Question by asdfghjkl;: Rosetta Stone for Russian?
My school is offering a language class using Rosetta Stone. i signed up and already paid for the class. what i want to do is learn Russian, but i don’t know anything about the Russian language, i don’t even know simple greetings.
i really want to learn Russian because I’ve fallen in love with Russian lit, especially Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Someday i want to be able to read them in the original Russian.
I’m 16 years old and i don’t really know any language besides English and a little Spanish. So I’m wondering how difficult this will be if i go into this class knowing what i know now (pretty much nothing). i also want to know what i could do to prepare myself for this class over the summer.
Also, if you’ve used rosetta stone, did you like it? is it a good way to learn a language?
i don’t want to read Dostoevsky in Russian right away (well, i do, but i know i can’t)
that’s just a long term goal. and my main reason for getting into Russian
Answers and Views:
Answer by ellakolesnikova
Privet…(Hello!)
well…i am so glad….to “hear that”,i mean…you only 16 and writing (thinking)…so smart,after everything i did read…here on YA!
so¿what can i say? I am Russian….,russian is my native and i’m watching on CNN almost everyday…between the News….about Rosetta Stone…like the best method to learn any language,so maybe you can try now on your Summer Vacations and you can feel it ….if it’s really true!
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Randem says
I've used Rosetta Stone… mostly as a way of practicing things I had already learned in other places.
It's pretty good, but it's definitely not going to have you reading Dostoevsky!
As far as preparing over the summer, I recommend that you sign up at http://livemocha.com/ and do one lesson per day. That should last you most of the summer, and it won't eat up too much of your time. And, of course, it's free. It'll definitely give you a big head start on your class.
Once you start the class, you're going to need to augment the Rosetta Stone with some grammar lessons. For that, I suggest Teach Yourself Russian Grammar. You're also going to need tons of vocabulary and phrases and what-not, and for that I recommend Living Language Complete Russian.
Enjoy. Russian is an awesome language. But be prepared to do a lot of work. I've been studying Russian for seven months now, and while I can have a generally fluent conversation and I can understand most movies I watch, I'm still nowhere close to reading Dostoevski. 🙂
quixoticparadox says
welcome! russian is the first language i learned.
what helped me is to take russian for what it is, and not compare it to your native tongue. russian is russian and not english or french. it has its own rules of grammar and sentence structure. once you learn to read the alphabet your ability in the language will greatly increase. try to really focus on that at first. try to speech every day, even with your self if there is no one else. and as far as tools pimsluer cds i believe will help you and will be less expensive than rosette stone.
above all remember that this new language is a tool once you understand how it works this tool is yours.