More on Learning Russian

People say to me, "Oh Russian's a difficult language." I'm not brilliant yet but I don't really find it particularly difficult, after all millions of Russians can speak it so why not me.  I know they have a head start on me but I'm game to give it a go.  People say,"But what about those funny letters?" Well the funny letters are really the easy one's because you don't already have a known sound for them.  The difficult ones are "o" which mostly sounds more like"aw" or even "a" to us. Also their G looks like an r to us and usually sounds like"g" but sometimes "v".  What looks like a B to us is a v.  As I said not really difficult!! No it's great fun and I love it.  The best bit is spending time with my teacher because she makes me speak the language as much as possible during the lesson.  sometimes we meet at a friend's house but when she is busy we meet in an old fashioned tea room. The owner puts us in a quiet corner and lets us get on with it. British people are renowned for being bad at languages.  We worry about setting it wrong too much.  When you are learning a language you have to have a go and not worry about mistakes. For too long we have let the others do all the work.  I began learning after reading about Tsar Peter the Great, a fascinating book, but it made we want to know about the russian people and I felt I could only do that by learning the language. I've been learning about eighteen months.  There have been many plateaus in this time and I have become discouraged, but somehow I manage to carry on. One of my most important aids is the Bible in Russian on my iphone both written and spoken.  I wouldn't recommend it for everybody but I have quite an extensive knowledge of the Bible.  My favourite passage for this is John 4 where Jesus meets a Samaritan woman.