Okay, I'm finally doing this
I grew up around Russian speakers, and the language is almost as "familiar" to my ear as Hebrew and Arabic. In my mid teens I was capable of understanding basic conversational Russian, however most of that has faded away.
I've been doing the Penguin course for about a week now, and because I already knew so much, I think I'm making good progress. I'm up to chapter 10, but I admit that I've been a bit lazy about doing "extra" practice - I feel like I already know so much of the vocabulary and grammar that I kind of skim over it, when in reality I definitely DON'T know it as well as I think I do.
I've been using the following sites to practice my declension of nouns and adjectives in the cases/numbers/genders I've so far encountered:
http://www.practicerussian.com/Tests/Te ... tives.aspx
http://www.practicerussian.com/Tests/TestNouns.aspx
I find these both really amazing tools that I wish I had for other languages. Sometimes it doesn't work properly (for example: sometimes if you press "enter" on your keyboard instead of actually clicking the button, it gives you the wrong result), but it's really helping me to become more automatic in my knowledge of cases.
What is really tripping me up is genitive plurals (I know I'm joining a long list of people here ) and even just nominative plurals in the class that adds "-a". I definitely need a lot more practice there.
I sometimes also mix up the noun and adjective declensions, so I'm working really hard to practice as much as possible. When I sit and think about it, I nearly always get it right - but I want it to become faster and more automatic.
I do have some questions for now:
1. The pronunciation of я, е and о seem so irregular.
я:
I mean, in words like язык I hear it as "yezik" (which, thanks to hearing Russian so much as a child but never learning it properly, I assumed was the correct spelling of the word too!), and I can't quite predict when it is pronounced in this way. Sometimes I'm sure it's "ya", but then it's "ye" or "yi". How is it pronounced in яя, also?
е:
Sometimes it really sounds like "yi" rather than "ye". Also, "ее"?
о:
I know it's usually somewhere between an "a" and "e" in unstressed positions, but how do I really know? Is there any way to really get it? I mean, in ого it sometimes sounds like "ava" and other times I almost hear "eve" or something.
2. Sometimes I feel like ы is basically the same as и.
I know I'm probably wrong, but that's how I sometimes hear it. Then again, many of my friends are not formerly educated in Russian and only learned it through family.
3. I'm not this advanced with grammar yet, but I'm curious: how do you decline adjectives and nouns when there are two potential cases involved? Eg: "I am at my older brother's big house". Which case is involved? Genitive? Prepositional?
4. This is probably stupid, but if I'm not mistaken, the feminine singular genitive declension of nouns is the same as the nominative plural. Does this ever cause problems?
Thanks in advance to anybody who can answer these questions, and anybody who wishes to help/encourage me
I'm not confident enough yet to write sentences, but I'd love some private assistance from any Unilangers