'Musta ka? =))
Marami maraming salamat kita para sa pagpapahalaga mo ! 
It’s in Tagalog, of course!
I started in mid-spring of 2011, so I’ve been studying four years, with a couple of intervals. I’m also a bit of an unusual case. I was in Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, so I had 6 weeks of basic lessons, 5 hours a day, and had a continual opportunity to speak with my host family. That summer, and fall I was enormously busy teaching English, so I didn’t really have time to study, but I did make some solid flashcard decks of verbs, and I did have opportunity to speak. The next winter, after my program was closed I spent February to May studying - I memorized about 3200 words using Anki, at the rate of about 21 per day (in sets of seven). So that’s one year - and after spending a summer in Russia, I was able to have real conversations in Russian and understood the greater part of what I heard. Although - the first few weeks, I felt like it was all I could do to make out a word here or there. Possibly an accent difference issue, possibly I was way out of practice after not really hearing any Russian all winter - possibly they were just more educated and spoke better than the people I’d been speaking with before.
I strongly disagree that grammar needs to be studied formally - at least in the sense of, with a teacher and a book that explains rules and so on. My only formal study were a few weeks in Kazakhstan. It was a great basis to begin from, but I don’t think I really learned grammar until I began to study on my own. When I entered those flashcards in my Anki decks, I wrote out all the conjugations of the 200 or so verbs; upon reviewing, I made myself repeat all the conjugations, and when we had a lesson at our teacher methodology training conference, one of the Russians gave this grammar lesson on Russian verb forms, and I found that by memorizing a load of Russian verbs, I’d already figured out that all the endings are strikingly similar and rule-bound. Precisely because of this regularity, I think case-languages are perhaps the easiest languages to learn: you can memorize get everything just by memorization, without fear of getting caught up in exceptions. The vast majority Russian verbs in the past tense end in an “eel/al” sound; and the cases I memorized by simply putting a color-coded chart in front of my toilet.
My advice would be to skip reading for the time being - if you only have 30 minutes a day, get the 10,000 most frequent words in Russian book and memorize the first 3000 (that’s what I did). Basically, that puts you at preintermediate. At that level, grammar is almost a non-factor in understanding: you’re just decoding the general meaning of a sentence from the very concrete meanings of words; to give you an example in English, you can easily figure out what “jumped broke table cat vase off fell the” means, despite the missing words and almost total lack of grammar - same in the second language, both for you and the natives you talk to. Grammar simply doesn’t play a role. Once you’ve got those 3000, it will be way less frustrating to read texts that actually interest you, and you’ll be able to work on the actual significant meanings of words - how do you say “I thought” vs “it seems like” vs “that made me think” vs “apparently”, etc.
Second piece of advice - listen to Russian music. It’s not study, but if you find your mind unengaged and the music on, tune into the lyrics for a minute. Here’s a list I posted on another thread awhile ago:
Here’s a list of artists I’ve found in Russian that I like. Depending on what you like in English, it could be incredibly hard to find good music in Russian - most of the popular stuff today seems to be stereotypical Europop. This mostly in alphabetical order, some favorites my iTunes and VK account.
Alai Oli
Sunsay
Аквариум - Kind of like the Russian Dylan
Белая Гвардия
Браво
Кино
Владимир Высоцкий
ДДТ - I LOVE this group - you might compare it to Springsteen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yccdCMupj5c - love this one for the Russian folk chorus in the background near the end.
Земфира - popular female singer. She’s not bad, has somewhat of a cult following.
Машина Времени - Russian Beatles. Plus this song, which was the first I found.
Мумий Тролль - very modern. this guy is just basic quality pop.
Ночные Снайперы - a bit Indie
Ольга Арефьева - great folk singer, gorgeous lyrics, trained in opera. Got to see her a few months ago, was really excited - and there were only 100 or so people in the auditorium. Strange.
Пикник - get to see them in March!!
Пилот
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8HdeUq_hzg -starts one minute in, great song!!
http://rutube.ru/video/fdbd09ecfd7bc704051d9646…
Пятница / 5’nizza - Reggae
Сергей Бабкин
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjGbnllOOuk - he played live in a fantastic film, “день радио”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmT8db3Ao5Q
Сплин
Чайф - this might be heresy for some Russians, but I like the movie version of the first song better than the original - check out the film стиляги!
Несчастный Случай
Евгений Маргулис - this song is hilarious, especially if you’re upset at someone named Tanya. You have to check out the lyrics.
Пелагея
Сектор Газа
Definitely. The way lingq counts Russian words is straight up wrong. Because of the declensions, every word turns into a bunch of “words”, but really that’s the study of grammar, not vocab. And it’s far more than 8 - it’s about 40, because of all the participles and case entries. And I’m at C1 and have nearly 100,000 according to lingq. In reality, it’s probably about 20,000 in passive vocabulary. I only concern myself with new roots - if I see осуществивщимися in a sentence for example, I’m not going to add it to my known words because I know what осуществиться means and I understand what the case system does to a participle. No reason to spend time and energy learning that one particular form.
“Я хочу купить…” I think you are basically saying you want to buy something in the future here. I think it’s ok to say stuff like “Каждый день я хочу покупать…” too. Imo, word count on lingq is a very weak indicator of ones level in a language. Hopefully it’s not the only thing you’re doing.
Hi ! =)))
You are absolutely correct! =))) Я хочу купить is an exact equivalent of “I want to buy…”; there’s no need to be surprised with the perfective verb aspect for the incompleted, or even just a contemplated action! The implication in Russian is rather transparent; it implies the resolute desision to buy!
Every day I want to be buying… - is also grammatically absolutely correct, though, I have to admit, the situation itself is a bit unnatural, but it does not matter, as from the viewpoint of grammar in Russian it’s a absolutely correct usage of both the tense and the aspect of the verb! =)))
Very good progress man =)
I don’t think it is fair to say the way LingQ counts words is ‘wrong’. It is just that LingQ uses a definition for a word that is different to what we mean in almost every other context. I don’t take me known words count too seriously. I think of them like points in a video game.
“Wrong” is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but I think that it can be deceptive if a learner doesn’t look at the word count as points in a video game. That’s how I look at as well, but it seemed to me that Dimethylamine was taking it a bit too seriously. It really does not correspond to knowledge of words, and if you focus too much on memorizing the forms in lingq as they’re presented, you’ll delay your learning enormously.
Hi ! =)))
Wow! =))) Such complicated words??? =))))
Belive me, even a huge lot of native Russians do not exactly know which is the correct pronounciation and spelling of this participle in the instrumental case plural ! =))) It’s even worse when it goes about its imperfect aspect, in plural ! =))))
Осуществляющимися ! =)))
I found memrise about a month after I’d started learning the Cyrillic alphabet here at LingQ. I had all the alphabet lists lessons here at LingQ memorized but I was still having troubles reading new words on my own. I think the exercises of choosing letters that matched sounds repeatedly on memrise helpful. But a few lessons later and the spelling started to slow me down. I’m not complaining! I still use that app. But definitely useful to find a variety of resources.
How would you translate “Everyday I want to buy…”? Would it not be “Каждый день я хочу покупать…”?
I have to know the whole sentence to translate correctly. But I propose it would be: Каждый день, когда я хочу купить…- in English we often omit conjugations that appear by the translation into Russian.
You just translated “Every day, when I want to buy…”.
How about “Every day I want to buy coffee if possible.”
Hi ! =)))
This sounds quite a true-to-life situation!
“Каждый день я хочу покупать кофе, если будет возможность”.
Notice this “покупать”, as it is not specified when this repetitive action is planned to be over! =))) Notice also, that in Russian version only future tense is logically possible in the conditional clause here, as it is obvious that the consecutive actions will be taking place in the future.
Notice, however, that if you’d like to say something like, “Every day I want to buy coffee but I fail,” the Russian version will be “Каждый день я хочу КУПИТЬ кофе, но мне не удается”.
The reason for the perfective aspect of the verb in this case is that you are going to make a one-time COMPLETED action, not to infinitely continue doing these purchases!
Excellent translation and explanation. In your second example, Wade and Penguin both just say to use the perfective when there’s a failure to do something that’s expected/planned. Telling me the failure makes it into a completed action is hard for my native-english mind to grasp.
Wow! You do not know how excited I am to get such a high assessment for both translation AND explanation from a native English speaker! True that, I’m really greatful for this…
The explanation for this seemingly strange usage of the perfective verb aspect is really very easy to explain, I even explained this earlier here, but it’s much easier to explain it one more time than try looking for that explanation in this forum!
The reason for the perfective aspect in this case is implicit, that’s exactly the reason why it puzzles! =))
When it is said in Russian that ‘I want to buy…’ it implies the idea of me wishing to BOTH start the action of buying AND definitely complete this action! Sure enough, it puzzles every native English speaker as there is NO explicit completion of action! =))) But it is implied that saying this you are absolutely resolute about your decision to perform a COMPLETED action of buying! =))
And, just as an additional explanation, there IS only one case in Russian when you DO say in Russian the “I want to buy…” but with a verb in an IMperfective aspect!
But this case needs some further explanation! =)) In a word, it is used in Russian, when the purchase process itself is a very long and multi-stage procedure, and it’s an apparent fact that it is!
Thank you for this post and all the links you provided. I was looking for some Russian music that I could try and sink my teeth into, and possibly help me with word recognition, but had no idea where to even start. Appreciate it, buddy. Looking forward to going through and checking them out
I use Memrise for Cyrillic as well. It’s excellent.
IVe just found this message i wrote almost 2 years ago , when I had 15,000 known words and I still had trouble understanding Many things. But I trusted in Steve words, I keep pushing ,and now that I have 40,000 known words I can definitely say that I was right in my estimations . this amount of words doesn’t allow me to have the level of a native but I can understand everything more or less on my areas of interest , I can comfortable speak with friends understanding 95% , I can watch serials understanding almost everything too , only in difficult movies or difficult radio programs I understand around 70% which is enough to get the main idea . I gonna continue pushing , now is easier to get more new words , like 100 per day because many are different forms or words I already know . Now I have the theory that to understand everything on any context or situation I should have 100,000 known words . That’s the number I’m aiming for.
I nearly forgot all about this thread. It’s been almost 2 years since I posted this thread.
All in total, I’ve put in about 480k words of reading and 220+ hours of attentive reading. I still have a lot to work on, mostly listening and conversation. My speaking skills have been complimented by native speakers, but my conversation skills still feel weak.
I feel like if I hired a tutor, I would be able to speak better and have more structure to my learning. The time being, I am just reading and listening on LingQ, which I feel right now that I’m just ‘winging it’.