Quickie post - Russia in 2011!!!
I'm long overdue to journal about my trip to China, I promise I will get caught up. I still haven't uploaded all of my photos to facebook yet, but if anyone is interested in seeing them I'll put these comments on moderated so you can leave me your real name and I'll go ahead and friend you. I can't seem to figure that out, so send me a PM through
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So, the thing about Russian is that grammatically it's structured very differently than English. Italian is much closer to English, so you can essentially just learn vocabulary and be able to communicate. Russian is cased, which means that word order is irrelevant (which makes it an excellent language for poetry.) You designate the relationship among nouns in a sentence (actor, object of action, etc.) by putting case endings on the ends of nouns. Tricky system, and hard to pick up without a teacher.
Also, romance languages are well integrated into American culture in terms of pronounciation. We've heard Italian/Spanish/French words in lots of different contexts, so it's not too hard to say them correctly. Slavic languages are fairly phonetic in terms of spelling, but still it's tricky to get your tongue around the vowel/consonant pairings.
I learned it by total immersion, because I had no choice, and because all the oold ladies at the bazaar liked to drill me when I went shopping. I've never used Rosetta Stone, so I can't really speak to how effective it is as a system for learning a language that is so different from English. I did buy the flashcard packages for Russian from http://www.declan-software.com/ and found them to be pretty helpful - especially because the audio files help with pronounciation.
Another handy thing (can't find the link right now to the study) is having something like BBC Russian streaming in the background helps setup the framework for learning the language. Apparently being exposed to the sound of a language, even if you don't know any of the words, helps you get a feel for the rhythm of the language, and makes it easier to plug in words when you start learning vocabularly.
A few other resources for Russian:
http://www.svobodanews.ru/ (basically Russian NPR)
http://englishrussia.com/ (cool blog with nifty photo essays on various parts of Russian culture and history)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%D0%A1%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B0+%2B+%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B0&aq=f (Russian sitcom, similar to Mad About You, which is great for hearing realistic simple dialogue/conversation).
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