Russian Tutor 1: Russian for Beginners

My Dinner with Sasha

About a year ago, I found myself in a discotheque in Vilnius, Lithuania, trying to buy "underground" caviar from a Russian entrepreneur. I couldn't figure out if he was selling red or black caviar. I like black. I came home with red. Lots of it. I swore I'd learn some Russian before my next big caviar-buying adventure.

When I opened Russian Tutor 1, I knew perhaps only a dozen words of Russian, and almost nothing of the Cyrillic alphabet. And while my motivation may not have been purely academic, it was with great hope that I began the program. Some of my hopes were nicely met, others less so with the Russian Tutor.

The Russian Tutor is set up as a computer-based textbook of 26 lessons, rather than a fully interactive hypertext program. The linear structure is of the "chapter and lesson" type, familiar to every Language 1 student. (However, you are free to jump around in the program by selecting any chapter and then any exercise within the chapter. More on that later.)

The log-in procedure asks you to choose a user name and password. This feature allows different users to learn from the same program. The opening screen is filled with text that explains various aspects of the program. It's text-dense and not terribly attractive, as the font quality is low.

The program then opens to a screen of the Russian alphabet. A voice reads very quickly instructions are spoken in Russian, but written in English. The instructions say merely to "become familiar" with the letters. There is no quiz or testing mode, although you can click on each letter to hear how it is said. As a passive activity, this doesn't provide nearly enough feedback or interaction. The lessons also include phonetic spellings (in IPA) for each of the letters, and throughout the program. This is a severe weakness in the pedagogy of this course. I could have (and would) have spent a significant amount of time learning the alphabet thoroughly before commencing with the program. However, given little opportunity to interact with the alphabet, or to practice recognition through quizzes or games, I moved on to the first chapter.

Each of the chapters focuses on one or two major language constructions, such as "What are you doing?" or "Where is the book?" There are also two or three "scenes," in which the characters hold a conversation. These scenes are drawn in simple, flat graphics with very little animation. The same characters reappear throughout the chapters. In the beginning scenes of Chapter 1, the characters identify objects in a room ("What is it?" "It's a magazine."). Then, in the testing mode, I identified the objects that were spoken first by pointing and clicking on them, then in a similar activity, as the item was highlighted, I chose its name from a list.

It is here that my lack of practice with the alphabet became apparent. Although I had had little practice reading or identifying letters, I was expected to pick the names of words from a list, based on what was spoken. This task was difficult, but it did force me to attend to the sounds of words and their connection to their alphabetic representations. One of the confusing parts of this exercise comes in the feedback. When selecting a correct choice, the character makes an odd gesture--which is the opposite of what I expected it to be. It looks like "wrong" to me, but apparently, it means "right," because he's smiling. However, the characters are always smiling...

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