Шаг за Шагом

Russian Songbook

In the course of my recent meanderings through the Russian musical landscape I've relied heavily on the University of Pittsburgh's Russian and East European Summer Language Institute's Russian songbook. What a great resource. I'll have to add it to my resources typelist.

Not Cheap

Елизавета recently costed doing a Russian course at her local tertiary education establishment. By way of comparison here's what it costs downunder.

For starters, there aren't too many places you can study Russian in Oz and here in Queensland the only place you can enrol at undergraduate level, is at UQ in Brisbane. The Introductory Russian Course is in two parts, I and II, in each of semesters 1 and 2 respectively, at A$2,000 each, so $4,000 tuition fees for the year. That might sound a bit cheaper in US$, a veritable gift at US$3,040.

At that price they're certainly not going to attract a lot of passing or casual interest. Going to Uni here in Oz has now become a relatively expensive exercise what with the recent shift towards 'user pays'. Of course you can always get a CPI indexed government loan and then spend the next twenty years of your life paying it back. Luckily I live 5 hours drive away when I'm at home and about 18 hours drive away when I'm at work or I might have been tempted - NOT.

Disappointed

Following links around, as you do, I chanced upon Verbioso's web site. It's not the swishiest site around but it's relatively easy to follow and initially offered some promising features.

As price-conscious as ever (read: stingy), I immediately went for the free Russian verb demo, the download for which weighed in at a modest 300kb or so and also the free dictionary, rather larger at over 3Mb. Both files are in a zipped up archive format. On unzipping the former, which came through OK, you find a readme file which tells you to email your name to Verbioso and they'll then email you a password to unlock the rest of the zip file to save and use. I emailed them a couple of days ago but no password has been received so far.

I tried several times one evening to download the dictionary and failed miserably, with the download finishing well undersize on every occasion. On a better connection in the office it looked as if I'd successfully downloaded the complete file but it won't open and appears to be
corrupt. I shall try again, no doubt, but I suspect they've either got a corrupt download file or a very dodgy internet connection. Our work connection is otherwise fine, plenty of other stuff downloads without a problem.

The object (presumably) of these freebies is to whet your appetite for the commercial products which they also offer on the web-site. The lack of rapid feedback (where's my password ?) and the download difficulties make me wonder just how serious these guys are.

Splashed out !

Splashing outside - ещё дождь идёт. Very unseasonal. Splashed out also financially - another spending spree on Amazon. This time:

Take Off in Russian and First Thousand Words in Russian. The first comprises a book and some audio CDs which are sorely needed to turn my evening walks into something more productive and the second is a children's book to help with basic vocabulary learning.

Off to Brisbane tomorrow for a few days. Word of the day завтра. Might even visit the Russian video shop to see if they've got any children's books in stock.

Link Update

I continue to scour the web for useful sites and resources. I had planned to do a post on the spelling rules and will in due course, but looking for online notes on that subject I chanced upon a couple of useful sites, both US educational establishments.

First up is the Russian Club at Stetson University. Of particular note here was a little pdf file which will be a useful aide memoire for remembering the numbers. I mention it specifically because tucked away down the bottom of the page was the reason why the Russian word for 40 (сорок) is so different to the rest of the numbers. If you knew how long I'd spent on the net trying to find out that little fact you'd be appalled. This site looks to have sound files on it which may prove particularly useful.

Next up is Denver University's Russian Language and Literature web site. It looks as if there's a few useful resources on there although I haven't yet had a good look around. I have added both to my typelist although I'd already linked to Denver's alphabet page which, coincidentally, also has good coverage of the spelling rules.

I've been focussing on verbs of late, not sure exactly why, I just like verbs, but the roots are pretty hard to absorb and retain. My joy at finding that the past tense was so simple was fairly short lived because the chapter started going on about aspect and perfective and imperfective verbs at which point fatigue conveniently overwhelmed me. I'm left wondering why the past tense suffixes relate to gender so closely and how the language develops the depth of complexity offered by English or French with a much broader range of past tenses.

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