Learning Russian

Yes. From my mother. shite is hard yo.

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Anybody here learn Russian? What is the best way to learn it from your personal experience besides living in Russia, which isn't an option right this second.

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Studied it in college, and greatly enjoyed it. What helped me the most was having a firm foundation of the Greek alphabet before attempting Russian. Knowing the alphabet made the transition to Cyrillic much easier. From there, once I got over being completely illiterate, I found it somewhat easier to pick up.

The Pimsleur CDs have been good for basic conversation, and I've heard great things about the Rosetta Stone. When I was in school, my professor was a native Russian, and that didn't help me much. The language intrinsically made sense to her; one of our lab professors was a native English speaker and had learned Russian, and studying with him was much more effective because he was able to make it relate to English better.

Self-study helped, a lot. I'm horrible now because I haven't used it in so long, but I can still read it at an elementary level.

I will say this: when it comes to reading Russian, it's much easier than reading English in the sense that letters are very precise. They can only make one sound - none of this f, ph, and gh make the same sound crap. There's really only one way to spell a word properly in Cyrillic, and that was another huge hurdle that learning Russian cleared for me better than, say, learning French.

I did 4 semesters of Russian in college, and found it to be a lot easier than French or Spanish to pick up. Some of the things that make it easy, especially for beginners:

There are fewer verb tenses in Russian than in most other languages. Everything is Past, Present, Future, none of this past pluperfect nonsense.

The alphabet shouldn't take more than a week to learn, and was honestly really easy. 33 characters, and a lot of them make similar sounds to english. Spelling is cake as there is one sound each letter makes, and only 2-3 silent characters (and they are always silent).

There is no sentence structure, which means you can order sentences as you would in English; at least this was accepted by my native speaking Russian teacher.

The verb 'to be' is implied, not said.

Some of the harder parts:

Nouns have 10 (IIRC?) declensions, similar to latin. Plurals are a nightmare, as Russian has a singular, a plural for 2-4, and a plural for 5+. Subjects have a declension, direct objects have another, and indirect objects have a 3rd.

Some consonant clusters can be challenging to pronounce.

Yep. I took a lot of Russian-themed classes as electives, so it kinda became a "sub-minor" in a way. One of those was a Post-Soviet Politics class as a poli sci course, taught by an American former federal asset who went to law school with Putin. Fantastic class, and really interesting perspective on politics over there.

I had another class based on medieval Russian history that was taught by a former Soviet academic. Hardest class I've ever taken- her grading was insane.

Don't know anything about the master's program you're speaking about. What umbrella was that under? Environmental studies?

Thanks for the link, will check that out tonight. Living abroad is the ultimate plan but I have some boxes I have to check here first i.e. Let my lease run out, save up some money, get my certification to teach English overseas. Going to attempt to get some basics of the language down in the meantime.