Tower of Babelfish
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Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.

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    • Tag Archives: Russian

    I’m back! Some thoughts on my Russian journey

    Well so much for updating over the summer!  I think I imagined having a bit more free time to fill, but instead worked ~14 hours a day all the way through.  So! Russian thoughts and results:

    Continue reading →

    (Jailbroken) iPhone Tutorial: How to set up a custom Russian Phonetic keyboard layout on your jailbroken iPhone

    This might be for a somewhat small audience, but if you have a jailbroken iPhone, there’s a great $2 app in the Cydia store that lets you customize a 5-row, 41 character keyboard (and if you really want to go nuts with it, you can set it up with 82 characters, taking advantage of the shift key).

    This tutorial will explain how to set this keyboard up to make a Russian Phonetic keyboard layout, which doesn’t seem to exist on the iPhone at all.

    Continue reading →

    Reader Q&A: On Grammar

    I’ve been getting some really great questions via the contact form, and I thought some of the answers might be helpful for others, so I’m taking some of the questions and answers and putting them here! Today we’ll cover a few questions regarding grammar.

    Grammar

    Q: How do you use Anki to work on grammar?

    A: Most of the time, I use fill-in-the-blank style cards - the sort of stuff you’d see in any grammar workbook (in fact, I usually just copy a few examples from whatever grammar workbook I end up buying):

    Front: Right now, he (to walk) to school. Back: Right now, he is walking to school.

    Front: Right now, he is walking ___ school. Back: Right now, he is walking to school.

    Q: What about verb conjugations?  Do you do conjugation tables?

    Continue reading →

    Base vocabulary list for all languages!

    I’ve written a base vocabulary list of 400 words.  You can dump these into Anki right at the beginning to give you some words to play with.  This will give you some time to start learning grammar and checking words off of your target language’s frequency list.

     

    Minor cosmetic updates, and added Harry Potter books to the Learn Russian page.