Category: russian language study

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…