13 December 2012:
Some random musings III.
1. I was browsing Google's Zeitgeist when I saw the most searched 'why' term: 'почему обама кактус'. Why is Obama a cactus?According to some search results, there was a survey done in America (I think few years back). 20% of respondents thought that Obama was the name of a cactus. Others even thought it was some kind of wheat. One comment I saw was 'Американцы знают толк.' ('Americans know a lot.')
2. I started Russian lesson 2 just now, but I couldn't really maintain. I couldn't even complete the first lesson properly. The tough thing about Russian is that there is a lot to learn for grammar, but in compensation spelling and pronunciation is so much easier.
However, I am indeed having problems with grammar. Each word can either be masculine, feminine or neuter. I understand that many other languages have this too, but having learnt English and Chinese where there's no such thing, this is difficult for me to remember. Also, vocabulary is also not very easy to pick up as there may be gender-specific words (something like 'lion' and 'lioness', but for many more). (Also what intrigues me is that the Russian word for 'father' is feminine.)
I am thinking of creating some poster where I can paste around my room to remind me of Russian grammar. There are some online but it's payable. Or I should start flashcards soon, to help in my vocabulary.
Also, Russian cursive is not as easy to remember. Some lower-case letters are totally different when in cursive. So sometimes I myself get confused when writing. My Russian handwriting looks horrible; hopefully it'll get better as time goes.
Declension drives me crazy as well. It's a little like adding '-s' or '-ing', but there are many more rules to remember and there are primary and secondary procedures. Ugh no.
I know ... I'm complaning on and on about Russian, when it's my interest to study it. So yes, I would still continue (not going to waste $60) and press on. Hopefully I'm having a hard time now cos there's a steep learning curve so that after that I would be fine.
3. If you may, do ask me questions at my Formspring. I've been answering machine-generated questions, and it gets boring after a while. Or you could comment on the posts here on that site too!
Anything's fine.
TTFN.
Oh and tomorrow or the day after I shall review a game that I've been playing on my iPhone for at least two months already. Best of all, it's free!