of words. It's also really not impossible to learn the alphabet and if you can't bolster the motivation to learn it you will have a problem learning the whole Russian language.
And also remember kids, have fun with it!:thumbup:
I try to watch a lot of media with russian subtitles, and also Russian speaking with english subtitles, watching Russian movies also helps you understand the stereotypical slightly cold and pesky attitude uniformly shared by the whole Russian people..
I'm also planing on ordering a easy-to-read book so that I can publicly try to stutter out badly misshaped and deformed russian words, whilst eating borsch mixed with vodka on a public bus (obviously allocating my time between reading, scribbling as-well as phrasing and apathetically starring out at the cold world).
Good luck!
also there probably was a market for Russian some 20 years ago when telling "Natasha I love your borsch as much as your pet bear" could help with communication, these days russian grls speak decent English if they're worth hitting on.
Not really the right topic for politics it but I do think that learning Russian can indeed prove useful in the long run. That is if you have a passion for the language and the motivation to learn it. It's generally hard as fuck to learn something solely on the purpose of learning, especially if you don't like the concept of learning it in the first place.
Even though I agree that learning Russian to pick up girls might seem a bit stupid, but that isn't really the only use I see for knowing a language.
Edit: I do realise that I might come of as terrible naive being. But that's mostly because of the countries history.
cheboorashka says what?
Afrikaans ~ 2-3m native (know little but I get it)
Norwegian ~ 5m native (can make sentences but don't have a big vocabulary)
Indonesian ~ 23m native 140m total
Im considering switching to Indonesian just for the fact that more people know it. These 3 languages are the flat out easiest for English speakers to learn and I want to learn one of them for, as I said, to experience the process of learning a language.