Some thoughts about learning a language
I started learning Russian for a bit less than two months now and I find it slightly different than when I learned other foreign languages. I think it’s due to the fact that the alphabet is different, but there might be more to it. Anyway, I have noticed that my approach is different than what I expected. I first gave myself a hard time trying to decipher the words and was puzzled by the pronunciation all the time. I could never get it right. I also tried hard to start writing, which was a disaster. Regarding the handwriting, I think I’d better wait until someone can actually show me how to do it. And as for typing… I had bought stickers for the keyboard, but the letters faded away in a matter of days. So I’ll need to get a real Russian keyboard.
So reading and writing suddenly were not an option anymore. Fortunately, thanks to Iconoclass, I’ve got the Rosetta Stone program installed and it’s a great tool to learn. I started learning only through hearing. I noticed that I needed to find a way to remember all the vocabulary and started “cheating”, noting down some phonetics on a notebook, in order to remember them more easily. I felt bad about using phonetic transcriptions at first, because I thought that it wouldn’t help me later on to be able to read. But in fact, it’s just the other way around. Since I started using these phonetic transcriptions, I remember the words more easily. And once I know what a word sounds like, it’s easier to decipher it, actually. So I think I finally found the right method to learn how to read. I see the words globally, and I don’t struggle to decipher them letter by letter. The words are like a whole picture. I don’t pay much attention to the letters in them yet, so writing will be the last thing I’ll be able to do.
But on the other hand, that’s exactly how children learn their mother tongue. They hear the words at first, and they know how to talk long before they learn to read and to write. And it’s easier for them to read a word that they already know than to learn a word whose meaning they don’t know yet.
Dobryi-dohter kindly settled a video list for me, so that I could watch movies and cartoons in Russian. It’s amazing how much one can understand of a story without knowing the language. I pick up some words, recognize others. It’s a victory each time I can understand a full sentence.
I wonder if perhaps the approach of a new language is different for each new language, even for one given person. I mean, I know the approaches are different for people. But I didn’t learn Spanish, Swedish, Esperanto, German and Russian the same way. Each time, I used different tactics. So it’s not only about my language learning preferences; the language itself implies some adaptation as well. It’s a pity that no one tells us about these things at university in the linguistics department. So far, nothing I’ve learned there was ever useful to me. I had to learn how to teach a language on my own. Now I realize that I learned to be a learner on my own too.