Speak German or Russian?

[KestrelBike]

I'm curious if anyone speaks conversational German or Russian and would like to work on their skills. Or if you're a native speaker, would be patient enough to want to talk with a non-native speaker to help them improve.

I took 4 years of Russian in school and 2 years of German, but I'm much better in the latter due to vocabulary familiarity w English.

Just throwin it out there! No politics involved, just love languages and hate to see my skills rusting.

[fitz19d]

My germans pretty much fallen apart, now at probably a 1st year level with a bit of random higher stuff. Was too young to learn when I was there. Could never conjugate well. I do have a friend who is 100% fluent read/write who would probably be happy to talk on facebook with you about random stuff. (Into random wierd stuff but guns too) Think he even knows a tiny bit of russian.

Also still have my awesome German teacher from high school who does yearly exchange trips there. He'd possibly be an options. (Knowing him might be cool with someone sitting in on some german 3 and 4 classes or even have you guest speak on something random.)

If you want PM me a facebook screen name and I can try passing you along to one or both of them.

[ANADRILL]

some german, mostly read it...

[patrick0685]

how hard was Russian to learn?

[centrarchidae]

I know a little German. He's sitting right over there.

[MrPrena]

Good luck on foreign language.
German is not a easy language to learn.
I took Spanish as a foreign language, and I couldn't pronounce words on GER/ENG/GER dictionary.

Lucky that majority of percentage of German I dealt with in Germany already knew how to speak English. Made me right at home. :D


I am fairly sure local university paper will have language friend pair. You teach em ENG, and a foreign student teaches you the language.
I know Front Range Community College near HWY 36 has many foreign students for their esl language course.

[Goodburbon]

If you were closer...

[Holger Danske]

Just started the kids on rosettestone German. They are digging it.

[Hoser]

I took two years of Russian. But that was many years ago during the cold war. If I am around it a bunch some comes back, but for the most part its gone.

[cstone]

Check the library in Glendale. They have current Russian publications and literature. Some of the librarians are fluent. About half of the waitresses at Pete's Greek Town Cafe are recent arrivals from Russia. They are willing to listen to me butcher their language.

For German, you may as well listen to Deutche Welle online. Most of the Germans I've run into here would rather sprechen sie die English.

[KestrelBike]

how hard was Russian to learn?

Learning the cyrillic alphabet was very easy, it takes most students a week tops to learn it (so 5-10 hours). Learning the grammar takes a bit of time, but what's nice is that it very rarely deviates from general rules, unlike English. What's also nice about Russian grammar is that as long as you have the right case/tense, you can pretty much put it in whatever order you want. The part that kills me is the vocabulary. If you come from a western language, there is very little overlap in vocabulary.

For instance, English: Book ; German: Buch ; Spanish : Libro (but at least there, libro is kinda like library, so your mind can make the jump). Russian : K'nee-gah (Книга). To look at the total difference in vocabulary another way, imagine you were plunked down amongst some heart-surgeons (assuming you are neither a doctor nor fluent in Latin), and they just started talking about myocardiac fibrolations with endocronic infarctions blah blah etc, you might understand the "cardiac" but everything else you just don't have any context for. That's what a lot of Russian students run into even in their 4th year, each context area of life vocabulary has to almost be learned fresh from scratch. My professor told me that he learned it by *forcing* himself to learn 40 new words a day, and he'd go back and test himself on previous vocab-sets mercilessly.

All that said, you can get an eager student able to fend for himself in a Russian city easily in 4 semesters worth of classes.

[KestrelBike]

Just started the kids on rosettestone German. They are digging it.

German is a lot of fun, and I was able to teach myself to a 300 level using movies (with english captions) and music like Die Toten Hosen and Die Aerzte (left-wing bands from the 80's-2000's). The grammar's definitely a pain in the butt.

[KestrelBike]

Check the library in Glendale. They have current Russian publications and literature. Some of the librarians are fluent. About half of the waitresses at Pete's Greek Town Cafe are recent arrivals from Russia. They are willing to listen to me butcher their language.

For German, you may as well listen to Deutche Welle online. Most of the Germans I've run into here would rather sprechen sie die English.

yeah that's interesting, I rarely meet Germans who want to speak their language. I have all of my textbooks with me, I was hoping for a foreign-language beer-buddy lol, but I should still check out the library. At work I listen to a lot of DW.de, they've got some interesting programs on there. Thanks for the tips!

[meatman]

I'd like to learn how to speak German. My wife grew up speaking German growing up in Illinois but her parents found out she needed to learn how to speak English to communicate with the neighbor kids when she went out to play. She still speaks fluently.
We went to Germany in May for her family reunion and while we were touring with her parents we stayed at a bed & breakfast. She spoke to the owner of the B&B in German when we were getting a room. When the owner talked to her parents the day we left, he told them that he had no idea that she was American because her German was flawless. That's pretty impressive considering that she rarely uses it, occasionally talking to her parents on the phone in German.

I bought some cheap software that was supposed to be like Rosetta Stone with picture recognition and identification. I need to use it again, but I guess it's all about making the time for it.