Word of the day – подбородок

By Simon

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

4 thoughts on “Word of the day – подбородок”

  1. to make it easier to remember ‘podborodok’ – ‘pod’ is ‘under’, ‘boroda’ is ‘beard’. So it’s something under the beard:)

  2. What does it say about the old Russian culture that the word for “chin” means “under the beard” ? : )

  3. Hi. I used Rosetta Stone for an independant study course for Hebrew at my university last quarter. It helped a lot with learning vocabulary (sometimes a little strange, like ‘clown’) but I got my conversation from talking with Hebrew speakers. I’m nowhere near fluent, but it’s nice to know I know words like לובש (to wear).

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