Mr. Bitter's Business

I started a new unit this week and it solidified two things that I’ve already remarked on before, the importance of context and the little ways my wife helps me, which boosts my ZPD. As I’ve said before, Rosetta doesn’t give the English translation, and so you have to figure out what is being said based on the image and the context Rosetta tries to create. The phrases in this picture below were kind of difficult to figure out and were really only clear after I asked my wife what they meant. In a real life context, it may be easier since I would be able to see the entire process play out, and know what came before and what came after, instead of just getting five separate images. 1. "The man and his car." 2. "His car is red." 3. "He's driving his car." 4. (This is implying that he's about to let the other guy drive his car.) 5. "He's driving his (as in the other guy's) car." All this was pretty hard to figure out on my own...

Well, I hit a milestone this week; I completed Unit 1 of Level 1! It’s about time, now only a thousand more lessons to go and I will have reached automaticity. This milestone lesson actually goes along pretty well with this week’s readings on transfer. So here goes. This lesson was different from the others because it tried to mimic a real life context where I would have a conversation with people, asking and responding to questions that we each posed. It pretended that I was out for a hike with my dog and I ran into a couple people and we started to chat. Rosetta had certain questions and responses it wanted me to ask, but all of these were based on things that I had already learned, even though I couldn’t recall them that quickly. "Do you have a dog?" "Да. У меня есть собака." (Yes, I have a dog.) (You might think that the guy should be saying, "Is that your dog?", but he's not. "Do you have a dog?" is sort of a bad phrase to put ...