Flash Cards and Fiddly Endings

I don't sit down with my Russian materials with as much frequency or consistency as I should. Part of the reason for this is that I am more than a little skeptical of self-studying languages. As a certified and slightly experienced ESL/EFL teacher, I know that learning any language involves developing the four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Self-study of a language does little to develop speaking skills because it provides no real opportunity for error correction. I can listen to a CD and repeat, but I don't really get to know if I'm pronouncing anything right. And the CD doesn't provide pronunciation even of all the words used in the book.

Another cause of my lack of discipline has been that, until recently, I felt as if I were going over old ground rather than breaking new ground. Most of what I have done has had the effect of reviving what I knew at the end of a semester of college Russian, not of teaching me any truly new material. Going over old ground can often feel dispiriting.

But I'm trying some new techniques for getting up a bit more steam on my Russian. One is making myself flash cards of vocabulary and going over it a few times until I really know the words. I've made quite a few flash cards out of vocabulary in my Teach Yourself Russian book, as well as verbs I found on a website listing the most frequently used words in Russian.

I am determined, from now on, to learn at least 10 new verbs a day. I think I can handle that for as long as I remain Stateside. I may not know the verbs as well as I should--some of them I am certain are irregular, but I can find no conjugations for them, nor can I determine for all of them whether they are perfective or imperfective aspect--but at least I will have recognition value when I start taking Russian lessons in Moscow.

The other big challenge for me right now is to get to a point where I know all of the Russian noun case endings. Having learned forms in Latin and Greek in high school, this should not be a challenge and mostly just requires practice. But it's awfully dull practice, just sitting and writing out noun declensions, and since I also have a limited vocabulary at present, I cannot always easily call to mind another word that fits the declension I need to practice.

Hopefully that will change once my Thousand Words in Russian book comes. I finally ordered the picture book. I hope it will at least get me through a lot of practical, real-life vocabulary so that, reasonably soon after arriving in Moscow, I can ask for boots and bananas without constantly consulting a phrasebook.