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[alternakittyn.livejournal.com]

Hi there! I'm new to the community and I thought I'd introduce myself. My name's Carolee and I just started trying to learn Russian. I'm doing this because my boyfriend was born in Kiev and his whole family speaks Russian. He and I are living together and have plans to buy a house so I figured it's time to learn the language!

Right now, I'm learning with the aid of the Pimsleur Beginning Russian CDs, Russian in 10 Minutes a Day (which I liked because it had phonetic pronunciations and Schaum's Outline of Russian Grammer. However, I've encountered a hurtle that I'm having some trouble getting over.

The biggest problem I'm having right now is learning cyrillic. For some reason, the way the two books present cyrillic (not very well!) makes it really hard for me to wrap my brain around it. How did you all learn? Ideally, I'd like to get a program to quiz me (it's how I learned hiragana and katakana when I learned Japanese years ago). Does anyone know of one?

Once I know enough to make actual conversation, my boyfriend and I are going to switch over to speaking as much Russian as we can to help me learn more. Any other tips for a real true beginner?