Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

Something that I've heard Steve Kaufmann say repeatedly is that one of the most important skills when learning a language is your ability to notice. When you start noticing patterns you should investigate them and use them as an opportunity to learn. Well after 7 months of learning Russian I really started to notice the different cases for 'you': ты, тебя, тебе etc.  Don't get me wrong, it's not that this has been under my radar all this time. It's just that my curiosity has now become so intense that I'm actually willing to learn a little bit of grammar in order to understand it better. This is also the result of using the Speakly app which requires me to choose the correct word for some of the exercises. From some quick searches this is what I've determined to be a list of the various cases of 'you'. Please realise that I'm learning this for the first time and just going off of what I've found online. Don't take this as the definite...

While I was researching how to learn Russian a couple of months ago I stumbled upon the Latin learning community. It turns out that there are people learning it as a living, spoken language. Not only that, there are in fact comprehensible input resources to help people learn it.  Specifically there is a book series called Lingua Latina which teaches the reader Latin without using any other languages. Everything is written in Latin, starting with very simple sentences and working up to authentic Roman texts. Many people believe that it is not only the best book that's ever been written to teach people Latin, it's the best book for that purpose for any language. Now prior to this I was aware that Latin like Russian uses a case system. Although until recently I only had a vague idea of what that means. That words have different forms depending on the context they are presenting. So I decided to look up how Latin grammar works and I stumbled up on a page which explains some of the...

I dusted off the copy of  the New Penguin Russian Course  I bought a couple of years ago and decided to start reading up on Russian grammar, a full 4 months after my decision to acquire Russian with a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion Approach. I quickly skipped the first two chapters which cover how to read the Cyrillic script and encountered the first grammar lesson in chapter 3. 1. There is no present tense of 'to be' ('am', 'is', 'are') 2. No equivalent of the articles 'a' and 'the' 3. The word это has multiple meanings, including 'this', 'that' and sometimes 'it' 4. All Russian nouns are either masculine (он), feminine (она) it (оно)   or neuter. 5. Masculine nouns normally end with a consonant or й. 6. Feminine nouns normally end with a or я. Although words that specifically denote men are masculine.  7. Neuter nouns end with o or e. 8. Most nouns ending with ь are feminine but there are masculine words w...

Here's a quick overview of my current understanding of Russian grammar. It might be useful to keep track of this over the coming months. I've heard that Russian uses something called cases, something that I know the Latin language has as well. From what I've heard it means that a word is altered depending on certain circumstances. For example a noun might have a different ending if it is doing something or something is being done to it. I can imagine that some words also change if there is some aspect of time involved. So describing something that happened yesterday or something that will happen in the future.  As you can tell my understanding of grammar in general is very limited. I know what nouns, verbs and adverbs are, but that's it. For example I've heard people talk about the 'future imperfect tense' but I have no idea what that means. I'm interested to learn about Russian grammar but according to the methods that I'm following it's not som...