What information do you memorize for verbs or adjectives?

[blackxlupin.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone,

I've been learning Russian for a few months now, and I'd like to start learning vocabulary more efficiently. I'd really appreciate input from more experienced learners/speakers on these questions:

1) Do you memorize the infinitive stem for every verb you learn so as to be able to form the past tense and the imperative?

2) When you learn adjectives, do you find it necessary or useful to memorize the short forms and/or comparatives (so you know which syllable is stressed)?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

Dude I don't know; maybe I wasn't the most efficient learner ever, but I don't really understand what you're asking. Like, of course you have to know the infintive form of the verb. And you have to know the comparative and short form, obviously, but there's not much variations or all that many exceptions in terms of how they are formed. Russian is very systematic.

The most efficient way to learn vocabularly, IMO, isn't lists and flash cards. I would say read as much as you can, watch as many movies etc. as you can, take every possible opportunity that presents itself to you to speak with a native speaker. I think you'll get a feeling for stress and things in a better way than making lists and quizzing yourself or something. My brain remembers better when a friend explains something to me, and the way that I hear other people stress things, than me just writing things down and putting a stress mark somewhere.

[ingwall.livejournal.com]

I absolutely agree. Reading is the very best way to boost your vocabulary. There are a bunch of pretty good Russian audio books out nowadays, so that would be of help as well.

[blackxlupin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your reply!

What I meant specifically was this: usually with Romance languages, there's gender to memorize. So people find it helpful not to learn "vache = cow" but rather "une vache = cow," because that way, you're sure to remember the gender. And I was wondering if anybody did anything like that with Russian. For instance, I now memorize nouns with their stress patterns (provided they're regular), because a friend of mine who's studing to be a Russian translator told me this would be a good idea.

Of course vocabulary is best learned in context, but Russian books and texts are much easier for me to get my hands on (I'm strapped for cash at the moment) than Russian audio is. The problem is, as I found when learning English, stress is incredibly difficult to correct later on. When you've mispronounced a word for months or years on end, it's so deeply ingrained that you'll always be confused as to where to put the stress. At least that's what happens with me, and I really want to avoid that as much as possible with Russian.

So basically, is there any reliable way to tell from тесный where the stress goes on тесен, тесна, тесно and тесны ? Or is it simply more efficient to memorize "тéсный - тéсен тесна́ тéсно тесны́" instead of just "тесный" ?

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

Whatever works for you, I guess. Also you're studying Russian; sign up for vkontakte and rutracker.org and pirate audio and video to your heart's content. Money ain't no thing.

I'm not a good memorizer with lists; I have to think instead what, say, "мир тесен" sounds like. If you really want to improve your vocabulary, there's a little cheap book of Russian roots/suffixes/prefixes: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0893570524/ref=mp_s_a_2?qid=1335341957&sr=8-2 Concentrate on memorizing THESE at this point in your Russian studies, rather than individual words and stress changes.

[blackxlupin.livejournal.com]

Wow, I feel like I hit the jackpot of useful replies. Thank you so much!

[malinguo.livejournal.com]

There isn't a reliable way to tell where stress will be on the short forms of adjectives. I recommend downloading an electronic version of Zaliznjak's dictionary paradigms. If you like memorizing or looking up entire paradigms, that's a decent source. Here is your link.

http://www.speakrus.ru/dict/all_forms.rar

Alternatively, you can look up individual words here, and you get paradigms with stress marked:

http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/morphque.cgi?flags=endnnnn

For verbs, there are some generalizations about past tense and imperative formation based on conjugations, but again, these are violable. The Zaliznjak paradigms give you the whole list if you want to see all the forms.

The good news is that for close to 90% of the words in the language, stress is fixed in inflectional paradigms. The bad news is that irregular words tend to be used with somewhat higher frequency. So your best chance of really internalizing the stuff is to get a lot of exposure to spoken Russian. I support the audiobook suggestion; they are not hard to find.

(NB: I am not a foreign learner of Russian but a native speaker. I study the morphophonology though.)

[blackxlupin.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, this looks incredibly helpful.

[malinguo.livejournal.com]

No problem. Oh, there is actually an interesting shift going on in Russian right now, whereby many of the irregular verbs of the -e- conjugation class (e.g., maxátʲ `to wave', dremátʲ `to dream, snooze', and klíkatʲ ̩`to call') are undergoing a shift in the direction of regularity. Since variation between, say, "maʃú" and "maxáju" is fairly acceptable and attested in spoken Russian, you can get away with using the leveled, regular forms (i.e., maxaju, maxajeʃ, maxajuʃʃʲij, etc.)

http://www.hum.uit.no/a/nesset/Janda,%20Nesset%20and%20Baayen%202010%20offprint%202.pdf
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/nesset/Nesset&Janda%20Paradigm%20structure%20published%20kopi.pdf

[http://users.livejournal.com/kaede_/]

Since variation between, say, "maʃú" and "maxáju"

I always wondered, is there any difference between these forms?
Our Russian school teacher said, that the form 'махаю' is uncorrect or vernacular, but I hear this form considerably more often, and those from whom I hear it do not seem to be not enough educated people.

[malinguo.livejournal.com]

The difference is precisely that--the first form is more prescriptively correct, and the second one is what people often say in normal conversation. If you want to sound "correct", use the first form. The articles I linked discuss the different rates at which this change has been spreading throughout the paradigm. To me, "maʃú" is the preferred form, but I don't have nearly as strong a preference between máʃuʃʃʲij and maxájuʃʃʲij.

The regularized forms with the max- stem have the added advantage of having fixed stress on the theme vowel -a-, which should make them easier to memorize for a foreign learner.

[olydiagron.livejournal.com]

Hi, I started studying Russian when I was an adult, and I also memorize a lot.
My only advice is to not memorize words independently, but always combination of words or whole sentences. Lyrics and lines from movies. And if you are studying in class with a textbook, combine the words in the vocabulary list.
It works for me.