Do I have to learn the cylrillic alphabet to use rosetta stone russian?
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at
8:51 pm
I recently got the rosetta stone program for Russian, and was quite excited to use it. Me and my fans think Russia is awesome, and wanted to learn some Russian and take a trip there. Unfortunately, it seems that you have to be quite fluent in the Cyrillic alphabet to use the program. I was wondering if I am right in this, and if so, if anyone can give me any pointers in learning the cyrillic alphabet/Russian in general.
спасибо! (Thank you)
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Tagged with: cyrillic alphabet • pointers • rosetta stone • russia • stone program
Filed under: Russian Language
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Yeah, you do, and even though it may seem like this could inhibit your learning of the language, it’ll strengthen it, because:
a) The Cyrillic alphabet is VERY easy. You could easily learn it in 20-30 minutes and then internalize it by practicing often / finding a Russian text to read.
b) if you ever do make it to Russia, you won’t find transliterations, and you won’t find that many people who even know the Roman alphabet.
c) If you ever plan on studying other Slavic languages (i.e., Polish, Serbian, etc) it’ll make pronunciation much easier once you know the letter and it’s Cyrillic counterpart. For example, the word "Srebrenica" would be pronounced "Sre-bren-ee-ka" by the average person, but it’s actually pronounced "Sre-bren-ee-tsa" since the Cyrillic letter transliterated as "c" is ц, pronounced "ts."
d) Russian is just so much easier to understand and pronounce with the Cyrillic alphabet. When you see a bunch of apostrophes and stuff in the middle of transliterated words, it’s confusing, but to see a ь at the end of a word just makes sense.
General pointers on learning the alphabet:
a) If you can, find a site or something that will read a Russian word (or, simply, an English word) and ask you to write it using the Cyrillic alphabet.
b) Find a Russian text or something like a block of text from a Russian website and practice reading it aloud. This will speed up pronunciation as well as internalization of the Cyrillic alphabet.
c) Listen to Russian texts and dialogues. I’ll provide a link to an excellent Russian course at the end.
All in all, even if you end up using a program that doesn’t use the Cyrillic alphabet, please learn it, because it’s practical.
=D
To make an answer short, yes you should be familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. With enough dedication and practice you should be able to memorize it. Here’s a site: http://www.ilike2learn.com/ilike2learn/russian/index.html
To be quite blunt, there’s no point in learning the language with the wrong alphabet. OK you’d be able to speak the language and understand it spoken to you, but the moment you see it written or have to write it you’ll be stuck.
It would be as useless as a Russian learning English with the Cyrillic alphabet.
i have absolutely no idea. need the p o i n t s