Happy Russian language moment
Pardon me while I get all proud of myself for a minute...
It's been a long, tough slog for me studying Russian. I've been frustrated that it's taking, literally, at least five times the effort that studying romance languages did, but I'm finally feeling like I'm making some real progress.
Now I'm able to understand most of Russian friends' blog posts, or follow the preparation instructions on a package of food, without having to pick up a dictionary. I'm up to page 235 in the Russian version of HP6 now, and I only have to look up half as many words per page as when I started.
But what really encouraged me today was discovering on the Internet a list the of most commonly used Russian words. Here you'll find the top 2000, with English translations, and there are longer lists without translations here.
I was curious to see how many I actually knew, so I looked at all of the top 1000 words -- and I already knew 96% of them! So I skipped way ahead to numbers 4900-5000, and found I'd already learned half of those as well, including fun, weird words like "endlessly" (бесконечно) "impatience" (нетерпение) and "cul-de-sac." (тупик) I can't believe I've already learned a few thousand Russian words.
Time flies when you're reading Harry Potter...
It's been a long, tough slog for me studying Russian. I've been frustrated that it's taking, literally, at least five times the effort that studying romance languages did, but I'm finally feeling like I'm making some real progress.
Now I'm able to understand most of Russian friends' blog posts, or follow the preparation instructions on a package of food, without having to pick up a dictionary. I'm up to page 235 in the Russian version of HP6 now, and I only have to look up half as many words per page as when I started.
But what really encouraged me today was discovering on the Internet a list the of most commonly used Russian words. Here you'll find the top 2000, with English translations, and there are longer lists without translations here.
I was curious to see how many I actually knew, so I looked at all of the top 1000 words -- and I already knew 96% of them! So I skipped way ahead to numbers 4900-5000, and found I'd already learned half of those as well, including fun, weird words like "endlessly" (бесконечно) "impatience" (нетерпение) and "cul-de-sac." (тупик) I can't believe I've already learned a few thousand Russian words.
Time flies when you're reading Harry Potter...