Duolingo Russian Is Upon Us!

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

This has been a long-awaited moment friends. Before I had even started investigating Russian, a course was in the works over at the Duolingo Incubator to teach Russian to speakers of English. As I may have alluded to, Duolingo is a very important resource for me. Completing the French course was an important moment and really spurred me to go to a level in French I had never accomplished in any language before. The fact that it is a free resource and never plans to charge money for its courses is incredibly encouraging especially for students like me who don't have the pleasure of being able to go out and buy expensive language courses.

I've quickly decided on my least favorite part of the course, and unfortunately, it's something that isn't really fixable. I didn't expect how frustrating it would be to have to switch between the English and Cyrillic keyboards all the time! Depending on whether the sentence I am asked to translate is in English or in Russian, I have to change my keyboard settings to the appropriate language. I should be glad I'm not hauling around two 50-pound typewriters, I suppose. It really isn't that bad.

One of my favorite parts of Duolingo is that it forces you to learn a lot of the grammar points more slowly than you would otherwise. Why is that good, do you ask? Well, here's my problem. I open my "Essentials of Russian Grammar" book from the library, and I see pages and pages of noun declensions. I pore over them, and try to ingest them all at once. I want to just believe that if I stare at the table hard enough, I will gradually just learn all of the endings available to me. An impossible task. Duolingo introduces the different forms of the words much more sparingly, so for the first chunk of the course, instead of trying to differentiate between the singular and plural forms of the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional cases in their masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, I am given masculine nominative singular and masculine accusative singular, and those are the only two I get to play with for a while. Then, as I pass the various levels and skills, more forms are introduced. This staggered learning style is much more effective for synthetic languages like Russian, where the language is full of little endings you have to attach to the ends of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns to change the meaning.

The true test of this course's worth, however, will be to see how much it aids my conversation and comprehension skills. We'll see about that.