There is a new Alexander Arguelles video up on Youtube. He demonstrates how he uses Assimil to learn Russian. The video is in Russian and is very long (1h 40min).
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It is rather, but it is very welcome! Thank you for sharing the link.
(As an aside, I can understand Prof Arguelles better when he does not read. Any suggestions as to why that could be?)
So, I shall now return to the video. I find that I need to take a break every few minutes.
P.S. Just thought of an explanation: perhaps because the vocabulary in the lesson is more difficult than the language-learning-related sentences A.A. uses.
Other questions: does he sound different when he “acts” out a scene? Am I just not used to seeing him come alive like that? I think, though, it is more about the level of difficulty.
[Edited for lots of typos etc.]
Thanks a lot for this link, Snorre! Normally Prof. Arguelles only speaks English in his You Tube videos, so that’s extraordinary! I am not a speaker of Russian, but I have the impression that he speaks Russian slowly, so that might be very good to understand for learners of Russian.
Evgueny and eugrus, what’s your opinion on the quality of his Russian?
Fasulye
Uhm…what´s the point of the video?
That’s was great to see professor arguelles video, it’s great to see him doing his shadowing technique. He is a very dedicated man to learning languages, it really is admirable what he has achieved, although I don’t speak russian I learned that learning a language takes a lot of hours of study and hard work and that I take too many breaks!!!
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Alex is an amazing polyglot. I was curious to see how many languages he spoke, and googled to find out. There is a wealth of information about his language learning career at this website which dates from September 2011.
http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html
He writes
"Scale for Assessing Foreign Language Reading Abilities.
I am all too frequently asked how many languages I know, and I dread this question because I am truly unable to answer it. Having spent my life studying languages, I have such varying levels of knowledge about or abilities in different languages that I cannot give a simple answer, …The only aspect of my foreign language knowledge that I can quantify in any way is my ability to read, for my main goal in studying foreign languages is to develop the ability to read the Great Books that have been written in them. "
There follows a long long list of languages in which he knows between 95 and 99.9% of all words he will encounter while reading. Russian is at 98% for the great works of Russian literature.
Based on my experience, once we have a large passive vocabulary, we have a solid base from which it is not difficult to develop a high degree of proficiency in the other language skills.
Keep on LingQing
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