Second Lesson

This lesson is the second half of the first lesson I gave you and it will cover the remaining Cyrillic symbols in the russian alphabet.

First we will cover the letters that look different/weird, but sound like english letters

Б - "B" as in bat
Д - "G" as in guy
З - "Z" as in zoo
Л - "L" as in lazy
П - "P" as in pot
Ф - "F" as in federal
Ы - "I" as in bit
Э - "E" as in bet

The next russian letters look different/weird and have new sounds as well.

Ё - "yo" as in yonder
Ж - "zh" sound, like in beige
И - "ee" sound as in taxi
Ц - "ts" sound as in sits
Ч - "ch" sound as in chip
Ш - "sh" sound as in shut
Щ - "shch" sound, produced by saying "sh" with tongue on the roof of your mouth
Ю - "yoo" as in universe

And the final two letters are the pronunciation letters

Ь - Hard letter, used to seperate two words, indicates slight pause
Ъ - Soft letter, makes the previous consonant softer

And now combine this lesson with the first and you have: The Russian Cyrillic alphabet!

If you want further learning, I have sites listed in my resource page, but I will also include a link to a Russian Pronunciation guide sheet below.

http://www.friends-partners.org/oldfriends/language/russian-alphabet.html

I hope you enjoyed the lesson, keep checking back for more progress reports and lessons

До свидания, Все (goodbye,everyone)

God and Russian

In the last few weeks, I have continued learning about the Russian language. I also continue to be interested in the different words and unique sounds I learn about in this new and foreign language. Throughout my learning, I saw God's plan for language and the greater purposes of language: Community building and Order Discovering.

Language is a great way for people to connect with each other and form a tight community, after all, knowing a region's language can help you become connected to that community better than if you didn't know its local language. God wants us to build community with each other so that we can spread his message of love to everyone, including those who speak foreign languages. So, knowing a few different languages can greatly increase a person's ability to spread the message to a vast audience and allow him/her to become connected to a population.

Language also has it's own order to it, shown through it's spelling and grammar rules. This order may be hard to understand at first, but when you understand it, a language can begin to make sense to you. I feel that God gave us this feeling of order to help us better co-operate with each other, after all, it's hard to get along when people can't even agree on how to spell or even pronounce a word.

That's why I feel that learning a language demonstrates these two elements of faith.