potoloklol

I took most of the stuff I studied seriously in school and language learning was one of them. I remember my first day of French class I was thinking, "What did I get myself into?" But the teacher was very nice and fashionable and pretty and so French that I wanted to be just like her. A few months into my French class, I realized that I was actually learning another language! I thought that it was an amazing achievement and so I continued to study hard and have retained what I learned in high school throughout the years.

Russian is a lovely language! I would suggest that you be diligent and patient with your studies. Honestly, learning the Cyrillic alphabet is the easy part. There are several letters similar to English, you just have to get used to how it looks. It just gets harder after that because of the grammar and cases. If you put in the time and effort though, you'll eventually see results. Best of luck!

My experience with Google translate has not been so good. It may work for some languages like Spanish,but it is almost never 100% accurate. It is especially terrible with Russian because of the sentence structures and grammar and changing endings. Google translate can give you a good idea of what the sentence may mean, but not the exact meaning or a natural translation. I wouldn't rely on it too heavily, maybe just for a word or two.

I would recommend Le Petit Prince. It was the first French book I read all by myself without a teacher to guide me or classmates for support. It is my favorite book and it was simple enough to understand with my rudimentary French skills. I learned so many words and I genuinely enjoyed the story so it didn't feel like learning, it felt natural. The Little Prince asks questions like "what does this word mean?" and so I felt like I was learning about the world along with him. Perhaps it is best for someone with an intermediate level of French than for a beginner, but I really think it is a good one to start off with.

I watch a ton of films in the target language, usually I'll find one that I really like and I'll just watch it over and over again. The more times I watch it, the more I understand as time goes on. Also, I listen to music, but it can be trickier so I usually just stick to films. To start off with, I do listen to the dialogue from the lessons, but I mostly enjoy speaking to my native speaking friends and listening to them speak their language. In fact, I was hoping to put in some practice today, but my friend is not replying to my messages

For me the most difficult has been all the declensions and cases. Changing the ending of the words has been quite a challenge! The second most difficult thing in my opinion has to be writing. I'm used to writing print and my cursive handwriting even in English is ugly to me so Russian cursive has been absolute torture! There are some similar letters, but I cannot for the life of me write letters like "ж." I really should practice more, but until I perfect my handwriting, the struggle goes on. As for pronunciation, I find it relatively easy. I never really struggled with it, just a few minor screw ups with the stresses. Sometimes I'm too shy to speak Russian, especially when one of my Russian friends insists that I repeat a word a million times. Of course only after I repeat it several times will he say that I was saying it correctly the whole time, but by then I don't feel like repeating any more words. Ah well, I love the Russian language and hopefully someday I will be fluent!

Hello, everybody! I'm a 22 year old college student currently trying to learn Russian. It has been the most challenging language I've learned so far, probably because I only studied it diligently for six months when I enrolled in first semester Russian at my college. Anyway, I'm fluent in Spanish and English and I took three years of French when I was in high school. I'm pretty good at French and have continued to study it independently since the days of my high school career. I also plan on studying Italian; since I know Spanish and French, Italian is quite easy. I can already understand a lot of things, however, for now I'm focusing on conquering Russian. I'm sure I'll gain a lot from this forum and I hope I can give back as much.

There are many reasons why I love Duolingo! It is super easy to use and it's a lot of fun. If I'm bored or while i'm on the bus I just go ahead and use it to study my languages. It's not the best at explaining grammar and the like, but it's a good way for me to practice if I don't have much time to actually sit down with a textbook or something. I think it's a great app to start out with and a good supplement to other language learning activities.