Russian A Notes from class Осень 2014 1st Week — Первая неделя

Wednesday — среда́

Чита́ть до заня́тия: Introduction, Days 1-2 [alphabet, reading cognates and familiar Russian words, writing your name]

We will hit the ground running as we embark on a challenging and fun year-long adventure in Russian. The first step is learning the Cyrillic alphabet, which you need to master as quickly as you can. Don’t be afraid, learning Cyrillic is not difficult! In order to assist you, there is a website with instruction in reading and writing the Cyrillic alphabet at:

http://languages.uchicago.edu/NativeHand/CyrillicQuickly/

There are video clips of letters and words being written in cursive at this site (note that the site is not fully fleshed out and there are no audio files on these pages). If you join class after Wednesday, this site will help you get caught up with the alphabet. Don’t worry, the alphabet is not scary. You can learn the basic sounds of all the letters on day one and you’ll start to be comfortable reading and writing by the end of the first week of classes.

For tomorrow (Thursday), read the Introduction chapter of the textbook and complete the exercises on learning the cyrillic alphabet at the beginning of the workbook (Introduction, pp. 1-8 for Thursday and 9-22 for Friday) and read Unit 1: Days 1-3 for Friday (the books are divided into Units and "Days"; the homework will always be clear based on what “days” we are covering in class; a day in our class will always cover more than one “day” in the textbook) textbook and complete the corresponding exercises on pp. 23-32 of the workbook. In general, we strongly encourage you to write out at least a little bit of the various homework assignments prior to our classroom discussion so that we can better make use of the class time and target the areas that need the most practice and explanation. However, the homework will be due in the following class as indicated on the syllabus.

Vocabulary acquisition is something you should spend time with each day. The book clearly lists vocabulary at the end of each chapter, but we have also created daily lists if you would like to start studying those each day. Don’t be scared! The first few lists are mostly recognition vocabulary from internationalisms and cognates between English and Russian. In general, these daily lists have around 10-15 words to look at each day.

We also have all vocabulary up on quizlet.com/Harvard_Slavic for easy review.

Please let us know if you need any assistance with learning to read and write the alphabet. Try to be as comfortable as possible with reading and forming the letters already during the first few days of class.

1 Russian A Notes from class Осень 2014 Russifying your names

Here is a list of student names to get us started:

first name last name и́мя фами́лия Davis Дэвис Antonia Антония Zoe Зоуи Brian Брайан Kevin Кевин

I’ve cyrillicized these names according to pretty common standards (the Russian version of Wikipedia is a great source to look for cyrillic forms of common first and last names) although there are a few ways of doing things (1)one can adopt a Russian name or the Russian version of one’s name if it exists; 2) one can try to preserve as closely as possible the sound of the name from the original language (no , , or [æ] as in cat, etc.); or 3) one can try to approximate the spelling of the form in the original language: Батман vs Бэтмен (the preferred form). In addition there are certain conventions that have been used at various times (e.g., German or English names with are rendered as in Russian (as Гг), but more recent entries of Latin will use Russian <Хх>:

Гарвард, Гарри (so Гарри Поттер is grandfathered in!, but Деби Харри slipped through), Гамлет, Гитлер, Гайдн, Генрих Герц but Мартин Хайдеггер, Вернер Херцог, and Херби Хэнкок or Хайд Парк (в Чикаго), but Гайд Парк (в Лондоне), Харрисон Форд, but Герберт Гувер, etc., etc.

Here’s another mix of names from days gone by and more recent times: Гарри Гудини, Говард Хьюз, Халк Хоган, Хелен Хант. Note the preference for Хх these days for foreign /h/, but the previous preference for Гг in things that were standardized long ago.

Here’s a list of Hollywood people over time if you’d like to practice reading: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Голливудская_аллея_славы_— _список_лауреатов_за_вклад_в_киноиндустрию

And while we’re having fun, here’s a list of Russian words in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Russian_origin

Syllabus Notes: • we will finish both volumes of Live from Russia during the academic year; we will begin vol. 2 already in Fall for Chapter 7 • try to study vocabulary a little bit each day among the other things you do, learning the vocabulary is one of the biggest challenges in the early study of Russian

2 Russian A Notes from class Осень 2014 Coming Thursday: The Cyrillic Alphabet and Basic Pronunciation • voiced and voiceless consonants • vowel reduction • hard and soft consonants (-C/-Cь) • intonation (ИК-1, ИК-2, ИК-3)

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