Accents in BYKI Russian?

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Druzia,

I was wondering if some native speakers of Russian could say whether the Russian instructors in the BYKI program have good accents or not? http://www.byki.com

Do they have the proper accent, or do they have some other accent?

Spaciba.

bhv

Comments

[ex-roumor.livejournal.com]

I downloaded but it didnt work however.
so i tried this one http://www.byki.com/reply_w_3.pl?fi=NnDF172244

sounds ok. I wouldnt say its a real-life accent. something makes it a bit artificial. But words are pronounced correct and its the official moscow accent

[ex-roumor.livejournal.com]

oh ! man i just tried program itself. o_O omg1
Man's voice and accent is ok but the woman's is awfull.

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Thanks Roumor.

Does the woman sound like an American, or have a strong regional accent or what?

I listened carefully to the web link above and then to the software I downloaded and I think there
were two different female instructors doing the recordings.

[ex-roumor.livejournal.com]

2nd woman sounds like russian. and they all are definitely russians but something wrong about her intonation. its realy not common to hear something like that in a real life.

good luck with russian, bhv )

[vargtimmen.livejournal.com]

I would very strongly warn you against using anything from Transparent Language, they are scam artists. Their software is always a complete joke, typically a 10-page complex piece of writing that's read aloud to you.

I can't recommend Rosetta Stone enough, as a supplement (not replacement) for textbook or private instruction.

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip on Transparent Language.

There is an amazing amount of junk materials out there in the language learning world. Most of them vary between being worthless and worse than worthless. When a customer fails to learn the language due to the lousy materials the teachers and suppliers of the materials just say, "Well maybe you don't have a language aptitude." Nonsense. Every healthy human has a language aptitude that varies between good and incredibly good, however there are some chimpanzees (the real kind in the zoo) that are known to have difficulty learning language.

I've had good luck with Pimsleur and I highly recommend their programs on CD's. However I've completed all three programs and I'm a long way from fluent. I don't think Rosetta Stone is good for beginning students because they just start you out with a list of words. Believe me, learning a list of words is not the same thing as learning a language. I met a guy in Ukraine who knew maybe 2000 English words, but he still couldn't speak English.

I tried Rosetta Stone once and gave up when they wanted me to learn to learn to say, "The Boy is Under the Ball" Malchik Putmechom. (if I recall correctly). I figured I could go a very long time without needing to know that. I know this is their attempt to teach grammar, but you don't need grammar either until you can speak fairly well.

Having said all that, I can now carry on a simple conversation in Russian and I sure do need to learn a lot more words. I also suppose that learning grammar at this point wouldn't be too bad.
Maybe I should buy Rosetta Stone again and endure the pain and boredom.

Can't one of you language gurus out there figure out a way to make language learning really fun? I'm thinking that I may have to develop my own language learning program, just so I can learn it and have it be a lot more fun!

[vargtimmen.livejournal.com]

Rosetta isn't just a list of words, it teaches you immersively by showing you different configurations of Swadesh List-type words. Children learn by doing this sort of play with configurations in their heads. Admittedly it isn't a technique that works for everyone; my wife needs to get 100% on everything and when she makes the mistakes one needs to make to learn anything she gets extremely frustrated. But for me it's easier to pick up a sort of intuition about how to decline words than to learn the rules and think back on which rules apply every time you try to formulate a sentence. For a single prepositional phrase you have to think of which case it should be in, what nouns of that gender do in that case, what adjectives modifying nouns of that gender do in that case, and whether the resultant words are affected by the 5 and 7 letter spelling rules. The only way to be good at a language is to be able to think in it, for your brain to know the rules instead of you. With some languages like Chinese, simply translating English words into Chinese words is not an option, you need to actually formulate the sentences thinking in a Chinese thought pattern.

[bhv.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. Thank you.

Yes we do need to make mistakes in order to learn. One thing that has really helped me is that I have had a good attitude about learning, and I have made my necessary mistakes with great enthusiasm!

My first attempts at saying hello in Russian , Здравствулте, were hillarious to me and even more so to any native speakers who happened to be listening.

Rosetta stone may eventually become something other than a list of words, however it does START with a list of words and in my opinion that's not the best way to start. However nowit might be right for me.

I completely agree that the rules have to be in your brain at some low level. Knowing grammar rules at the conscious level will help you pass a test in a classroom, but may not do much good when you need to compose some complex thought.

I'm glad you have had good sucess with Rosetta Stone. Are there any other language learning tools that you also think are great?

[vargtimmen.livejournal.com]

TalkNow! products are okay for pronunciation and vocabulary building, but there really is no software as of yet that will teach you a language. If it weren't illegal I'd tell you to download it off mininova.org for free since it's not worth the retail price. Honestly, the best way to learn a language at this point is to play a game you know really well, but a foreign language version of it. I did this with "The Secret of Monkey Island" in Spanish. When you press a button with a verb written on it, you see the direct consequences of your actions, like an child saying "milk" and seeing what happens whenever they say milk. I've been wanting to create a game on this same principle, where you have to comprehend the natives in order to progress in the game, but I don't have a lot of time to do it and AGS (what I want to build it in) doesn't support Unicode. Which can be worked around but wow what a major pain in the ass. I'd have to create special fonts, and transliterate languages like Hindi and Japanese when I'd prefer to write with both transliterated and original text. (That's another thing nice about Rosetta Stone, you learn the Chinese logographs without actively trying to memorize them. Just seeing the pinyin syllable with the logograph creates an unconscious association between them)

BTW

[lantse.livejournal.com]

Just yesterday I've got the Rosetta Stone multilanguage programm and I was really shoked by the pronunciation and accent of the Russian speakers (especially the intonation). It is very unnatural. My mother says they sound like aliens who try to classify what they see on Earth for the first time. No one would say in Russian about a little girl and a fish "Один человек и одно животное"!!!

Re: BTW

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Thanks Lantse,


Rosetta stone has written software that takes almost every language in the world and matches it up with the same set of photos. The trouble is that it is sometimes hard to know if they are teaching you the world for girl or person. I gave up on Rosetta Stone when I was told to learn the phrase, Malchik put mechom, and I figured I could go a long time without needing to say the boy was under the ball.

When the pictures were taken in Virginia USA and intended to apply to every language in the world, you can get some truly strange results. Language learning photos really should be culturally specific.

Did you think that the speakers were not native speakers of Russian, or were they simply being told to say a phrase that was truly strange to native speakers of Russian?

[oryx_and_crake]

you don't need grammar either until you can speak fairly well
---
Wrong. In Russian you will not be able to construct even a simple sentence unless you know the system of cases, the principles on which the sentences are structured etc. And that's grammar. Without grammar, the only thing you can do is learn by heart a few phrases, as in a phrasebook, but this does not mean you are able to speak at all, forget about "fairly well" .

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

You don't want to learn lists of words, but rote learning phrases is really the same as learning words, you've just taken your little words and replaced them with really big ones. I think instead of not needing grammar until you can speak well, you can't speak well until you know grammar. A confusion of cause and effect perhaps? :P So I think you should learn some grammar, but not necessarily by memorising "The boy is under the ball" (your comment on that, by the way, made me laugh out loud). Instead try playing with the sentence, like if the ball was under the boy, how would the cases change? What if the boy was a girl, or the ball was a book, what if the boy WAS under the ball but isn't anymore, etc.

If you want a *fun* way to learn, well, I can't in good conscience recommend this to you if you need to learn Russian quickly or correctly, but I learned pretty much all my Russian off Soviet propaganda posters, rock music and Wikipedia. If you do things this way you're likely to learn everything wrong the first time round and then have to relearn it, and you also tend to pick up some pretty funny ideas, like thinking хочу and хотел are different verbs. But you realise where you went wrong eventually and I think it gives you a more solid understanding because now you also know what not to do, but if you need to look intelligent at a meeting this is not for you ;). It is pretty damn fun though.

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Thanks miconazole and orxy_and_crake too.

Fun is what this is about for me. Fun learning and fun communication with interesting people and there are many interesting people in Russia. While I do want to become fluent, the journey to fluency is one of the biggest rewards. If I have any important meetings to attend don't worry, I will hire a translator.

I like the idea of studying old propaganda posters, music and Wikipedia. Sounds hilarious if done with the right attitude and a sense of humor.

I have had a friend of mine take several simple songs by Igor Krutoy and turn them into quite good language lessons. First she transcribes the song into Russian a line at a time. Since these songs are like poetry, this is easy.

Next she does a literal word by word translation into English below the Russian. Each word is liked to a file that carefully and slowly teaches you how to say that word. Then there is another line with the correct literary translation so it makes sense.

Then there is a version of the phrase that is linked to an audio file with her reading the sentence in the way a teacher would read a sentence, clearly and distinctly.

These lessons are really quite fun to study with, but it takes her a couple of hours to make a lesson for a four minute song, so she has only done three of these for me.

By the way, I do not consciously know the system of cases, I consciously know only one grammatical rule, but I can converse well enough to get directions, arrange meetings, check into a hotel, make polite conversation about where I'm from and what I do for a living, ask about their family. I DO run out of vocabulary, and I cannot yet converse about complex subjects. I would call that speaking fairly well. If you disagree, I respect your opinion.

I'm not claiming to be fluent, I certainly am NOT fluent, and I suppose that I will now have to break down and learn some grammar rules, but I didn't start with them and my method has worked well for me so far.

By the way, I find learning a phrase to be no more difficult than learning a word. I don't know why this should be the case and I am not sure if this is true for most people, however it does seem to be true for me.

[miconazole.livejournal.com]

You sound like you do speak pretty well, though without grammar you probably can't speak as flexibly as you could. You have a great starting point though in that you can take what you *can* say and start analysing it. With any luck you'll have already been exposed to a lot of the case and tense endings and studying grammar will just make everything fall into place.

As for the music thing, you can do that yourself too, there's a lot you can learn just by observing. Listening to music while reading the lyrics is a good way to study pronunciation, especially vowel reduction, and you can look up words that come up frequently and see where they occur in other songs and look at how their usage changes them. But if you learn like this you're on your own so it helps to have a certain pioneer spirit/obsessiveness. By the way, Russmus.net has a pretty good number of song translations and Russian mp3s are, how shall we say, astonishingly easy to find on the net. I recommend Kino (http://russmus.net/band.jsp?band=Kino) for songs that are somehow great while being structured like a lessons from a reader. Mavra's translations can get kind of creative though, so be careful.

And oh yeah, I don't doubt that learning phrases is easy, but there aren't a whole lot of situations where you can just use a single phrase as-is. If you take it apart and learn to modify even a part of the phrase then it becomes suddenly more useful. When I studied French in high school it was all either rote learning phrases or memorizing verb tables. I stuck with it beause I liked French, but at the end of it I was like "Screw this, I'm not doing THAT again." So I can understand your desire not to spend all your time memorising, but not so much the speaking in phrases. It's better to try to learn a language as freely as possible, I think.

[vargtimmen.livejournal.com]

For me it's a lot easier to start with small components, and it's impossible to remember phrases if I don't understand how they're composed. Memorising words like шарикоподшипниковый quickly becomes tiresome if you can't break it down into the component morphemes шар-ик-о-под-шип-ник-ов-ый. It's easier to remember Adios and Adieu if you know they mean "To God", and it's easier to remember what are for a learner, at first, the arbitrary strings of letters "hasta luego/mañana/la vista" if he knows what means what. If he doesn't know "hasta" means until, he might assume it means "see you".

[bhv.livejournal.com]

Hi Vargtimmen,

>It's easier to remember Adios and Adieu if you know they mean "To God", and it's easier to remember >what are for a learner, at first, the arbitrary strings of letters "hasta luego/mañana/la vista" if he knows >what means what. If he doesn't know "hasta" means until, he might assume it means "see you".

Wow that's very insightful. When I try to learn a phrase I do try to learn what the individual parts literally mean and what the overall phrase means.