Hi, everyone...

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I'm a Californian 15-year-old homeschooled high-school student (sophomore, I guess, although I'm on break), and I've been trying to learn Russian for a while now... still having problems with Cyrillic that discourage me when I try to get further in.

Basically, I went by the method of buying a Russian dictionary and a Russian grammar reference... and then looking stuff up online. It works okay (for me), but there are some things left unaddressed.

Mmkay. So I have two main questions:

The first is on the letter "Ы." How exactly is it pronounced? A number of websites I've visited say that it's 'somewhere between the u from put and the i from pit.' Which really doesn't make much sense to me at all. One thing that I've heard is that it's just like the i from pit... but then how does "ый" work?

The second question is on the aspect of the verb. None of the people I have (as of yet) spoken with about Russian are native speakers of English... so they can't really explain it. By the aspect, I mean the whole perfective/imperfective thing (i.e. the difference between прочитать and читать).

Any help here would be much appreciated.
Спасибо.

[EDIT: Thanks for your help, everyone. :)]

Comments

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm going to look into getting the Pimsleur Russian. As for the contrived dialogues... well, isn't that the way with most language tapes? :)