I love languages.

I am creating this blog to record my daily experiences of learning a new language.

I feel satisfied with my level of fluency in my first L2, French. I learned French in the classroom for many years before a one-year immersion in France. I plan to continue to improve my French fluency, but I want to actively acheive fluency in another language.

To learn Russian, I am not going to follow a classroom program of study. Rather, I am going to work on the self-taught method.

It is an experiment for me. I want to know if I can teach myself more effectively and efficiently than I can learn in a classroom environment.

I chose Russian as my next language for several reasons. I wanted to learn a language that does not use the Roman alphabet. I am interested in Russian literature. I have a friend who speaks Russian natively.

I have been working on learning Russian for almost a year now. I recently became unmotivated to continue, so I picked up a book by Barry Farber titled How to Learn Any Language. He gave me a few helpful hints, so I am changing my strategy slightly. I am also more motivated to continue with my studies after having read his short book.

Ideally, I hope to study about 2 hours a day. One hour will be spent with the Rosetta Stone software that I purchased from eBay. The second hour will be spent studying my grammar book and a Russian website that I have chosen, as well as listening to my audio cassettes. I will be making flashcards of new vocabulary words to study at dull moments during the day.

Here is a list of my current study materials:
Rosetta Stone software, Personal Edition set;
Take Off in Russian audio cassettes from Oxford;
Teach Yourself Beginner's Russian Grammar;
First Reader in Russian, Ann Rolbin;
Unistar 99,5 website (http://www.unistar.by/);
Harper Collins Russian Concise Dictionary;
homemade flash cards on index cards;
Russian for Beginners, Duff & Makaroff;
Russian Stories: A Dual Language Book from Dover.