September 02, 2013

9 Ways to Brush up Your Russian


9 Ways to Brush up Your Russian

Has your college Russian gotten a bit rusty? Looking for some fun, useful, but most important effective ways to brush up on your Russian? The internet is here to help! 

Sure, in an ideal world, you would set up a weekly chat over кофе or чай with a local Russian. But that can be hard to pull off and even harder to maintain. So, barring that, here are a few online resources to help dust off your rusty Russian and/or pump a bit of new life into it.

  1. Ekho Moskvy. This great radio station offers the ability to listen to its programming online, with the all important bonus that most programs feature full transcripts. It's a great way to recharge your listening comprehension. Sure, you still need to look up the Russian, but it sure helps when you can read what you are hearing. Start by exploring their interview section.
  2. Dozhd television also offers transcripts for some of its talk programs.
  3. TV Tsentr, the television station overseen by the Moscow City Government, offers transcripts for their news videos.
  4. Political ads. No transcripts here, but the videos from political campaigns stretching back to the mid-1990s are a great test of your comprehension, plus a great way to walk down memory lane. 
  5. Audio Books. Listen to Собачье сердце while driving to work, or Dostoyevsky while you work out. These books are all free to download and listen on your MP3 player, in iTunes, etc. Pick up a copy of the print version of a work at an online bookstore (ruskniga.com or vasha-kniga.com are two recommended sources) or find the text at Maxim Moshkov's lib.ru and you can read along (not while driving, of course). Our link above is to the classics page, but book-tracker has all sorts of other books including detective novels, humor, science, foreign lit, etc.
  6. Podcasts. Podcast programs are great to listen to while driving, jogging, walking, sleeping, whatever. We have not found wonderful riches here, but there are a few worth exploring, depending on how advance you are: RussianPod 101 (not to be confused with RusPod), Master Rusian and Lingq, some of which we have written about before. Lingq's podcasts of Anna and Andrei's conversations are fun.
  7. YouTube Video language courses. We have yet to find anything stellar in the realm of free videos for intermediate and advanced users (most lessons seemed to be geared toward beginning users), but there is plenty that is decent and free . A few decent alternatives include Russian Plus, Fun Russian, and Alrus.
  8. Movies, movies, movies. Once your language reaches intermediate comprehension and conversation level, you need to dive in and start watching Russian movies. They are an amazing source of cultural knowledge and awareness. And the best thing is that many of the classics are now available free online. Russian Remote offers free access to films, documentaries, video clips and more. And MosFilm has begun putting much of its film archive up online for free viewing.
  9. Music. Finally, load up some Russian music into your iPod and start listening. Recommended: Vysotsky, Galich, Okudzhava and Grenbenshchikov, all of whom are now readily available on iTunes. Also recommended for language learners: Timur Shaov. Meanwhile, you can of course also stream many Russian radio stations live, and watch Russian music videos online. 

 

This is a far from comprehensive list, but hopefully a good place to start your linguistic brush-up. Of course, if you have any suggestions or corrections, please pass them along!

Special thanks are due to the ever-resourceful participants of the SEELANGS Slavic languages list for some of the ideas shared above. 

Photo credit: HNumus.

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Some of Our Books

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The Frogs Who Begged for a Tsar (bilingual)

The fables of Ivan Krylov are rich fonts of Russian cultural wisdom and experience – reading and understanding them is vital to grasping the Russian worldview. This new edition of 62 of Krylov’s tales presents them side-by-side in English and Russian. The wonderfully lyrical translations by Lydia Razran Stone are accompanied by original, whimsical color illustrations by Katya Korobkina.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Chekhov Bilingual

Chekhov Bilingual

Some of Chekhov's most beloved stories, with English and accented Russian on facing pages throughout. 
Okudzhava Bilingual

Okudzhava Bilingual

Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards. 
Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Stargorod is a mid-sized provincial city that exists only in Russian metaphorical space. It has its roots in Gogol, and Ilf and Petrov, and is a place far from Moscow, but close to Russian hearts. It is a place of mystery and normality, of provincial innocence and Black Earth wisdom. Strange, inexplicable things happen in Stargorod. So do good things. And bad things. A lot like life everywhere, one might say. Only with a heavy dose of vodka, longing and mystery.
White Magic

White Magic

The thirteen tales in this volume – all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century – contain a fair dose of magic and mysticism, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
A Taste of Chekhov

A Taste of Chekhov

This compact volume is an introduction to the works of Chekhov the master storyteller, via nine stories spanning the last twenty years of his life.
At the Circus (bilingual)

At the Circus (bilingual)

This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.

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