2019 – Language Journal: Week One ✓

Welcome to my language journal for 2019.  Setting goals is very important to be successful in any
endeavor, and this is also is true when learning a new language.  This journal is where I will record my weekly goals as well as my progress of learning the Russian language.  Up to this point, I have taking several online courses, and finished many language books, which over the course of four years, and it has given me a fairly sturdy foundation to begin learning Russian.  Yes, that’s right, after all that time, I am just now ready to REALLY begin learning Russian.  At this point, I know enough to dangerously butcher this beautiful language with bad sentence structure, wrong verb conjugations, use incorrect gender of a noun or adjective, and place stress on all the wrong syllables.  Of course this would then have my language partners ask me “Что ты сказал?” or “Просто спросил меня по-английски.”  But no worries, it is all a part of the process when you learn anything new.  Your brain has to absorb this new knowledge into your long-term memory and marinate for awhile, before it really can become useful to you.  And that can take some time, but it will eventually happen, and will became a part of your memory’s DNA.

So here is how this journal will work.  At the beginning of each week I will post my language learning goals for that week.  Then at the end of the week, (most likely on the weekend), I will add my progress to that week’s post, whether it’s good, bad or awesome!  This will keep me accountable and track my progress along with it.  I will also add notes on what I am struggling with and need to improve upon.

My major overall goal is to finish an online course which teaches How to build Russian Sentences.  The course has 70 modules, I want to complete 10 modules each week.

Week One: 

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So without further ado here are my language goals for Week One:  I’m excited to begin!!!

Weekly Topic: Building sentences with personal and possessive pronouns.

Weekly Goal: Complete 10 modules

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***WEEK ONE – COMPLETED***!!!

Today is Saturday, January 26th, 2019 and here is my end of the week progress report…

Number of hours I studied this week:   8-9 hours_

What I learned this week:  Each module focuses on sentence structures, starting out simple by building sentences with just [NOUN + NOUN] constructions. For example:

• Сестра – врач.
• Мама – учительница.
• Папа – юрист.

Then adding a Possessive pronoun to the beginning of the the sentences in which you must match the gender of the noun:

• Моя сестра – врач.
• Твоя мама – учительница.
• Ваш папа – юрист.

Next modules added adjectives to the mix:

• Мой брат – умный студент.
• Его папа – отличный юрист.
• Ваша мама – строгая учительница.

I learned how most adjectives are formed, see the following table.

Endings of adjectives

Add the word очень, to the sentences

Моя сестра – очень хороший врач.

Personal pronouns:

Example sentences:

Creating plurals of adjectives:

-ые or -ие (after the letters г,к,х,ч,ш)

красный карандаш – красные карандаши

хороший человек – хорошие люди

Last was making [Personal pronoun + noun + adjective] constructions:

What I want to improve:  I need to manage my time a little more so that I can have more time for deep learning.  My problem was taking on too much this time.  So next week I will reduce it down to 5 modules, which should be more realistic.  I believe this course will help with constructing correct sentences during live speech, which is a big problem for me.

Thoughts and feelings:  _  Although I did finish all ten modules, it was a strain to do so, because as with everything, life doesn’t stop.  And to top it all off I didn’t allow myself enough time to absorb and review the lessons properly.  So I will consider this a “lesson learned”.  With each module I need to spend at least one hour and maybe another thirty to forty-five minutes of review in the evening.  I think this is more realistic and still allow for other things that life throws at me.

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So week one is completed, even though I took on too much this time, I still learned a lot from the first ten modules.  So next week will be only five modules, which should allow me more time to absorb the materials.  So I’ll see you on my next post for Week Two, as my learning challenges continue.

-Eugene