week 5 of learning Russian, a real time experiment so work caught up, and completely wasted week 4. have done a few sessions through italki and things are traveling well on that front, it really shows how different teachers use different strategies to teach you, and I found that, personally, so far, going through simple phrases with a little stress on grammar is nice, looking at textbooks and trying to remember six different variations of the same verb is not. memrise word count is 300. which means that my basic vocabulary coverage is about 60% in terms of word count and I will spend the coming weeks revising them, and put word expansion on a second priority this way. I'll try to get some cognates remembered while i'm at it. So the next phase of vocabulary acquisition would have to be topic specific. Before I can think of anything else I will try to hang on to some of the online papers for inspirations, phrases and words specific. Listening wise I find LingQ.com a great source of read materials with texts.

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.

most efficient way today to learn Chinese good day guys. For another day of bad ass language learning, may the force be with you. i got asked this question a few times by friends recently who want to learn a bit of chinese, mostly for business reasons, and find that as one advances from the "how are you"s to the more complicated vocabulary and expressions, it's a bit challenging. my advice is simple, try to read articles that are very short and try to read as many of them as possible. So basically, read Twitter. Or, the chinese version, WEIBO.com The thing with Weibo as it is with Twitter is that the language usually borders between written and colloquial, and as the twits at a certain time usually circles around several trending topics, that's just a super efficient way to get exposed asap. for linguistic geeks: since the structure of the chinese language is additive, meaning you express future tense or past tense not by changing the verb itself but by adding additional words to it, weibo would be beneficial for its compact language use, often stripped of unnecessary decorative words to the bare minimum for idea expression. good luck.

week 2 of learning Russian, a real time experiment hi everyone, this serves a journal of my study experiences thus far. Please share your experiences as i'm a complete noob. "there's no way and no point in learning Russian, not at your age." says my friend. the truth is the recent news exposure of the region has brought me more interests into the area than ever before. And you really can't say no to a language in which Water and Vodka spells so similar. Other than the perspective of facing years and years of hard practise, however, I'm into the school of thought that language learning should always be simple. Hard, demanding, but simple. Week 1: I spent the whole of week one researching on methods and materials on learning Russian, of which Italki is one, as well as learning the cyrillic and pronunciation basics. Week 2: I decided to learn the basic vocabulary of Russia with a simple ANKI card system, didn't really stick as it was really boring. Wasted three days. Switched to Memrise. So far so good. The 4 hour body guy has a lot of good notes about deconstructing the language into small pieces for digestion, as well as the 3months to fluency guy. Sounds like a plan. So far I have covered 150 words on the frequency list, which should cover about 50% of the written vocabulary in Russian, things like it, that, who, what. Now to fill in the blanks in between. looking forward to Week 3: a few things planned ahead include: Finish the top 300-500 words memorisation asap, and move on to the Russian Cognates, words like STUDENT, that are basically English pronounced in Russian cyrillic, which may not be very cool but at this stage very fast way to expand the vocabulary. Realistically this should take me all week. the next step would be to find a topic, in which there is plenty of information easily available as well as something that's very interesting, and hopefully not too complicated.In that way I can find some words with some actual meanings to fill in the blanks between "i" and "you". I have a week to find that.