takeonafrica wrote:22camels wrote:Good luck! How good is your Russian?
Seriously, I know enough to get me by.
I'm trying to learn a bit more - got my 'teach yourself Russian' book for reading in the evening (in case I have trouble falling asleep)...
Have you tested it? I thought I had enough Russian to get by very minimally from time spent with a book and a recorded course, including additional time spent out there. But even though I could even decipher brief printed documents, such as tables of stats and legal regs I was working with, I had real problems making myself understood if it was much more than a transaction in a shop. I certainly couldn't find any way to ask the question "will I be able to get out of this building after 5.30pm" so anyone could understand it, despite spending time with a dictionary and grammar to try and construct the question. I didn't take any risk and always left by 5.30. And I have some facility with language - I speak Spanish fairly fluently, French I have done meetings in it, Portuguese and Italian I survive, I've succeeded in communicating in Norwegian and Malay in an emergency. But Russian I just found too difficult. Also Burmese - I couldn't even read the phrases in the phrase book so they could be understood.