title

As many of you know my husband and I are in the process of adopting a child overseas. The country we are adopting from is Kazakhstan. We feel we should know some basic Russian so we can hopefully communicate with some of the Officials we meet along the way. We will have an interpreter with us but it would still be nice to be able say some things to them in Russian. We want to make a good impression!!

My husband ordered some CD’s which came with 2 books. I started listening to the first CD yesterday as I was doing my walk. It helped hearing how to pronounce the words but what I need is to be able to see the word/s spelled out phonetically. The books that came with the CD’s does not do this. When I think I am pronouncing it correctly, I find out I’m not because some consonants are silent or pronounced differently depending on where they fall in the word. The letter “R” is going to be a problem for me because I have trouble rolling the “R”’s with my tongue. Sometimes I can do it, other times I can’t. I’ve also noticed that there are different ways of saying something (informal vs formal). Then there are stressed syllables vs non stressed. I had no idea how hard this is going to be.

I went to Barnes & Noble yesterday to see if I can find any books that sound out the words phonetically. There were more CD’s but not many books in what I was looking for. I guess Russian is a language not many people want to learn. I ended up buying “Russian Phrases for Dummies”. That’s definitely me right now

So I’m thinking to help me along, I would write up flash cards with the Russian word written out phonetically on one side and the other side the English word and also do the same thing for sayings. I can then practice them everyday and hopefully by the end of 4 months I’ll feel comfortable speaking Russian.

If anyone has any other ideas to help me with learning the language, I’d appreciate it.

Do svidaniya!!!