So I moved on to Lesson Two on my Russian cd and promptly had no clue what I was doing. I’m a whiz at Lesson One. In fact, when I went to pick up the kids last night I practiced on the daycare workers and they enjoyed my attempt to say the following:
Excuse me. I’m American. Are you Russian? Do you speak English? You don’t speak English? I speak a little Russian.
That whole exchange is a variation on the things taught in Lesson One. I can do it REALLY well.
Today the Lesson tried to teach me to say three things that are virtually impossible to say. A formal version of “hello”, and the phrases “very well” and “not very well”. On the CD it sounds like complete gibberish and I could NOT get the pronunciation down at all, and finally gave up and just listened mutely to the CD the remainder of the way in to work. The other words it taught this morning I already know – Thank you (spa-SEE-bah) and Goodbye (das-vee-DAHN-yuh).
One thing I’ve noticed is that if you put the right inflection into the Russian and make it less gutteral it actually sounds a lot like Japanese or Chinese. That might have thrown me off because I kept obsessing over how NOT Russian it could sound at times. I’ll try again on the way home and see if I can at least master how to pronounce “very well” and “not very well” even if I can’t insert it into a sentence.