Post: #1

Right now I am studying Russian, and previously I was studying French. I've done this on and off over the years and I think I've finally stumbled upon a trifecta for doing this that works really well, so I wanted to share it.

First, get the Pimsleur lessons for your language. Funnily enough, by about lesson 15 of the first series you are doing basic (AFC) pickup in your practice conversations. Some of the conversations where you as the AFC are just totally bombing out trying to pick up a random Russian girl are pretty hilarious.

Second, get a flashcard program called Anki. It's really basic (there's even an iOS app, but it's pay), and it's got a ton of public domain flashcard decks.

Third, Google Translate! This isn't as good a tool as I would like it to be, but it's pretty damn good. I'll explain below.

So, here's what I do. I'll explain what I did for French, since Russian has an additional wrinkle.

First
Take a Pimsleur audio lesson. When you get a new word or phrase, write it down using Notepad or something else (You'll want to be in front of a computer, or you can use the Notepad app on your iPhone - I've done that and it works ok but will screw up the next steps.) Don't worry that you're not spelling them right, just use ghetto phonetics. Enter the phonetic version and the English phrase beside it.

Second
Once you're done the audio lesson, look back through your notes and take every phrase and word you've just learned and run it through Google translate. For example, if you've learned "vous comprenez très bien", you've probably noted it as "voo comprehnay tray beeyen" or something. Now run the English phrase through Google translate and get the proper spelling.

If you think you've got the proper translation but you're iffy on reading the sentence, there's a nice "Listen" link that plays back a usually dead-on text-to-speech rendering of the phrase. You can use this to learn how to pronounce new words. For French it's great. For Russian it's occasionally a bit off.

Also, there's a nice feature where you can click on a part of the sentence and a drop down will show you alternate words or phrase parts you can use instead.

Once you have the proper phrase translated, replace your ghetto phonetics version with the real version and learn to properly read it.

NOTE: This can be a bit problematic as Pimsleur and Google occasionally disagree on the spelling of phrases, but in the case of French at least you can always get Google and Pimsleur to agree if you know the sometimes-weird structure that Pimsleur used to construct the sentence. For instance in French you often have to add "is it that" in front of a question sentence because that's a construct that proper French uses a lot.

Third
Now you'll have a growing text file of a whole bunch of phrases and basic words, and this is good - but it's hard to review. I bet you can guess the third step.

That's right, create a new flashcard deck in Anki. Cut and paste the English phrases as the card front, and the other language phrases as the card back. So:

Front: "You understand very well"
Back: "Vous comprenez très bien"

Anki has a good reviewing system. If you don't get it the first time, hit "Again" and it will be readded to the queue until you get it in that session. Try it, Anki's pretty sweet.

And that's the trifecta. If you're studying Russian you'll also have to learn Cyrillic, which is a lot easier than it seems. I'm just about done that in less than 5 hours - it's dead easy.

Hopefully somebody finds this helpful.

Post: #2

Forvo is also very good for translations, as those are phrases from native speakers.

Post: #3

Pimsleur is very good.

Post: #4

Great advice.