плотник (plotnik), noun = carpenter

After a break of a few weeks, I started studying Russian again today. This week’s lesson is about occupations. It provides the Russian words for various jobs, but unfortunately doesn’t tell you how to say “I am a …” or “I work as a …”. Such sentences will hopefully appear later in the course.

Other words for occupations include:

секретарь (sekretar’) = secretary
доктор (doktor) = doctor
медсестра (medsestra) = nurse
зубной врач (zubnoj vrač) = dentist
учитель (učitel’) = teacher
пекарь (pekar’) = baker
механик (mexanik) = mechanic
студент (student) = student

туфля (tuflja), noun = shoe

This week’s Russian lesson is about clothes and this word just appeals to me. It sounds a bit like “tooth fly” – my way of remembering it is to imagine my shoes being full of flies with big teeth. This is quite a strange image, but that helps it to stick in my memory.

I also like the Welsh word for shoe – esgid – it sounds like skid, so to remember it, I think of people skidding around in their shoes. The word for a horseshoe is pedol, which conjures up images of horses pedalling bicycles.

Anois tá mé ag dul níos mó Gaeilge a fhoghlaim (Time to learn some more Irish now).

подбородок (podborodok), noun = chin

For the past three months I’ve been learning Russian with Rosetta Stone. I study one lesson a week and spend about half an hour to an hour a day on it. This week’s lesson is about parts of the body and I really like the sound of the word for chin in Russian.

Rosetta Stone courses come a CD-ROM and are designed to teach you entirely through the medium of the language you’re studying. As far as I can tell, all Rosetta Stone courses have the same format – you start learning individual words, such man, woman, boy girl, dog, elephant, etc. Then you learn how to combine them to together in increasingly complex phrases and sentences. The idea is that you’re supposed to pick up the pronunciation and grammar as you go along. In the case of the Russian course, it doesn’t teach you the Cyrillic alphabet, so it’s a good thing I already knew it before starting the course.

Each lesson consists of a series of exercises that drill you in listening, reading, speaking and writing. You can go through the lessons at your own pace, let the program take you through them, or test yourself.

Level 1 of these courses includes 92 lessons, Level 2 has 118. I have Levels 1 & 2 of the Russian course, so if I continue studying at the rate of one lesson a week it will take me over four years to complete the course. By 2010 I should be fluent in Russian then!

One frustating thing I’m finding with this course is that it has yet to teach me any useful everyday phrase – things like “hello”, “how are you?”, “good bye”, etc. It is giving me a thorough grounding in the basic vocabulary though.

Has anybody managed to complete a Rosetta Stone course? Are you now fluent in the language you used it to study? What did you think of the course?

You can find more information about Rosetta Stone courses at: www.rosettastone.com