Russian language teaching methods for Spanish?

[mia-l.livejournal.com]

Dear friends! :)

I’ve got a friend of mine and we are in the same year as translator/interpreter/teacher at the University.
We are leaning English as the first language and my friend’s second language is Spanish. As she has her Spanish friend who wants to learn Russian with her help, she suddenly realized that she had some difficulty explaining to him some Russian rules and words and phrases usage. Could you help me, please, and give me advice where she can find some useful information regarding learning Russian as a foreign language? Maybe you know some very good links in the Internet or some good books? And my question is: “Is there a difference between the Russian language teaching methods for Spanish or for instance for German?

Thanks in advance! :)

Comments

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

I don't think there should be a noticeable difference between teaching Russian to a Spanish or a German.
Some outstanding characteristics of Russian which you may compare to Spanish and German/English:
- Russian is inflected: nouns, adjectives and verbs (to a lesser degree) change as change the person, gender and count
- there're 6+ cases in Russian which make it hard to master. These cases add yet another degree of change in nouns and adjectives
- word order is very relaxed thanks to the cases, which denote the subject and objects in a sentence
- there're no articles in Russian, it all comes from the context or possessive adjectives
- there're 3 genders in Russian (English: 0, Spanish: 2)
- there're reflexive verbs in Russian (Spanish has them, English doesn't, I don't know if German does)
- as usual, there're some quirks in tenses and verb conjugations (Russian verbs can be imperfective and perfective, it's a pain to get it right which one to use and how to make one form given the other)
- Russian verbs may have prefixes which alter the meaning of the base verb to something different, sometimes very different and there doesn't seem to be a good set of rules as to which prefix means what, it's probably on the verb by verb basis and needs to be memorized (pretty much like English phrasal verbs: get up, get away, get back, get out, etc)
- there're very few rules on where the stress should be in a word and it's almost never visualized in writing (like English, unlike Spanish) and the stress changes as the word changes its form. I'd consider this to be the most complicated part after the grammar, because you just have to listen a lot and memorize a lot to get it right
- there're a lot of orthographic and punctuation rules
- there are a number of irregular words that are spelt differently compared to seemingly similar regular words
- the sounds of Russian are slightly different compared to English and Spanish (not sure German). A lot is common with English, but not everything and Spanish sounds would probably be more like a big subset of those, that is, more sounds are missing in Spanish.

P.S. If the friend is truly interested in the language exchange (Spanish<->Russian) let me know. I've been unable to find anybody truly devoted to the studies.

[crimeanelf.livejournal.com]

:) As for the genders, I think Russian and Spanish have the same amount: Spanish have two in singular and two in plural, while Russian have three in singular and one in plural.

[bokh.livejournal.com]

Going the opposite way (i.e. learning Spanish over native Russian) I was under impression that:

- vocabulary-wise Spanish is closer to Russian than English is - that is, I could guess the meaning of new Spanish words more often than my English-native classmates (or maybe I'm just better at guessing O_o)

- culturally again, Spanish speakers are much closer to Russians than English speakers. Superstitions, traditions, folk remedies etc. are often remarkably similar. I think these similarities are a consequence of the Orthodox and Catholic churches being quite similar, too - but that is just my layman opinion.

*English and Spanish referred to above are those spoken in the Americas. YMMV ;)

[crimeanelf.livejournal.com]

My boyfriend is Spanish and he's learning Russian (after English and German) through an English textbook. I have to admit the textbook works really well, however, often he says he does easily understand certain features because they exists in Spanish or German. Like reflexive verbs or dative case.