Thursday, August 31, 2017

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Чудовищная русская пропись!

Русские прописные буквы.... Вот это да!
"Dearest Misha has deprived the lady-millionaire of lilies!"
Милейший Миша лишил лилии миллионершу... 

If you're having trouble with a particular letter, check out these YouTube videos... They're pretty good!

Monday, August 28, 2017

(Kind of) learn to read Russian in 15 minutes!

This cartoon introduces you to the letters in the Russian alphabet, a subset of Cyrillic. It's pretty good... it has a lot of terminological problems, and some outright errors, but as a pragmatic and quick guide to learning the letters, it gets the job done. Enjoy!




It continues here...

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

A world of languages...

Twenty-three languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people of the 7.2 billion inhabitants of earth. (There are at least 7,102 known languages.)

Russian is spoken as a mother tongue by 166 million people (and by many others, for whom it is used as a language of study or business). But not all the speakers of Russian are from Russia...


An overview of the Russian alphabet




If you're having problems learning the alphabet, or if you're just bored... please watch An Introduction to the Russian Alphabet (total of around 30 minutes). Да, знаю! Yeah, I know... It's really rough and I'm really longwinded, but watch it anyway.


In class, I provide you with a list of "sight words." (Here's a copy.) These are simple Russian words, often cognates with English or another language. The premise: You start with the first word, which is made up of shared letters between Russian and English. Then, word by word, the list introduces and reinforces new letters. By the time you complete the list, you've learned all 3444 letters in the Russian alphabet! You can listen to me reading the list of words here