week 3 of learning Russian, a real time experiment on Sunday evening I decided to make the jump and did a video lesson on italki with a very friendly Russian girl. Just so you know the ENTIRETY of my Russian vocabulary is 200 words. Well, 210, the last ten were from a word list called "swearing & dirty words" from Memrise.com which I don't think i'm gonna use any time soon. Anyway, the lesson was a lovely experience in that it was a truely Zero-to-One moment. Learning Japanese was not 0-to-1 for me coming from a Chinese background, but this time was different as this was the very time I talked to a native Russian speaker. I learnt a few things which may or may not help me in the long run but i'll write it down to remind myself before I forget. 1. Yes and No and your facial expression can convey much more info than you'd expect, which confirms a face to face or video communication is much more efficient. 2. there seems to be no "a" and "the" in Russian, verbs and nouns change all the time for gender and tenses but there's actually not that much difference in the pronunciation much of the time unless you are really picky. which means I'm gonna postpone this area of the grammar until as late as possible. 3. by far the most interesting detail for me, whereas in English "a hot girl" and "hot food" share a sensuous compatibility in its linguistic meaning, in Russia apparently when you describe food as "острой" and someone as "острый", the shared similarity seems more to do with a sense of "sharpness" rather than a sense of energy level. From this one incident the hypothesis is that Russian has a more primal kinetic action feel to it than English. Does it mean then Russian has much more colourful and potent Verbs and less so for adjectives? Just a random thought. cheers.