We are very happy to announce the publication of our new Russian textbook: “Sputnik. An Introductory Russian Language Course. Part 1” by Dr. Julia Rochtchina. Sputnik comes with a complementary website SputnikTextbook.org. You’ll find a lot of professional (studio quality) audio recordings and exercises there. Learn more.
Cheers,
Language Metropolis team
Happy New Year to all!
January is our busiest time of the year. For many people, learning Russian is a serious enough challenge to qualify for the New Year’s resolution. For these people we say: good luck to you brave ones! It is our pleasure to support you during this exciting journey.
Language Metropolis team
Dear Customers!
We added a new “destination testing” feature to our program this weekend. Each destination consists of several scenes. When you have learned the words and phrases for the scenes, you can take a timed test. Your objective is to get from the first scene to the final one by listening to the characters, choosing the right answers and formulating the correct questions. You will have 20 to 30 minutes to complete each test. A wrong answer subtracts 30 seconds from the time remaining. Each test is designed to simulate a real-life situation.
For our existing customers: to benefit from this new functionality you will get an additional 1 year added to your subscription free of charge. If your subscription has already expired, don’t worry, we will reopen it and you can enjoy an additional year of the service for no additional charge.
A new school season has begun. Congratulations to those attending a school, college or university! We hope everybody had a great summer. It was a very busy and exciting summer for us: we had opened a publishing department and got a Russian textbook for beginners published. At the moment the limited edition of the book is available to universities only, but it will be available to everyone interested in it in about a month. Stay tuned!
For those learning Russian this is a great blog by Laura Williams (http://llorax.livejournal.com). She writes each post in both English and Russian. Read this post for example: Весенний день в русской деревне. A spring day in the Russian village.
About Laura in her own words:
“It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years since I “traded” my home state of Colorado in the US for Russia. I have already lived half my life in a foreign country – essentially my entire adult life. I came here for work and stayed for love – love of Russia’s vast expanses, its wilderness, and the people who protect it. But it was for one special person that I not only left behind my homeland, but all the conveniences of civilization and city life, and moved to a small village in the Bryansk Forest…”
«Не верится, но прошло более 20 лет как я "променяла" родной штат Колорадо в США на Россию. Я уже половину своей жизни живу на "чужбине" - фактически всю свою взрослую жизнь. Приехала по работе, осталась по любви - любовь к российским просторам, ее дикой природе и людям, которые ее защищают. Но ради одного особенного человека я оставила не только родину, но и все удобства цивилизации и городской жизни и переехала жить в маленькую деревню в Брянских лесах... »
«Не верится, но прошло более 20 лет как я "променяла" родной штат Колорадо в США на Россию. Я уже половину своей жизни живу на "чужбине" - фактически всю свою взрослую жизнь. Приехала по работе, осталась по любви - любовь к российским просторам, ее дикой природе и людям, которые ее защищают. Но ради одного особенного человека я оставила не только родину, но и все удобства цивилизации и городской жизни и переехала жить в маленькую деревню в Брянских лесах... »
With the upcoming release of the destination testing, we are adding a bit more structure into the course. There will be 175 steps to complete. Picture below demonstrates 17 steps you are to take for the “from Airplane to your Hotel” destination. Learn words and phrases, listen to the dialogs and read the scene comments to prepare for the final destination test.
Happy New Year to all our customers and visitors!
In 2014 we will keep doing our best to make it as easy as possible for you to improve your Russian. In the next little while we will be adding the destination tests. We are quite excited about this new functionality. This is how it will work: imagine you need to get from the hotel to the train station with your train departing in an hour. You will have one hour to take a bus then a subway and catch the train departing for St. Petersburg. Along the way you will need to answer questions to proceed from one scene to the next one.
Coming up soon: a new scene to learn restaurant related phrases and vocabulary. Talk to your server, pick the food from the menu, ask for a receipt etc.
We are adding 100 new pictures to our dictionary. Picture based exercises are in development as well and to be released soon.
Recent update allows each phrase to be broken up into words. This may help you practice recognizing sounds of individual words within the sentence.
Michael
For comments: service@languagemetropolis.com
Memorizing a new word and its translation isn’t always enough for long-term language retention. Have you ever noticed that the very next morning or in just a few days, your new vocabulary word is gone and you’re faced with learning and memorizing terms all over again? This is because our brain does not always create ample associative links for new lessons to stick. Language learning experts will tell you that memorization is aided when you learn words in their natural context.
That’s why we’ve updated Language Metropolis to provide terms in their context. Learn sentences and phrases including each word’s proper articulation and translation.
Sign-up, sign-in, and start learning the Russian language in context, today!
We’re excited to announce the launch of bigger, easier buttons plus a few other great interface upgrades available to iPad users. In addition, our developers have fine-tuned sound volume issues that some of our loyal users brought to our attention. Sign-in to start using Language Metropolis on your iPad and enjoy our latest enhancements, today.
Michael
Questions? service@languagemetropolis.com
We’re pleased to announce the introduction of Memory Vault for Language Metropolis. Use Memory Vault to measure your progress and see how many vocabulary words you’ve mastered. Memory Vault marks each word as either remembered or not based on how successful you are during testing. Stay tuned as we unveil more exciting enhancements in the coming months!
For questions and suggestions: service@languagemetropolis.com
Everyone at Language Metropolis would like to say ‘thank you’ for providing your valuable feedback over the past months.
We’ve been busy making improvements to the Language Metropolis experience based on actual user input. Among those recent upgrades is the ability to skip all dialogs on the current scene and move to the next. We still recommend learning vocabulary before you continue to make sure you get the best program results, as the package was designed to gradually cultivate your Russian lexicon. It’s also important to see words repeatedly and in various contexts.
Stay tuned as we introduce a few new features over the coming months including the ability to open all scenes and destinations, skipping the gradual learning process mentioned above. This is offered primarily for those of you who simply want to pick-up phrases from a particular scene or refresh your skills.
We’ll also soon launch a word context feature including the ability to see how words are used in various situations. This new learning dimension can improve both memorization and retention.
Finally, our developers are excited to expand our online dictionary in the coming months.
Michael.
For questions and suggestions: service@languagemetropolis.com
We’re excited to announce the launch of Language Metropolis! Everyone on our team would like to thank our users for their continued patience and support during the development stage, and we invite you to take part in the innovative and interactive language learning experience.
Michael.