Description

This course is designed to teach you Russian in a way that allows you to go from complete beginner to having conversations with native Russians speakers in 2-3 months.LEVEL 1 of RUSSIAN consists of:-Sentence Building-Comprehension-Translation-Reading/ListeningYou can find out more about the foreign language road running method here:http://www.flrmethod.com/The course also includes instruction videos on how to use it.And here’s one review about the method:The online ployglot community seems to be a fairly small but well connected group.  Most of us tend to be educated professionals with a passion for languages, travel and culture.  The are, however a few “rock stars” in this arena who have taken this avocation to whole other level.  One such “rock star” is Moses McCormick.Moses (at last check) is “conversational plus” in over 50 languages.  This is clearly a pretty amazing feat considering that he is only in his 20’s and most of us can’t even name 20 languages.  Moses began his language studies at The Ohio State University where he majored in Chinese and became a highly sought after language tutor.  A tutor  not just in Chinese, but in several other languages, including some that he never studied.  Since then he continues to accumulate more languages.  He currently spends three months on each new language but approaches no more than four languages a year.  Clearly Moses has found a way to “hack” the system.   He has and he calls it the FLR method.FLR stands for “Foreign Language Roadrunning” and is designed to get students up to conversational ability quickly.  Through his own studies, he identified several common components and phrases which were necessary to speak at an elementary level. He also noticed these same sentences applied to whichever language he was studying.  No, it was not   “This is a pencil … This is a blackboard” … My house is big …This car is new…”  He found that learning key interrogatives and memorizing several predictable, stock sentences was much more useful and efficient.   For the interrogative “what” , for example,  he might learn:Q: What’s your reason for learning Chinese? / Nǐ xuéxí zhōngwén de yuányīn shì shénme?A: I want to learn Chinese because I want to go to China one day. / Wǒ xiǎng xué zhōngwén yīnwei wǒ yào dào zhōngguó qùQ: What is your job? /Nǐ de gōngzu. shì shénme?A: I’m a student / Wǒ shì yīge. xuéshēngQ: What do you do? / Nǐ shì zuò shénme de?A: I study at the university. I’m a teacher / Wǒ zài dàxué xuéxí. Wǒ shì yīg. lǎoshīQ: What is your age/How old are you? / Nǐ duōda leA: I’m 30 years old. / Wǒ 30 suìQ: What do you do in your spare time? / Nǐ yǒu kòng de shíhou zuò shénme? etc…Once all the stock questions and answers are familiarized for all the interrogatives, he introduces what he calls “key words”.  These are the connector words that give speech the fluidity expressed by advanced speakers.  He has about 40 of them. A few for example are :as long as, continue, still, probably, maybe, usually, sometimes, ok, I see, once in a while, always, especially, like this, like that, must, simply, yet,  I feel that etc.  He memorizes these 40 words and then uses them to recompose the sentences that he has previously learned.  The key words can then link several of the sentences together and give a sense of fluidity to them. He makes his own drills by writing and memorizing these recombined sentences.  Once he has done this he gets to work speaking with as many native speakers as he can find.  For some more obscure languages he has to do it online or in chat rooms.  For a language like Mandarin, however, it is usually not too difficult to find speakers in the community.This is supplemented by using a textbook and recombining the textbook’s dialogues with the key words as above.  He then does the same process for comprehension difficulties: eg:   “I can’t understand you when you speak that fast, if you slow down I might be able to understand better…”.   This is followed by creating a stock paragraph introducing oneself that can be automatically reproduced from memory with a native speaker.This method has been incredibly effective for Moses and his students.  I met with him over Skype yesterday to discuss the method  and how I could apply it to my Mandarin quest.  Moses greeted me with a huge smile.  He is incredibly friendly and clearly has a passion for languages and linguistics.  We went through his own current plan for learning German.  I was amazed!  50+ languages and he hadn’t tackled German yet.  We shared a laugh over that one.