So I decided to try to look up some articles in the subject-area from my profession. Much to my surprise and delight over 50% of the vocabulary is English derived.
Which means that I should be able to learn those words super quickly.
It also means the main goal for which I decided to do Russian (for professional purposes) is several months ahead of schedule.
I’m actually USING Russian now. Awesome Sauce!
I just started the russian duolingo course and I always find it so funny when I find an english word buried under all those russian letters.
How comfortable would you say you are with the cyrillic and how long have you been at it?
I’ve honestly just been clicking on the words to hear the audio so I’m semi illiterate. I can read the words slowly and painfully if I sound them out.
If my focus had been on reading rather than listening, I’d be better at reading cyrillic but it hasn’t been my focus.
In terms of where I’m at: my guess is I am low B1 level (as in low intermediate) at listening. I’ve been at it roughly 8 months now.
I have about 5,400 mp3 words under my belt in anki and 11,000 some words under my belt in lingQ.
Still, these english/german words that are plentiful consist only a thin layer on a sea of the language. And then there is a bottom of that sea - the common words from prehistoric times (Papa, Mama, Cow, Wolf). Everything in-between needs to be acquired.
For sure. And it has definitely been a brutally hard slog to memorize 5000 words of standard Russian compared to the much lesser effort to memorize French. That said, my excitement is specifically because I got my goal of using Russian for my job much earlier than expected simply because the vocabulary is mostly English which is obviously way way easier to memorize.
Let me guess. IT engineer, eh? 