Are there any english-speakers among us? Let's talk then :)

 

Je voudrais vous proposer parler français parce qu`il est plus belle qu`anglais)))

It is much more useful to find native English speakers for conversations. I tried to use English with my Russian friends several times, all I got was a solid language barrier We lacked idioms and sayings all the time, the talk was as official as TV news. Chatting with natives is much better as you constantly learn real vivid language from them.

P.S. Have you come back? :)

P.P.S. BTW, here's a nice vocabulary test: http://testyourvocab.com/. I got 12−16k at several attempts :)

olimo, and I have about 5k.
I'm gonna come back in 2 weeks :)

Does anyone know a helpful way to improve vocabulary?

p.s. if I have any mistakes, correct me please :)

I'm gonna

Does anyone know

thanks :)

Reading is the the easiest way for me. Listening to the radio or podcasts and watching movies are helpful to improve oral speech comprehension. And the active vocab is boosted when you practise using new words.

5k is pretty nice for a 16-year-old

By the way, the Sword of Truth series is not very hard to read from my view of a non-native speaker :) I had read 9 books in Russian when I found out there are 2 translations of the 10th book. I could not decide which one is better so I just found original books. And looking at them I decided to begin from the start once more. Now I read Stone of Tears :)

I'm not sure if we should really correct each other's mistakes. It will make this thread really boring

Miserable 6k. Shame on me.

I don't understand oral speech at all. Tried to listen to the podcasts but they're way too fast, I can't take whole phrases. I also watched all 5 seasons of "La Femme Nikita" series with original speech and English subtitles, and it was well understood. Looks like it didn't widen my vocabulary much. :)
And I still can't avoid multiple I's in my sentences. :(

5920. Thought that second try could be better but... only 5300. :)

Try audiobooks. You can begin with any book you've already read and remember well. If your comprehension is very low, these sessions will be more like studying: first listening to a portion, then reading it, maybe repeating the listening while reading as well. Movies are more useful when watched without subtitles.

What's wrong about multiple I's?

Yesterday evening I started reading "Three men in a boat" by J. K. Jerome, adapted by Ilya Frank. In my case, it's a good way: I can read a book in English and don't have to look up for every unknown word in a dictionary :)

With a vocab of 5K words I'd recommend reading something easy or well-known but without adaptation. You don't need to look up every unknown word, most of them you can guess from the context.
Three Men in a Boat might be not so easy. Try Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia, for example :)

Olya, where do you find native speakers? I think it's quite difficult unless you are a pretty girl.
by the way, I tend to believe that even native speakers use no more than 2-3k words on a regular basis.

I have one who found me himself

I hope I am Actually, the Australian guy in question is interested in Russian, so we can be of value to each other :) Unfortunately he is not often online. I suppose you can try searching for people on Russian-learning sites, so that they may be interested in you because you are Russian.

Native speakers are not for learning words but to use them fluently without too much thinking. Chatting with Russians in English is mostly showing off like “look guys, I know such and such word, I'm cool!” Chatting with natives is actually for communicating, you don't think your words over so much, you want to send and receive meaningful messages and thus sometimes even forget that you use not your native language.

I mean I seem I use too many I's, like in a school composition titled "About Myself". Russian language has means to avoid that (verb conjugation, omitting pronouns etc.), and does English have?

Yep. :)
Olimo, how do you type these (“”) quotation marks? Is that autocorrection?

I've never wondered :) In tech docs written in English there are many “yous” which I almost always avoid when translating into Russian. So I suppose “you” and “I” are ok)

Nope. It's a typography layout. You can try Ilya Birman's layout. I use another one which is not so popular, but I just got used to it.

sometimes I think that translating English to Russian is more difficult than vice versa. In this sense English is much more simplier

It depends on your experience :) I translate from English to Russian every day at work, so I feel it much easier. Anyway, it is the target language skill that is crucial.

As for English itself, yes, I agree that it is more simple :)

It's much easier to translate English<->French than English<->Russian because English and French languages have similar grammatical structure. Sometimes it's not even necessary to understand what you're translating. ;)