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

[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.