#russian:general

[guillemelgat]

Hi everyone! I know I haven’t been doing a lot of Actual Language Learning Posts on here in a while, that’s because I haven’t been doing a lot of Actual Language Learning. But that’s another can of worms that I’ll talk about later; for now, I’ve decided that I have at least one language goal this summer, and yes it is coming completely out of left field and has nothing to do with any of the languages I’m currently learning.

Basically, one of my really close friends from college is from the same area as me so I’ve been going over to her house a lot recently, and her family is Russian, by which I mean very Russian. Everyone there speaks fluent Russian, including the kids in our generation, and while my friend says she’s used to translating for people, I feel really weird not being able to just like...follow the conversation?? I am generally a chameleon when it comes to being in a place, and right now I feel very much like I am getting in the way.

All that goes to say that my goal this summer is to learn basic survival Russian. Not to understand it fluently, not to speak it, not to read or write it, and not to be able to get my C2 certificate in it (although given the people I’m around, understanding the conversation might require a C2 ceritification as well as like 5 PhDs 😅). I just want to be able to sort of know what’s going on and not feel like I’m interrupting everything with my inability to speak in Russian. So in order to do that, I’m going to be doing something virtually unprecendented for me: only learning vocabulary.

My goal is to do this Memrise course with some of the top 5000 words in Russian and get as far as I can in the next few months. Then I’ll also try to listen to music in Russian and follow the lyrics, which tends to help words stick in my brain. Besides that, I’ll hopefully be visiting my friend enough to get in a lot of listening practice, and my goal is for this murky cocktail of practice to be enough. I know it sounds kind of crazy, but I wouldn’t try it if I already wasn’t picking up one or two words from my one quarter of BCS. I think that if I really put in the time and effort, I might actually be able to start understanding stuff by the end of the summer, which would be super cool.

This isn’t my only summer goal, but it’s the one I’m focusing on for now. I might add a couple of things in the future, I’ll keep you posted on it! Anyways, thanks for listening to the ramblings, and hmu if you have any more recommendations <3

#when it's just her family it's like okay i feel bad not speaking russian but there's not a lot of social interaction happening here #but when i'm one person in a group of many and everyone else speaks russian i feel really bad not speaking it #although tbh my friend has MASTERED the art of simultaneous translation #i felt like i was sitting in the un #anyways i'm going to try to do this and probably add on some malayalam and maybe amharic?? idk #we'll see #general:goals #russian:goals #russian:resources #russian:general #ooof well i guess i'm adding another language to the rotation :')