How I Learned Russian Wie ich Russisch gelernt habe Cómo aprendí ruso Comment j'ai appris le russe Come ho imparato il russo 私がロシア語を習得した方法 러시아어를 배운 방법 Jak nauczyłem się rosyjskiego Como aprendi russo Как я учил русский язык Hur jag lärde mig ryska Rusça'yı Nasıl Öğrendim Як я вивчив російську мову 我是如何学习俄语的 我是如何學習俄語的

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann, and today I'm going to talk to you about how I learned Russian. Olá, Steve Kaufmann, e hoje vou falar com você sobre como aprendi russo. Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell to get notifications. So I was about 60 and my approach to language learning had always been that you shouldn't focus on grammar. Então, eu tinha cerca de 60 anos e minha abordagem ao aprendizado de idiomas sempre foi que você não deveria se concentrar na gramática. Uh, you need to get used to the language through lots of listening and reading.

I had done that with Chinese, with Japanese. You need to get used to the patterns of language and not focus on the itsy bitsy details of the language. Musisz przyzwyczaić się do wzorców językowych i nie skupiać się na drobnych szczegółach języka. And people said to me, that will not work with Russian because Russian has very complex grammar. So that became a bit of a challenge. Stało się to więc pewnym wyzwaniem. Uh, and also I had always enjoyed, A poza tym zawsze mi się podobało,

you know, reading novels of Russian literature in English when I was young. So I thought it would be cool to be able to read uh Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in Russian. So with that, I started learning Russian. I began at that time, LingQ was very much in a sort of rudimentary stage. Počeo sam u to vrijeme, LingQ je bio u nekoj vrsti rudimentarne faze. Я начал в то время, LingQ был в какой-то зачаточной стадии. It would take us three, four, five seconds to save an individual LingQ. Trebalo bi nam tri, četiri, pet sekundi da spremimo pojedinačni LingQ. 個々のLingQを保存するには、3、4、5秒かかります。 Uratowanie pojedynczego LingQ zajęłoby nam trzy, cztery, pięć sekund. Нам потребовалось бы три, четыре, пять секунд, чтобы сохранить отдельный LingQ.

But I started obviously, you know, not having a full fledged program at LingQ. Ali počeo sam očito, znate, nemajući potpuni program u LingQ-u. しかし、私は明らかに、LingQで本格的なプログラムを持っていないことから始めました。 Но я начал, очевидно, с того, что у меня не было полноценной программы в LingQ. I bought books, uh, Colloquial, uh, Teach Yourself, Living Language, listened to those, read them. As soon as we had certain things that I could do on LingQ, I started doing them. Как только у нас появились определенные вещи, которые я мог делать на LingQ, я начал их делать. Yevgeny, who is a great supporter of LingQ in

petersburg, created a lot of great content. Uh, as soon as I could I started into, uh, you know, audio books. And I'm going to give you a brief view. In fact, if you look behind me, you'll see, I stacked them up to have a look here. Zapravo, ako pogledate iza mene, vidjet ćete, naslagao sam ih da pogledam ovdje. You'll see some of the, uh, DVDs, some of the videos that I watched, some of the CDs that I listened to. The DVDs initially was more to, to stimulate me and encourage me.

The CDs was more for listening. I did a lot of listening. Uh, in those days, uh, we weren't yet able to import, you know, from YouTube and so forth, but we were able to import some of the classics, just the text, into LingQ. W tamtych czasach nie byliśmy jeszcze w stanie importować, no wiesz, z YouTube i tak dalej, ale byliśmy w stanie zaimportować niektóre klasyki, tylko tekst, do LingQ. And then I would listen to the audio. そして、私はオーディオを聴きます。 A potem słuchałem audio. And in fact, I'll give you a brief sort of view of my profile with Russian. そして実際、私はあなたにロシア語での私のプロフィールの簡単な種類の見方を与えるでしょう。 I faktycznie, dam ci krótki przegląd mojego profilu z rosyjskim.

And you'll see that I began in 2007 more or less, and that I've had a period of significant activity, which then tapered off. I vidjet ćete da sam počeo manje-više 2007. i da sam imao razdoblje značajne aktivnosti, koje se zatim smanjilo. そして、私が多かれ少なかれ2007年に始めたこと、そして私が重要な活動の期間を過ごし、その後次第に減少したことがわかるでしょう. So first have a look at that. I'm looking at my profile, and I get to my profile by the way, by clicking on my, uh, image here and then going to profile. And you'll see that I started learning Russian in 2007.

That's a long time ago. This is my hours of listening, not accurate because most of my listening through this period has been to CDs, watching movies, listening to Ekho Moskvy, and I'll get into more detail on what I did. Ovo su moji sati slušanja, nisu točni jer je većina mog slušanja kroz ovo razdoblje bila CD-ovi, gledanje filmova, slušanje Ekho Moskvy, i ući ću u više detalja o tome što sam radio. If I just look at my activities on LingQ. If I look  at my LingQs created, you'll see that I've been active over a long period of time. Als ik naar mijn gemaakte LingQs kijk, zie je dat ik al een hele tijd actief ben.

Even recently, I go in occasionally and read an article on LingQ and create some LingQs. So my known words total has grown in this fashion. I don't know... when we were starting with LingQ, there were some issues and I ended up with some negative numbers, but that gives you a brief sense of how long I've been at Russian. Я не знаю... когда мы начинали с LingQ, были некоторые проблемы, и я получил несколько отрицательных чисел, но это дает вам краткое представление о том, как долго я работаю на русском языке.

It has been a major love of mine. Het is een grote liefde van mij geweest. Это была моя большая любовь. And so I want to get into some detail about that. И поэтому я хочу подробно остановиться на этом. All right now, the first, um, audio book that I listened to was The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy because it's short. Итак, первая, гм, аудиокнига, которую я прослушал, была «Крейцерова соната» Толстого, потому что она короткая. And in fact I have it here. А на самом деле он у меня здесь. Okay. And I listened to it. I didn't really understand it, but I was able to import

the, uh, text because it's all, you know, free of copyright. I worked on it at LingQ. I did Chekhov, I did a lot of the classics of Russian. I can remember being in a place called Silver Star where in fact, I was training to ski in the Vasaloppet in Sweden, and I was out there cross country skiing three, four, five hours a day while listening to Chekhov, listening to Tolstoy, listening to, um, other classics of, of Russian literature. Sjećam se da sam bio na mjestu koje se zove Srebrna zvijezda gdje sam zapravo trenirao skijanje u Vasaloppetu u Švedskoj, i bio sam vani na skijanju tri, četiri, pet sati dnevno dok sam slušao Čehova, slušao Tolstoja, slušajući, hm, druge klasike ruske književnosti.

Go back to my room and look up words. LingQ was very slow. Three, four, five seconds to save each word, but I was determined. Okay. So that's kind of where it began. Uh, some of my favorite, um, you know, DVDs it, for example... uh, although my all-time favorite was ..., which to me was the ultimate exotic Russian experience. ええと、私のお気に入りのいくつか、ええと、あなたが知っている、それをDVD、例えば...ええと、私のずっと好きだったのは...、それは私にとって究極のエキゾチックなロシアの経験でした。 Э-э, некоторые из моих любимых, э-э, вы знаете, DVD это, например... э-э, хотя мой самый любимый был..., который для меня был самым экзотическим русским опытом.

Um... 19th century, uh, some guy from Georgia and so forth, but there's a whole bunch of them. ええと... 19世紀、ええと、ジョージア出身の人などですが、たくさんいます。 Эм... 19 век, какой-то парень из Джорджии и так далее, но их целая куча. This is another great one. これはもう一つの素晴らしいものです。 You know, this was... which is a classic in Russian, in Russia. あなたが知っている、これは...ロシアの、ロシアの古典です。 They watch it uh, apparently every new years. 彼らはそれをええと、どうやら新しい年ごとに見ています。 Uh, I got into some of the, uh, some of the more modern ones, but I find that the modern Russian... there's also... somewhere. ええと、私はいくつかの、ええと、より現代的なもののいくつかに入りました、しかし私は現代のロシア人が...そこにも...どこかにあるのを見つけます。 Э-э, я попал в некоторые, э-э, некоторые из более современных, но я обнаружил, что современный русский... там также... где-то.

Uh, here we have. But, um, the modern Russian movies are a little more violent. The old Russian Soviet movies, you know, uh, here we have another one, these were great. They had a, uh, gotta get my glasses on... whatever. Morali su mi, uh, staviti naočale... što god. And so that was that. However, another major, and I'll give you a bit of a tour now, then maybe of my library.

Yeah, I did want to give you a little bit of an overview of some of the material that I have used for my Russian here. For example... was one of my favorites. I listened to it over and over again. Uh, the same is true of Yama by Kuprin, but these of course were later on. Uh, to samo dotyczy Yamy Kuprina, ale te oczywiście były późniejsze. The very first... let me see, the very first audio book that I did was Prva... da vidim, prva audio knjiga koju sam napravio bila je

um, The Kreutzer Sonata... by Tolstoy. I did the whole Assimil series, but of course, as I'll show you, when I get to the books, that was only one of the, um, learning materials that I used. Я прошел всю серию Assimil, но, конечно, как я покажу вам, когда доберусь до книг, это был лишь один из, гм, учебных материалов, которые я использовал. Uh, of course I watched a lot of Russian videos. I went and got some of these DVDs just to display them here for you.

Uh, one of my favorites was... You know... uh, I mean, I could go on and on. My favorite was ... which I wasn't able to find in a hurry here. These are some of the CDs that I listened to. Um, you know, and I have only displayed some of them because I've got a whole bookshelf full of these CDs.

So that's just the sort of DVD, CD, uh, section. When I say listening and reading, I include reading. So I have a lot of books here in Russian, including books for learning Russian and books for me to read in Russian. And, uh, I'm sure I have others elsewhere in my library. Of course it's a bit messy here, we're

doing work in the house. This is my Korean section, my German section, and so forth. At least of my, uh, CDs because the DVDs, the movies are more to, to encourage and stimulate and motivate me. And it was fun, but the learning was from listening to the audio books and then reading them on LingQ and saving words and phrases and accumulating this total of 90,000 some odd I bilo je zabavno, ali učenje je proizlazilo iz slušanja audio knjiga i zatim njihovog čitanja na LingQ-u i spremanja riječi i fraza i skupljanja ovih ukupno 90 000, nešto čudno

known words. Granted in, you know, the way there are so many different forms of the same word. Doduše, znate, na način na koji postoji toliko različitih oblika iste riječi. You can't just start beating your chest and saying, I know 90,000 words, but it indicates that I've done a lot of reading and where I've read I've largely listened. But a major impact on my Russian learning Ali veliki utjecaj na moje učenje ruskog

uh, aside from the tremendous help I got from Yevgeny and other tutors, there was a while I should have shown that in my statistics, there was a while where I was doing a lot of talking as well, because I mean, we're talking about a long period of engagement with Russian. uh, osim ogromne pomoći koju sam dobio od Jevgenija i drugih učitelja, neko vrijeme sam to trebao pokazati u svojoj statistici, bilo je i vrijeme kada sam puno pričao, jer mislim, mi smo govoreći o dugom razdoblju angažmana s ruskim. So perhaps two years I didn't speak.

But then for another couple of years, I'd be on talking to Alana to, uh, to Yevgeny other tutors, a number of tutors that I had, LingQ tutors, and, and speaking and learning about Russia and learning Russian. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. And, um, but w w a major influence Ekho Moskvy. Now, Ekho Muskvy is a radio station in Moscow.

Not very popular in Russia because it's somewhat anti-regime. Although in fact, there's quite a wide range of opinion there, they have, like, you know, ... the communist is there. Hoewel er in feite nogal een breed scala van meningen is, hebben ze, zoals, weet je, ... de communist is er. You've got, uh, Um... I can't remember. It's been awhile, I haven't been listening to it for a while, but you had there's this imperialist guy and they have a sort of a wide range of opinion.

I wouldn't call them moderate in any way. 私はそれらを穏健とは決して呼びません。 They're all very emphatic and let they have to say, but if you listen to a, a group of these people, you get a sense of what people are talking about in Russia. Wszyscy są bardzo stanowczy i dają do zrozumienia, co mają do powiedzenia, ale jeśli posłucha się grupy tych ludzi, można zrozumieć, o czym ludzie mówią w Rosji. The big advantage of Ekho Moskvy is that every day there are, I don't know, a dozen interviews, audio with text.

So every day I would import the text into LingQ. I wouldn't  bother imoarting the audio because I would have that on my, uh, you know, iPhone or whatever, but I'D go through and mine it for words and phrases. Ne bih se mučio s umotavanjem zvuka jer bih to imao na svom, uh, znate, iPhoneu ili bilo čemu drugom, ali bih ga pregledao i tražio riječi i fraze. iPhoneなどにオーディオがあるので、わざわざオーディオを作成することはしませんが、単語やフレーズを調べてマイニングします。 I mean, I did that for years. Every day I would load up with five interviews. Svaki dan bih se napunio s pet intervjua. Каждый день я загружал пять интервью. I'd be listening in the car, listening everywhere, reading.

Ekho Moskvy was a major influence on me developing my Russian. Now, Russians get on and say, ah, that's a, you know, they're all, uh, American Stooges and blah, blah, blah, and whatever. Теперь русские вступают и говорят: ах, это, знаете ли, они все, э-э, американские марионетки и бла-бла-бла, и все такое. But the... in fact, it's, that's not quite fair. Maar de... in feite is dat niet helemaal eerlijk. There is a variety, but as with any, uh, information source, you have to pick and choose, and you can't just accept things at face value. Postoji raznolikost, ali kao i sa svakim, uh, izvorom informacija, morate izabrati i ne možete prihvatiti stvari zdravo za gotovo. さまざまなものがありますが、他の情報源と同様に、選択する必要があり、額面通りに物事を受け入れることはできません。 Существует разнообразие, но, как и в случае с любым другим источником информации, вы должны выбирать и выбирать, и вы не можете просто принимать вещи за чистую монету.

And I don't accept everything at face value that I hear on Ekho Moskvy. I nie akceptuję wszystkiego, co słyszę na Ekho Moskvy. И я не принимаю за чистую монету все, что слышу на «Эхо Москвы». However, it helped me a great deal. Het heeft me echter enorm geholpen. So basically my experience with Russian was one of discovering. First of all, the classics, because there I was able to... I went to Riga, Latvia to buy all of these, all of these, uh, CDs. I got lots of them, which you don't need to do now because you can find them online.

Uh, and I bought all these DVDs movies, which you don't need to do now because you can find them in Netflix, you can find them in YouTube. Um, and, and so I was exploring that aspect of Russia, but at the same time through Ekho Moskvy, I was exploring daily events, Russian perspectives on things happening around the world,

um, Russia?US Relations, Russia/ukraine relations, Russia/china relations. And so I was getting a rather broad base. И так у меня получалась довольно широкая база. The other thing that Russian did for me is it got me into the Slavic languages. It was my first Slavic language. And of course, yeah, it is difficult. It is difficult because there are many things in Russian that we don't have in English.

We don't have, uh, you know, verbs of motion. Nemamo, uh, znate, glagole kretanja. We hebben geen, uh, je weet wel, werkwoorden van beweging. We don't have cases. We don't have, uh, uh, you know, aspects of verbs, uh, these things. And you can read the explanations over and over again, but, and they're kind of helpful, but the explanations are not that difficult to understand, except that there are so many exceptions that you can get confused. But it's getting, developing these habits, these patterns of speech that they have in Russian, which are different from

english, and that just takes a lot of exposure. And even at that, as I've been away from Russian, and of course my Russian, uh, deteriorates, I make more grammatical mistakes, I search for words. I čak i pored toga, kako sam bio daleko od ruskog, i naravno moj ruski, ovaj, se pogoršava, radim više gramatičkih grešaka, tražim riječi. But again, if I get back into it, if I'm with Russian people, I hear how they speak. I pick up on how they speak. I start to refresh, you know, the habits that I have,

you know, lost and acquire new and better habits. So I'm comfortable with where I am in Russian. But Russian is, uh, because I don't have to write exams in Russian I just have to enjoy the language, but it was also the door into other Slavic languages. So, uh, after Russian I learned Czech because my father, my parents were born in, uh, actually the Austro-Hungarian empire, but what became Czechoslovakia.

And, uh, my father had, you know, scrapbooks at home of where he climbed mountains and did a whole bunch of stuff that was in the newspapers. そして、ええと、私の父は、あなたが知っているように、彼が山に登った場所の家にスクラップブックを持っていて、新聞にあったたくさんのことをしました。 И у моего отца дома были альбомы с вырезками, где он лазил по горам и делал кучу всего, что было в газетах. And now I'm able to read it. So I learned Czech. Czech was a long road, by the way. Между прочим, Чехия была длинной дорогой. And then from Czech, I did Polish and then I did Ukrainian and a little bit of a Slovak, which is very similar to Czech. А потом из чешского я сделал польский, потом украинский и немного словацкий, что очень похоже на чешское.

So it opened up the whole Slavic world. Uh, so it's been to me, it's been a love affair with Russian. ええと、それは私にとって、それはロシア人との恋愛関係でした。 Э-э, так это было со мной, это был роман с русским. Uh, a voyage of discovery of Russian, uh, of the ... of the Russian world, but also the Slavic world. ええと、ロシアの発見の航海、ええと、ロシアの世界の...だけでなく、スラブの世界の。 So, uh, just a quick summary. I hope that's helpful to you of how I learned Russian. Bye for now.