I checked My Toolkit on the Peace Corps website online, and downloaded some huge pdf file dedicated to teaching survival Ukrainian. But since Rosetta Stone doesn't offer Ukrainian, I figure that I might as well learn Russian since most of the country speaks both languages anyways.
So I've been learning Russian from Rosetta Stone, and its been kicking my butt. The sounds and accents in Russian are very different from those in English or the Chinese tones, so I've been struggling with it. So far, I've gone through like lesson 1 and part of lesson 2 of level 1 Russian and I've learned that I am especially terrible at rolling my r's (they roll r's more than spanish) and especially bad at pronouncing девочка (girl). I think I spent like a good 15 or 20 minutes trying to get past that word alone... but the good news is that now I can sort of say it. I've only learned basic words like boy, girl, man, woman, eating, drinking, reading, running and swimming. Hopefully the next few lessons will cover more useful, conversational stuff like greetings and the numbers.
Anyways, just for fun... I updated my blog title to say "the jinger" in Russian... according to Google Translate.
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A good trick for pronouncing things in Russian is to move your jaw as little as possible and kind of talk from the back of your mouth. The sound that is the hardest for me (native English speaker) is the soft "L". As lame as it may be, I like to sing to practice language. If you look up Verka Serduchka on youtube, you will get some fun songs in Ukrainian :)
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