Зимой и летом одним цветом.
So, a few days ago I had my first language exchange. Надежда found me online (I think from my hh.ru profile- which is a “Russian” LinkedIn for those who have never heard of it), and we decided to meet in the Starbucks near Юго-Западная. She is the same age as me, and has studied English for 1 year already. Надежда is learning English because she plans to work abroad at an international company. We were at Starbucks for around 2 hours. She wanted to learn Modal Verbs and practice reported speech. As a native speaker of English that has never taken a linguistics course, I have never even heard of these terms, so I had to do a bit of research beforehand.
Anyways, we went through a bunch of English exercises for about an hour and then we switched to Russian. I practiced using the prefixes над- и под-. Going over them together was actually very helpful! I think it was a successful language exchange and meeting was helpful for both of us. We even live on the same Соко́льническая ли́ния, which is very convenient. We made homework for each other, and our next meeting is this Thursday, and I hope we both can progress in our language learning!
Funny thing is, the next day I went to class, the teacher asked us to solve a Russian riddle! It was the same one that Надежда told me the day before, and I was the only one that knew the answer:
“Зимой и летом одним цветом.”
Ответ: Ёлка
Update: 2 Months in Russia
It has been exactly 2 months since I have been in Russia. I arrived on January 18th and today is March 18. I haven’t been updating this blog, but I will make more effort to do so. I will post more so I can track my progress, maybe do some dorm review/information post, class/textbook reviews, more photos of Moscow, etc.
Class + Life
I have been enjoying my life here. I really like MGU, my professors and my class. It was slow in the beginning, but the difficulty level is picking up now, and it doesn’t feel as relaxed (which I prefer). We had 2 Americans, 2 Japanese, 1 Chinese, 1 Cuban, 1 Korean, 1 Turk, and then me. Just last week, one American student went back and also a Japanese student left too. I thought it was so nice that he left our class with a Japanese pen each, even though we didn’t talk too much. Hiro, was the youngest and seemed the most motivated too. I think he wanted to study in Moscow after he graduated. Greg, who was a year older than me, will go to the army afterwards. I think we have an interesting mix of students.
Language Update
Well, since last week (or maybe the week before), I have learned all 6 cases. Of course I am not perfect at them still, but I have made a lot of progress in 2 months. Before I came back to Moscow, I only knew 2 cases (Nominative & Prepositional). Right now we are learning various verbs of motion, prepositions, and prefixes (по-, у-, при-, об-, под-, в-, вы-, etc etc etc). I think it is a bit challenging for me, but I just need more practice. Especially using them while speaking. I think reading is my strong suit (At least at the moment), while I need more help with listening and speaking. I guess I need to expand my vocabulary perhaps. I still have my same notebook- already on page 164! It’s funny looking back at old mistakes I made.
моя pусская тетрадь 