Speak German or Russian?

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Originally Posted by patrick0685

how hard was Russian to learn?

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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.

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Originally Posted by Holger Danske

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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!

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.