Dear Russian language,

I write these journals as way to see my interaction with you as language and introspection of my language acquisition skills. You still don't know me and I have yet to fully know you but after my first week of learning I can say I feel mentally rejuvenated. After the disastrous experience with Spanish I feel like a phoenix. Sorry Spanish language, it's not your fault, it's just that you and I are too different to get fully along with and this applies to other Romance languages I had to study in the past too (only exception Sardinian and Romanian). Languages are like worlds, and each world has a specific environment and resources. I don't adapt well in the warm temperatures of stem allomorphy typical of western Romance verb conjugation, not to mention the dangerous beast that lurks in the verbal tenses shores: the subjunctive.

Enough about the Romance languages, this diary is not dedicated to them but to you, Russian language. We actually met 10 years ago when I first approached your alphabet because I was obsessed with Romanov dynasty and Peter The Great. My past knowledge of Ancient Greek alphabet made me easy to learn your alphabet but then many events took us apart and I thought I never meet you again until now. After 10 years I could still remember your alphabet but my reading speed became rusty. Thanks to a dear Chinese friend I got a 1976 book about AK-74 (yes, I have a passion for military stuff) which I use as tool to speed up my reading skills and increase vocabulary:

A little gem I treasure dearly. In this first week I finally can say I managed to write in cursive Russian too. When I do my homework for the course I force myself to rewrite in cursive Russian so I can achieve two things:

1) further strengthening of Russian letters

2) memorizing new words

Here an exercise where I described differences in a room depicted in a draw of my grammar book:

Here the cursive is still very rough with some mistakes in the position of the letters, now I am learning how to distinguish "A" from "O" and "P" from "П". This exercise allowed me to better see the graphic differences between each letter and if at the beginning I was slow in writing in cursive because I had to see the correspondence between the letter in block letters and the one in cursive, after the fourth exercise I became fast because I memorized the letters in cursive too.

Now I enjoy so much writing you in cursive, but I cannot limit myself to mere "beautiful writing" as calligraphy suggests because I need to start first bits of grammar and in these days I started with nominative case (Именительный падеж) both singular and plural. Yesterday, during Russian class, we started prepositional case (Предложный падеж) and verbs that accompany this cool case. I started learning and repeating them in order to memorize but today I plan to do it again with the addition of writing them down. Here the list from my grammar book:

pro-tip to all people who are studying verbs: when you see the couple imperfective-perfective verbs STUDY it, no matter the cost! Study the couple, do not favour one verb to avoid the other or you will regret it a lot.

Perfective Verbs describe actions that have been completed or will be completed. They can’t express actions in the Present Tense, i.e. actions that are happening now. Perfective verbs describe actions with respect to a particular time; the events are not general. Perfective verbs have a “DONE” taste: I’ve done it! I’ll get it done! I’ll have it done by 18:00 tomorrow. Perfective verbs focus on results, they describe actions of limited duration and results of perfective verbs are still in effect.

Imperfective Verbs are used to describe uncompleted actions. Imperfective verbs describe something that you are doing now, or something that you used to do/do/will be doing regularly (repeated/habitual actions). Imperfective verbs focus more on the action itself rather than a particular outcome, and focus more on the duration of the action.

from: https://explorerussian.com/verb-aspects-perfective-imperfective-verbs/

So to conclude this first diary I plan to finish nominative case (and add some adjectives), learn and memorize all verbs that go with prepositional case and possibly see present tense. What I learned from this first week of Russian language?

You are very similar to German language; a beautiful woman who require time and attention, effort and professionalism and gives back lots of satisfaction, but unlike her you are even more immersive in terms of mental energies. Even on early stages of language acquisition, Russian takes time and patience. I still make lots of mistakes, especially on phonetic parts because stresses are mobile, unlike German, but I don't care, I like challenges and I have good auditory memorization skills.

That's all for now, I salute you, Pусский язык

Yвидимся в следующий раз!