Category: boris shekhtman

Harold Goodman: some recent stuff.

Dear friends After a hiatus of two years, at least, I decided to post something here. A few years ago a reader chided me for not posting on a regular basis. He was right, of course, if I wanted to build a large audience. When people come to me as…

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Learn foreign languages by having fun reading. Part 2

I once asked Michel Thomas about studying on my own. He urged me to read in the language I was studying. “Read what you enjoy and don’t look up words in a dictionary. Just keep on reading,” he told me. His advice was built on the fact that when we…

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Learn foreign languages by having fun reading. ( 1)

One of the many pieces of advice Michel Thomas gave me was to read. I am the first of five kids. Born in NYC I was alone for many years. Sure I had a brother and three sisters but we were never close friends. To this day, I am only…

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Another lesson, another lightbulb goes off.

There are times when, because of being tired, wanting a little time off from Russian, or just pure laziness, that I think, I hope Boris cancels class today. It would be so nice to just sleep in. Then I get up, shower, eat a bite, jump in my car and…

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My first talk in Russian.

I recently wrote a post on how I was scheduled to give a short talk in Russian before an audience of native-speakers. Well, it happened and here is what transpired. Since I had to speak for 15 minutes or so I made a short mind map of what I wanted…

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Following 129 hours with Boris Shekhtman.

About one year ago I began to study Russian with Boris Shekhtman. To date I have spent a total of 129 hours one on one with him learning according to his method. When I began I knew next to no Russian. I had previously spent a semester at the University…

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Russian verbs of motion – Boris Shekhtman’s way.

For those of you who haven’t studied Russian, I suspect that you may not know about verbs of motion. So let’s get acquainted with them. In English we have verbs like come, go, run and so forth. If we want to indicate that we went somewhere then we can just…

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Boris Shekhtman. The method ( continued)

As promised, I am continuing my account of my experiences studying Russian with Boris Shekhtman. At this point I have been meeting once a week for three hours with him for one-on-one tutoring. The lessons are very focused on my specific needs and idiosyncrasies in learning. As Michel Thomas explained…

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Speaking a foreign language.

One of the major obstacles for many beginning and intermediate language learners is conversing. Basically, there is only so much conversation that one can muster around the very basic vocabulary and questionable grammar that a beginner has to work with. In addition, the foreign speaker in most cases, while impressed…

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A novel approach to learning languages.

In 2001 the NY Times published a lengthy article in the Travel section by the former Moscow bureau correspondent, Francis X. Clines. I like people who have X as a middle initial. I assume the X stands for Xavier, which is a really neat name. How many people call their…

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