25.09.2020
2 hours
Today Chris got me familiar with some German articles that define genders of the words. Russian nouns have genders too, but we don’t have any articles coming along with them, it’s just about how you conjugate verbs or possessive pronouns, because the forms differ from gender to gender. The German is slightly less convenient in that way as you have to memorize all the articles, but on the other hand it frees you from learning different verb forms and stuff. We also studied German cases – Akkusativ, Dativ and Nominativ. It was very understandable, as we have cases in Russian, too, but we have like 6 of them, which is even more. And more complicated.
We’ve also gone through some very basic vocabulary in German, like Brot (bread), Backerei (bakery) and other useful words and phrases.
As for Russian, I’ve taught Chris how to write and read the Cyrillic alphabet. He seemed a bit confused with Ъ, Ы, Ь, В and Б, especially because the first three don’t have adequate analogues in English or German. But I think he’ll get it. He’s already doing very well, and we’ve spent some time as he tried to read some names of options in Paint (I was “illustrating” my explanations there). I think it was very successful.
I also realized how difficult it is for a foreigner to learn Russian. While explaining something to Chris, I often stumble upon realizing that for some Russian grammar & vocabulary features are so complicated and unique that it is nearly impossible to explain them or even make a rule out of them. And it’s just the second meeting!
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