Russian-English lessons exchange?

[oi3u45hj09f3.livejournal.com]

Hi,

Would anyone living in the south bay area, California, be interested in exchanging Russian conversation lessons for English conversation lessons :)?

I'm a Russian native speaker, so I can easily help you with your homework, speak Russian with you, etc. I'm not sure I'll be able to explain all the "formal" language rules to you, as it's been long since I studied them.
In exchange I'd like to practice my conversational English with a native English speaker.

Interested, anyone?

Comments

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you really really want to be useful and have good answers to the complex questions that you'll inevitably get and not just blank looks or "um, I dunno, maybe...", by all means, get yourself a book on the Russian grammar and study it first. You and your student will appreciate that. It's a huge difference between just knowing a language natively and that plus being able to systematically explain the explainable and logical in a structured way and point at the irregular and illogical things that must be memorized through a series of exercises. I've always questioned in English more than my teachers could explain because they never went that deep (due to various constraints) or just didn't care enough to do a diligent work. I wish they could explain all the regular stuff structurally with rules without wasting much of their and my time and also provide me with known irregular patterns. Most of them did a so-so job with the regular stuff and all the irregular stuff was essentially left as an exercise to me and beyond the scope of the class. Try to be better. :)

[ulvesang.livejournal.com]

to be fair, even experts on english still all can't agree on exactly why english is the way it is...

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

It's OK if there's no commonly accepted logical explanation or universal rule to this and that. But that doesn't, however, allow one to leave such a thing out of the course as if it never existed or there was nothing at all to say about it. That's what I mean, if you can't explain something exceptional that doesn't fit into a general model or conforms to some rule, be diligent in providing this information:
- this is an exception to this and that, no explanation or agreement exist on why this is so
- this same exception happens in such and such situations, sentences and words, here's a an elaborate list of them (OK, if not complete, some references could be mentioned for further study)
I remember I'd ask many times why the tense I used in a sentence was deemed to be inappropriate and the teacher would rarely be able to explain it or simply say "yeah, you know, in this sort of sentence the appropriate tense is this, you need to memorize it, and by the way, there're other kinds of sentences where this happens, for example,..." The same thing happened with the articles (the wrong phone number, the hospital, etc), word stress (an object vs to object, machine, etc), wildly variable pronunciation of letters and their combinations dependent on words (e.g. meat/great/weapon/caveat, polite/police, and many many more), irregular word forms (irregular plurals of nouns, irregular verbs), prepositions (e.g. in vs on, for vs to, in vs at). Eventually, when one faces the language for real (not just at school but at work and abroad), they realize how much was left untold, how much went wrong simply because not enough explanation and exception examples were provided. Sometimes they literally have to unlearn things they assumed were right. English has enough exceptions to be taught with them in mind. I believe so is Russian. A native speaker can often and easily spot a mistake once it's made, but it's an entirely different thing to prevent it from happening by explaining the regular and explainable and telling the exceptions. This is why I'm saying that to teach a language it's not enough to know it by heart. It's necessary to be consciously aware of most the language details. In the beginning this can be attained by studying (well, maybe just thoroughly reviewing) the language one more time. Then the ongoing work and experience will help you remain aware, actualized.

[rjray.livejournal.com]

I'm currently taking private tutoring in Russian from a person who's a native speaker and former French language professor from Uzbekistan. While this has been easier to do than commit to a college course, it's also been somewhat slow-going. I seem to be doing alright, it just gets frustrating sometime, to not be able to express more complex thoughts in Russian. I'm essentially back to a first-grade reading/writing level :-). It's my own fault for waiting until I'm 39 to learn my first foreign language...

Myngle.com

[langyashka.livejournal.com]

If you are interested in finding a teacher of Russian and you can also teach English yourself, then a good place will probably be www.myngle.com. They are launching the platfom in December this year, so you will be able to study Russian with e.g. native speakers from Russia and you can also leverage your own language skills by teaching someone else. It's looking really great, with Skype and online tools like live whiteboard, podcasts, home assignments, etc. And it's a free market for students and teachers/schools so you can pick your own teacher/method. A good spot to keep an eye on.