Title: RL101-6 The next 5 – 2/3 of the way

Playout date: 27 October 2006
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – heavy use
Location: Home
Other people featured: None
Genre: Lesson
Music used: I can’t help falling in love, Elvis Presley, karaoke.
Languages used: English and Russian
Animals featured: None

We look at another five letters, which is enough to take us two thirds of the way through the Russian alphabet.  That won’t mean being able to read two thirds of the words, of course, as most words are five or more letters long, and it only takes one of the these letters to be in the third not yet learned for the whole word not be readable.  However from this point on, the volume of words that we can indeed understand in full begins to increase out of proportion to the remainder of the journey.
Today’s letters are still letters deriving from Greek and not looking the same as in Latin, however these letters are also not written the same as they were in the original Greek.  That’s basically the idea of the course – back at the beginning we took a look at the six letters which are the same in Cyrillics as in the Latin alphabet we are probably familiar with ( hint – you’re reading it now) after which we looked at letters whose form in Cyrillics look like Latin letters but which sound different, and in each case they were also in Greek, and the Greek sound is basically the same as the Russian one.  We then went on to look at letters which are pretty much the same in the Cyrillic alphabet as they are in Greek, but which don’t resemble Latin letters and are therefore less likely to cause confusion.  The natural progression here is to look at the letters which really derive from Greek, but which also look slightly different to the way they looked in Greek. This will be followed by letters which derived from Hebrew instead, and then the mop up of the few letters left over at the end.  That’s basically the approach we’ve taken in this course to the Russian alphabet.

Related articles

Your thoughts welcome, by all mean reply also to other community members!