Всё по-русский….

That should translate as Everything in Russian. My first step to start getting more fluent is to make the things I do everyday work in Russian. So, first it was setting the iPhone to Russian language. It’s a one way process for now, as I haven’t figured out what I need to do to turn it back to English…c’est la vie I suppose.
I did also figure out that my Windows 7 that I’ve got on my laptop can run in Russian localisation mode. The catch is it has to be Windows 7 Ultimate. Lucky for me, being the techphile I sometimes am – I got that version the day Windows 7 was released…so now my laptop is also running in Russian!
In class today though, I thought that perhaps a safer way might be to use Linux, and set up a virtual machine from an ISO using VMware Player (or VirtualBox, or HyperV or Windows virtual machine). Off to Distro Watch…and I found AltLinux just had a new version released – and it’s all Russian. I’ve downloaded just the live ISO for now, when my russian is a bit better, I might try my hand at installing it from scratch.

Welcome

Here begins my adventure in becoming fluent in Russian. To begin with, much of this blog will be in English, but as my fluency improves expect to be reading a lot of Russian and hopefully none or not much English.

Why a blog? Well, actually it wasn’t my idea a all, but one poached from Benny the polygot at Fluent In Three Months – Start a blog. His site has been the catalyst which made me realise that it is indeed possible to become fluent.

I’ve already a bit of a head start as I have been learning the language on and off for some time now and still attend intermediate level classes weekly. But unfortunately living in a primarily English speaking country, the bite sized chunks learnt just don’t make for fluency.

What will detail fluency for me? Well, I should at least be able to look at the front page of the NTV News site without having to resort to some online translation tool or a dictionary. Past that, I should be able to watch a news article from there and be able to comprehend it too.
After that? Let’s just see how we go.