The series of books … for beginners or … for dummies was a big success. Albert Einstein once said: ”If you can’t explain it in simple words, you don’t understand it well enough!” The same is valid for Yuliya’s approach. As a native speaker and obviously a language expert, she is able to explain the topics in a very simple way.
Let’s imagine language learning as a cooking experiment. You need the stove, pots, and ingredients. I think the stove is the most important one. I would say it’s the motivation to learn the language. Pots are necessary parts – in the EOTO terms they would be the students. And the ingredients are the languages taught/learned. Feel free to shuffle the elements around.
On the learning side I have read an article – yes, I can read Russian! Pronunciation is slowly getting better and better. The main point of article was to recognize numbers in a written form. I managed it pretty well.
Next part of the lesson was learning how to express time. Apparently there are two ways of doing it: the literary way and the dummies way. Of course I opted for the latter one. This also suits my goal – I want to be able to communicate in Russian and not compete with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in becoming an accomplished novelist.
On the Finnish teaching side the topic was not that perfect – it was the actually Imperfect, or in English terms the past simple tense. But nothing is simple when it comes to Finnish grammar. I have presented the 13 – THIRTEEN! – not so simple rules. In essence they are pretty straight forward, but 13 is a bit too much isn’t it? It actually slightly discouraged Yuliya, but just for a short while.
I still think that the best way of learning any language is by speaking it. And when it sounds OK, you know you are on the right way. And when it sounds weird, you can figure out you made some mistake. And more you practice it, the more profficient you will become.
Today Yuliya needs to practice a bit and on Wednesday we will discuss the negative form of past simple tense.
And I’m so sorry. I again forgot to take a picture from the lesson.
Sincerely yours (С уважением),
Sebastjan (Себастьян)
Comments