On Russian poetry and Argentine math professors

I recently got in touch with an Argentine man, a retired professor of mathematics, via Skype. He was already quite advanced in English and was interested in asking about some idiomatic phrases, so we had a long and interesting conversation, mostly in Spanish. With his permission, I recorded it, and then later went back over it and transcribed it with the help of SIL's Speech Analyzer program:

http://www.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm

You can hear the conversation and read a partial transcript here. (If you're wondering, yes, I did ask for permission to redistribute the audio, and he said "si".)

http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/spanish/rmartilotti/20070905/

It's really quite amazing how bad my accent is, and how many times I say "uhhhhh"; although it's painful to review, it's also amazingly helpful because I can see all sorts of errors that I wasn't aware of at the time. It's also helpful because I can review the professor's part of the conversation and start practicing some of his turns of phrase. I think he was trying to speak simply for my sake, but he's still a professor and so couldn't avoid using words I don't know and lots of constructions I'm still nowhere near being able to produce.

This was such an extraordinarily helpful exercise for all four of the skills — reading, writing, speaking, and listening — that I can't help but think that it's pretty close to an ideal technique for learning languages. In particular, I think the same technique will help me immensely in learning Russian.

I've been scratching my head about how best to study Russian, because its spelling and pronunciation present such a problem. The sounds are quite different from the sounds of English, and the rules that tell you how to pronounce words based on the letters are elaborate; I can read them in a book and understand them, but making them intuitive is another matter.

When I started with Spanish, I just had to learn a few rules of spelling, a couple of new sounds, and that was about it; Spanish spelling and pronunciation are extremely regular, and the sounds are pretty close to English. In retrospect, that opened up all written Spanish — from books, newspapers, the Internet, what have you — as potential sources to learn from, without much danger that I'd inadvertently be teaching myself an incorrect pronunciation. In the case of Russian, however, this is a serious, serious problem.

For that reason, I've started to focus more on Russian audio for which I also have the text (which means Pimsleur Russian should wait for a while). As an experiment, I asked my friend Alex (who's a native Russian speaker) to record a couple of poems, and then give me the Russian text and an English translation. He obliged, with a couple of poems by Lermontov, one of his favorite poets. (I'm not sure what that might say about Alex, as, according to Wikipedia, Lermontov described his own poetry as "iron verse steeped in bitterness and hatred".)

I then cut one of the shorter recordings up into snippets, recorded myself saying the English text of the translation, and put them into a playlist structured so that the English audio is followed by a couple of seconds of silence, then the Russian audio of the same phrase. I used a system similar to Pimsleur's to repeat the phrases at expanding intervals. At the same time that I was hearing Alex say the Russian phrase, I would review the Russian text for that phrase.

After a fairly large number of repetitions spread out over a couple of days, my pronunciation of the Russian version was pretty good (according to Alex) so I started to use flash cards to study the phrases when I was away from the computer.

To be a little more formal, I followed this process:

1. Break up the audio into phrases
2. Record an English version of each phrase
3. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
4. Once the pronunciation is good, start using flash cards

Here's the text of the poem and my recording of it.

http://feb-web.ru/feb/lermont/texts/fvers/l22/l22-041-.htm

http://www.nycellar.com/james/languages/RU/Lermontov/Bored and Sad - JWW 20070911.mp3

So, I think the experiment was a qualified success, and I plan to use the same techniques with other audio for which I have the text and the translation. I've downloaded a number of audio books and stories in Russian and Spanish from various web sites and will go through and cut them up in a similar way.

I say it's a qualified success because this first iteration uncovered some problems with the process.

First, cutting up the audio is pretty laborious, so I may end up having to write some software to help me do it.

Second, there are many phrases which form a logical unit, so should be known in their complete form, but are just too complicated to learn all at once, and so have to be built up piecemeal. For example, I was having a lot of trouble with the line

ведь рано иль поздно их сладкий недуг

which Alex translated as "at some point their sweet suffering"; I didn't understand the internal structure or what the individual words meant, so it was just too long to learn by itself even after many repetitions. However, when I looked up the individual words and found that

рано иль поздно

meant "sooner or later" and

их сладкий недуг

meant "their sweet disease" or "their sweet ailment", I added those sub-phrases to the playlist, so they would come before the whole phrase; after practicing and learning these shorter phrases, which was much more doable, it was a piece of cake to learn the entire phrase.

Third, learning this way doesn't give you the individual meanings of the words or their grammatical roles. This makes it harder to learn to adapt the phrases and use them in other contexts.

So, I think when I work on the next poem (Lermontov's "Captive") I'll follow a somewhat different process:

1. Look up the words, learn their definitions, and figure out their grammatical roles
2. Break the audio up into phrases
3. Break the longer phrases up into sub-phrases which can be more easily learned
4. Record English versions of each phrases and sub-phrase
4. Learn the pronunciation using the audio with the text
5. Start working on the flash cards