learning russian

any helpful hints to help me learn russian? any music cds, magazines, etc anyone can suggest to help me familiarize myself with the look and feel of the language? i would appreciate some input thanks everyone!

Flux could probably help you out there.

Wow, he was helpful.

Myself, I bought a Russian-English Dictionary and paged through it constantly. Although it wasn't English-Russian (I had a pocketbook dictionary for that), it was otherwise really good, it had curse-words and proverbs and stuff. The editor was Oleg Bunyukh, and it was published by Hippocrene.

Russian syntax is very different from English, though, and unless you know other inflected languages, that's likely to be the hardest part for you. The cases and basic verbs are fairly straightforward, but the distinctions between multidirectional and unidirectional motions and perfective and imperfective actions are unfamiliar to a typical English-speaker (at least they were unfamiliar to me).

As for "the look and feel," there's a lot of Russian porn out there on the web. Also there are a lot of military and Communist sites. At Soviet Music and Sounds of the Soviet Union they have a lot of Soviet-era mp3s, and the lyrics as well. I use those sites to teach myself Bolshevik war-songs (just in case). More recently, I suppose TaTu has a website if you're in to that kind of thing.

There are some good films out there, too. I'd recommend "Brother" and "Burnt by the Sun" that I've seen. "Brother 2" is supposed to be better than the original. There's always "Aleksandr Nevsky" by Eisenstein, as well.

Ask CLASSWAR he went to DLI and was a Russian linguist in the Army.

[Edited on Jan 30, 2006 by TheNewPope]

As with learning any new language, I say surround yourself with as much as you can, even if you don't understand it all at first.

And once you learn it, use it as much as you can because if you don't, you will lose it.

I have a degree in French but after almost 7 years, my french is akward at best.

Ah to be able to read Dostoyevsky in Russian...