Well, that's it. What with my new job (which is very mobile and unsettled at the moment) I'm barely in a position to maintain my old blog without pretending that I can sensibly post to this blog as well. Something has to give and this blog is it. I'll leave it up for a while longer but its days are numbered.
I haven't given up on Russian yet but I'm struggling to devote a lot of time to it. It took me many years of study to get a French degree so I am particularly persistent in these matters and will not give up. Linguistically, I feel as if I've made one of those treks up as far as the comprehension base-camp. Much of the hard work is yet to come but you can see the summit of fluency from there and that's encouraging.
In all honesty the alphabet is now second nature and much of the grammar didn't prove to be difficult (I'm partly fooling myself here by consigning all the case endings into some sort of lexical variation category). It's the vocabulary which has proven to be the main stumbling block. I know that repeated usage will overcome that problem but I'm simply not using the words enough for them to stick at the moment. Not totally true, the verb сообшать (to report) stuck last week but at the rate of one word a week I'll be dead before I'm fluent at that rate.
Enjoy your studies, everyone. It was fun while it lasted. Thanks to all those who hepled me out once or twice. До свиданя !
Bye Ian! I have enjoyed reading your blog, especially The Three Little Pigs posts.
Good luck in your newest ventures.
Posted by: Елизавета | June 14, 2006 at 01:08 PM