Hi there, Steve Kaufmann, and today I'm going to talk to you
about how I learned Russian.
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So I was about 60 and my approach to language learning had always been
that you shouldn't focus on grammar.
Uh, you need to get used to the language through lots of listening and reading.
I had done that with Chinese, with Japanese.
You need to get used to the patterns of language and not focus on the
itsy bitsy details of the language.
And people said to me, that will not work with Russian because
Russian has very complex grammar.
So that became a bit of a challenge.
Uh, and also I had always enjoyed,
you know, reading novels of Russian literature in English when I was young.
So I thought it would be cool to be able to read uh Tolstoy
or Dostoevsky in Russian.
So with that, I started learning Russian.
I began at that time, LingQ was very much in a sort of rudimentary stage.
It would take us three, four, five seconds to save an individual LingQ.
But I started obviously, you know, not having a full fledged program at LingQ.
I bought books, uh, Colloquial, uh, Teach Yourself, Living Language,
listened to those, read them.
As soon as we had certain things that I could do on LingQ, I started doing them.
Yevgeny, who is a great supporter of LingQ in
petersburg, created a lot of great content.
Uh, as soon as I could I started into, uh, you know, audio books.
And I'm going to give you a brief view.
In fact, if you look behind me, you'll see, I stacked
them up to have a look here.
You'll see some of the, uh, DVDs, some of the videos that I watched,
some of the CDs that I listened to.
The DVDs initially was more to, to stimulate me and encourage me.
The CDs was more for listening.
I did a lot of listening.
Uh, in those days, uh, we weren't yet able to import, you know, from YouTube and so
forth, but we were able to import some of the classics, just the text, into LingQ.
And then I would listen to the audio.
And in fact, I'll give you a brief sort of view of my profile with Russian.
And you'll see that I began in 2007 more or less, and that
I've had a period of significant activity, which then tapered off.
So first have a look at that.
I'm looking at my profile, and I get to my profile by the way, by clicking on my,
uh, image here and then going to profile.
And you'll see that I started learning Russian in 2007.
That's a long time ago.
This is my hours of listening, not accurate because most of my
listening through this period has been to CDs, watching movies,
listening to Ekho Moskvy, and I'll get into more detail on what I did.
If I just look at my activities on LingQ.
If I look at my LingQs created, you'll see that I've been active
over a long period of time.
Even recently, I go in occasionally and read an article
on LingQ and create some LingQs.
So my known words total has grown in this fashion.
I don't know...
when we were starting with LingQ, there were some issues and I ended
up with some negative numbers, but that gives you a brief sense
of how long I've been at Russian.
It has been a major love of mine.
And so I want to get into some detail about that.
All right now, the first, um, audio book that I listened to was The Kreutzer
Sonata by Tolstoy because it's short.
And in fact I have it here.
Okay.
And I listened to it.
I didn't really understand it, but I was able to import
the, uh, text because it's all, you know, free of copyright.
I worked on it at LingQ.
I did Chekhov, I did a lot of the classics of Russian.
I can remember being in a place called Silver Star where in fact, I was training
to ski in the Vasaloppet in Sweden, and I was out there cross country
skiing three, four, five hours a day while listening to Chekhov, listening
to Tolstoy, listening to, um, other classics of, of Russian literature.
Go back to my room and look up words.
LingQ was very slow.
Three, four, five seconds to save each word, but I was determined.
Okay.
So that's kind of where it began.
Uh, some of my favorite, um, you know, DVDs it, for example...
uh, although my all-time favorite was ..., which to me was the
ultimate exotic Russian experience.
Um...
19th century, uh, some guy from Georgia and so forth, but
there's a whole bunch of them.
This is another great one.
You know, this was...
which is a classic in Russian, in Russia.
They watch it uh, apparently every new years.
Uh, I got into some of the, uh, some of the more modern ones, but
I find that the modern Russian...
there's also...
somewhere.
Uh, here we have.
But, um, the modern Russian movies are a little more violent.
The old Russian Soviet movies, you know, uh, here we have
another one, these were great.
They had a, uh, gotta get my glasses on...
whatever.
And so that was that.
However, another major, and I'll give you a bit of a tour
now, then maybe of my library.
Yeah, I did want to give you a little bit of an overview of some of the material
that I have used for my Russian here.
For example...
was one of my favorites.
I listened to it over and over again.
Uh, the same is true of Yama by Kuprin, but these of course were later on.
The very first...
let me see, the very first audio book that I did was
um, The Kreutzer Sonata...
by Tolstoy.
I did the whole Assimil series, but of course, as I'll show you, when I get
to the books, that was only one of the, um, learning materials that I used.
Uh, of course I watched a lot of Russian videos.
I went and got some of these DVDs just to display them here for you.
Uh, one of my favorites was...
You know...
uh, I mean, I could go on and on.
My favorite was ... which I wasn't able to find in a hurry here.
These are some of the CDs that I listened to.
Um, you know, and I have only displayed some of them because I've got a
whole bookshelf full of these CDs.
So that's just the sort of DVD, CD, uh, section.
When I say listening and reading, I include reading.
So I have a lot of books here in Russian, including books for learning Russian
and books for me to read in Russian.
And, uh, I'm sure I have others elsewhere in my library.
Of course it's a bit messy here, we're
doing work in the house.
This is my Korean section, my German section, and so forth.
At least of my, uh, CDs because the DVDs, the movies are more to, to
encourage and stimulate and motivate me.
And it was fun, but the learning was from listening to the audio books and
then reading them on LingQ and saving words and phrases and accumulating
this total of 90,000 some odd
known words.
Granted in, you know, the way there are so many different forms of the same word.
You can't just start beating your chest and saying, I know 90,000 words, but it
indicates that I've done a lot of reading and where I've read I've largely listened.
But a major impact on my Russian learning
uh, aside from the tremendous help I got from Yevgeny and other tutors, there
was a while I should have shown that in my statistics, there was a while where
I was doing a lot of talking as well, because I mean, we're talking about a
long period of engagement with Russian.
So perhaps two years I didn't speak.
But then for another couple of years, I'd be on talking to Alana to, uh,
to Yevgeny other tutors, a number of tutors that I had, LingQ tutors,
and, and speaking and learning about Russia and learning Russian.
And it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience.
And, um, but w w a major influence Ekho Moskvy.
Now, Ekho Muskvy is a radio station in Moscow.
Not very popular in Russia because it's somewhat anti-regime.
Although in fact, there's quite a wide range of opinion there, they have, like,
you know, ... the communist is there.
You've got, uh, Um...
I can't remember.
It's been awhile, I haven't been listening to it for a while, but you had
there's this imperialist guy and they have a sort of a wide range of opinion.
I wouldn't call them moderate in any way.
They're all very emphatic and let they have to say, but if you listen to a, a
group of these people, you get a sense of what people are talking about in Russia.
The big advantage of Ekho Moskvy is that every day there are, I don't know,
a dozen interviews, audio with text.
So every day I would import the text into LingQ.
I wouldn't bother imoarting the audio because I would have that on my, uh,
you know, iPhone or whatever, but I'D go through and mine it for words and phrases.
I mean, I did that for years.
Every day I would load up with five interviews.
I'd be listening in the car, listening everywhere, reading.
Ekho Moskvy was a major influence on me developing my Russian.
Now, Russians get on and say, ah, that's a, you know, they're
all, uh, American Stooges and blah, blah, blah, and whatever.
But the...
in fact, it's, that's not quite fair.
There is a variety, but as with any, uh, information source, you have
to pick and choose, and you can't just accept things at face value.
And I don't accept everything at face value that I hear on Ekho Moskvy.
However, it helped me a great deal.
So basically my experience with Russian was one of discovering.
First of all, the classics, because there I was able to...
I went to Riga, Latvia to buy all of these, all of these, uh, CDs.
I got lots of them, which you don't need to do now because
you can find them online.
Uh, and I bought all these DVDs movies, which you don't need to do
now because you can find them in Netflix, you can find them in YouTube.
Um, and, and so I was exploring that aspect of Russia, but at the same time
through Ekho Moskvy, I was exploring daily events, Russian perspectives
on things happening around the world,
um, Russia?US Relations, Russia/ukraine relations, Russia/china relations.
And so I was getting a rather broad base.
The other thing that Russian did for me is it got me into the Slavic languages.
It was my first Slavic language.
And of course, yeah, it is difficult.
It is difficult because there are many things in Russian
that we don't have in English.
We don't have, uh, you know, verbs of motion.
We don't have cases.
We don't have, uh, uh, you know, aspects of verbs, uh, these things.
And you can read the explanations over and over again, but, and they're
kind of helpful, but the explanations are not that difficult to understand,
except that there are so many exceptions that you can get confused.
But it's getting, developing these habits, these patterns of speech that they have
in Russian, which are different from
english, and that just takes a lot of exposure.
And even at that, as I've been away from Russian, and of course my
Russian, uh, deteriorates, I make more grammatical mistakes, I search for words.
But again, if I get back into it, if I'm with Russian
people, I hear how they speak.
I pick up on how they speak.
I start to refresh, you know, the habits that I have,
you know, lost and acquire new and better habits.
So I'm comfortable with where I am in Russian.
But Russian is, uh, because I don't have to write exams in Russian I just have
to enjoy the language, but it was also the door into other Slavic languages.
So, uh, after Russian I learned Czech because my father, my parents were born
in, uh, actually the Austro-Hungarian empire, but what became Czechoslovakia.
And, uh, my father had, you know, scrapbooks at home of where he climbed
mountains and did a whole bunch of stuff that was in the newspapers.
And now I'm able to read it.
So I learned Czech.
Czech was a long road, by the way.
And then from Czech, I did Polish and then I did Ukrainian and a little bit of
a Slovak, which is very similar to Czech.
So it opened up the whole Slavic world.
Uh, so it's been to me, it's been a love affair with Russian.
Uh, a voyage of discovery of Russian, uh, of the ... of the Russian
world, but also the Slavic world.
So, uh, just a quick summary.
I hope that's helpful to you of how I learned Russian.
Bye for now.