RussianFilter: Help me read better.
January 21, 2015 7:06 AM Subscribe
Are there resources or just tried-and-true methods to improve my Russian reading ability? Difficulty: I know zero Russian.
I am sure that one day I will want to sit down and learn the Russian language in all its 4 competencies, but right now Mandarin is my primary focus and I don't have time or brain-space to achieve another language goal. What I need is a way to improve my ability to get meaning from texts written in Russian. My research has evolved to a point that most of what I'm looking at now are primary sources in Russian, and I waste a lot of time a) trying to identify Cyrillic letters, and b) identifying, transcribing, and translating long words that turn out to be names of people or places.
Are there any books or tips that will help me speed up this process? Resources on learning the Cyrillic alphabet, especially handwritten/cursive forms would be a HUGE help, as well as some basics on Russian sentence structure or word conventions. I find that, for example in Romance languages, my brain can "skip" over grammatically non-significant parts because I already expect the sentence to read SVOO and I know the basic shape of prepositional phrases. So any resources that will help me do this in Russian would be great.
As I said, I am not trying to find an "easy" or "shortcut" way to learn Russian. I'm looking for a linguist's research hack. Something like this, which helped me in similar circumstances with Chinese documents.
I am sure that one day I will want to sit down and learn the Russian language in all its 4 competencies, but right now Mandarin is my primary focus and I don't have time or brain-space to achieve another language goal. What I need is a way to improve my ability to get meaning from texts written in Russian. My research has evolved to a point that most of what I'm looking at now are primary sources in Russian, and I waste a lot of time a) trying to identify Cyrillic letters, and b) identifying, transcribing, and translating long words that turn out to be names of people or places.
Are there any books or tips that will help me speed up this process? Resources on learning the Cyrillic alphabet, especially handwritten/cursive forms would be a HUGE help, as well as some basics on Russian sentence structure or word conventions. I find that, for example in Romance languages, my brain can "skip" over grammatically non-significant parts because I already expect the sentence to read SVOO and I know the basic shape of prepositional phrases. So any resources that will help me do this in Russian would be great.
As I said, I am not trying to find an "easy" or "shortcut" way to learn Russian. I'm looking for a linguist's research hack. Something like this, which helped me in similar circumstances with Chinese documents.
I learned the Cyrillic alphabet in my Russian 1 class in 9th grade. It was just like kindergarten - we had the alphabet hanging up in class in both Script and Type and we sang the alphabet song every day out loud. I can still read/decode Cyrillic, even if I have no idea what the word means, 20 years later. So, get yourself a basic printout and learn the song (I'll bet it is on youtube).
posted by soelo at 7:24 AM on January 21, 2015
posted by soelo at 7:24 AM on January 21, 2015
I found that learning the Cyrillic alphabet was incredibly easy. I studied it a bit on paper and then practiced writing out/reading familiar words and names (like Tchaikovsky, &c.). I think after that the most helpful thing was just practice.
posted by stoneandstar at 7:35 AM on January 21, 2015
posted by stoneandstar at 7:35 AM on January 21, 2015
I am confused by your question because AFAICT you are asking about a "hack" to read Russian without knowing Russian. This doesn't make sense to me - I have no idea how it could be done. The way to "get meaning from texts written in Russian" is to know Russian. You can't get meaning from text written in Language X if you don't know Language X.
The Cyrillic alphabet can be easily learned in a day or two (although I agree that Russian cursive letters can sometimes look quite different from their print version), but I don't know if that helps you very much. That can tell you that больница transliterates as bol'nitsa (ok, really bal'nitsa) but that doesn't help you know that it means "hospital", and you won't know what's being said about the hospital without knowing noun cases to know the difference between больни́ца ("a/the hospital") and больни́цы ("of the hospital"), for example. (these inflections make Russian word order rather flexible, although things are generally SVO). The inflection of nouns for case is something that the Romance languages have almost entirely lost, so this is a new and challenging feature that has critical importance to a sentence's meaning.
If you know Russian, whatever is a place or personal name will be obvious. If you think about it, a person who knew no English would not be able to pick out the personal and place names, or any meaning, from a sentence like, "Jane and Sidney opened a fashion boutique on Melrose Avenue." even if they knew the sounds all the letters made.
I read your question several times to make sure I got it right and maybe I am still getting it wrong (please let me know if I am), but having done foreign-language research myself in grad school, I don't understand how research can be done in a foreign language that one does not know very well. I could never research in Persian, for example, even though I know what sounds the letters represent.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:41 AM on January 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
The Cyrillic alphabet can be easily learned in a day or two (although I agree that Russian cursive letters can sometimes look quite different from their print version), but I don't know if that helps you very much. That can tell you that больница transliterates as bol'nitsa (ok, really bal'nitsa) but that doesn't help you know that it means "hospital", and you won't know what's being said about the hospital without knowing noun cases to know the difference between больни́ца ("a/the hospital") and больни́цы ("of the hospital"), for example. (these inflections make Russian word order rather flexible, although things are generally SVO). The inflection of nouns for case is something that the Romance languages have almost entirely lost, so this is a new and challenging feature that has critical importance to a sentence's meaning.
If you know Russian, whatever is a place or personal name will be obvious. If you think about it, a person who knew no English would not be able to pick out the personal and place names, or any meaning, from a sentence like, "Jane and Sidney opened a fashion boutique on Melrose Avenue." even if they knew the sounds all the letters made.
I read your question several times to make sure I got it right and maybe I am still getting it wrong (please let me know if I am), but having done foreign-language research myself in grad school, I don't understand how research can be done in a foreign language that one does not know very well. I could never research in Persian, for example, even though I know what sounds the letters represent.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:41 AM on January 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: That can tell you that больница transliterates as bol'nitsa (ok, really bal'nitsa) but that doesn't help you know that it means "hospital", and you won't know what's being said about the hospital without knowing noun cases to know the difference between больни́ца ("a/the hospital") and больни́цы ("of the hospital"), for example.
Right now the research involves manual transcription and machine translation, so this is exactly the sort of information I am looking for, actually. I've never worked with a language that has noun cases before, so understanding that Russian is a language that has them will help me look at these two words (больни́ца and больни́цы), and identify that they have a similar meaning, but different morphemes. This is where my Ask comes in - is there information about these morphemes, for example? Knowing them would save me time in looking words up separately and give me a sense of what is going on in the sentence without having to sit around and guess. Much like we do in English, I suppose - no one needs to tell me that "sedulity" is an adjective even though I had never seen the word before 5 seconds ago.
a person who knew no English would not be able to pick out the personal and place names, or any meaning, from a sentence like, "Jane and Sidney opened a fashion boutique on Melrose Avenue."
Someone who has a passing familiarity should be able to pick out that "opened" is the verb, which makes "Jane and Sidney" the subject and "a fashion boutique" the object. "And" indicates that there are 2 entities serving as the subject, the use of the indefinite article "a" is telling, the double-word noun "fashion boutique" strongly suggests that the first word is being used as an adjective. The preposition "on" and the capitalization of "Melrose" and "Avenue" gives information as well.
But even assuming that most people wouldn't be able to do this, let's assume that I can, and that this exercise will be helpful for me.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:58 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Right now the research involves manual transcription and machine translation, so this is exactly the sort of information I am looking for, actually. I've never worked with a language that has noun cases before, so understanding that Russian is a language that has them will help me look at these two words (больни́ца and больни́цы), and identify that they have a similar meaning, but different morphemes. This is where my Ask comes in - is there information about these morphemes, for example? Knowing them would save me time in looking words up separately and give me a sense of what is going on in the sentence without having to sit around and guess. Much like we do in English, I suppose - no one needs to tell me that "sedulity" is an adjective even though I had never seen the word before 5 seconds ago.
a person who knew no English would not be able to pick out the personal and place names, or any meaning, from a sentence like, "Jane and Sidney opened a fashion boutique on Melrose Avenue."
Someone who has a passing familiarity should be able to pick out that "opened" is the verb, which makes "Jane and Sidney" the subject and "a fashion boutique" the object. "And" indicates that there are 2 entities serving as the subject, the use of the indefinite article "a" is telling, the double-word noun "fashion boutique" strongly suggests that the first word is being used as an adjective. The preposition "on" and the capitalization of "Melrose" and "Avenue" gives information as well.
But even assuming that most people wouldn't be able to do this, let's assume that I can, and that this exercise will be helpful for me.
posted by chainsofreedom at 7:58 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: When I studied Russian in college, we learned Cyrillic with this book and its accompanying CD-ROM. There are probably cheaper options, but it worked.
Also, Sesame Street.
On preview:
If you're interested in what the cases mean, and what the declensions look like, masterrussian.com has some okay summaries.
Cases: http://masterrussian.com/aa071600a.shtml
Declensions/Case endings: http://masterrussian.com/aa052000a.shtml
posted by papayaninja at 8:04 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Also, Sesame Street.
On preview:
If you're interested in what the cases mean, and what the declensions look like, masterrussian.com has some okay summaries.
Cases: http://masterrussian.com/aa071600a.shtml
Declensions/Case endings: http://masterrussian.com/aa052000a.shtml
posted by papayaninja at 8:04 AM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: This is the best learning resource I've seen (I am a native Russian speaker).
posted by rada at 10:09 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by rada at 10:09 AM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
How about a Russian Grammar book? I used an earlier edition of this one when I studied Russian at University. Such a lovely language! So very, very complicated...
posted by ZipRibbons at 2:29 PM on January 21, 2015
posted by ZipRibbons at 2:29 PM on January 21, 2015
I've found Dover's "Essential X Grammar" books good as tightly focused reviews of languages I've already studied. I don't know how good the Russian one is, but for less than $8 I'd say give it a shot.
posted by benito.strauss at 7:43 PM on January 21, 2015
posted by benito.strauss at 7:43 PM on January 21, 2015
I think exposure and self-quizzing can make a big difference -
I'm going through something similar with Japanese right now, where my ability to read hiragana is pretty good, but I see a lot less katakana, so when I see a katakana word, I keep having to stop and struggle with sounding out the letters.
So here's what I suggest:
* get Anki flashcard software
* look for an Anki deck with Russian cognates, or an online list you can import
* spend 5 minutes a day drillling recognition of the Russian words
It's definitely helping my katakana recognition.
posted by kristi at 9:39 AM on January 23, 2015
I'm going through something similar with Japanese right now, where my ability to read hiragana is pretty good, but I see a lot less katakana, so when I see a katakana word, I keep having to stop and struggle with sounding out the letters.
So here's what I suggest:
* get Anki flashcard software
* look for an Anki deck with Russian cognates, or an online list you can import
* spend 5 minutes a day drillling recognition of the Russian words
It's definitely helping my katakana recognition.
posted by kristi at 9:39 AM on January 23, 2015
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posted by devnull at 7:17 AM on January 21, 2015