Spicy Details:

Variety truly is the spice of life and so in this installment of "Spicy Details" the most diverse Rusky Ed unit yet will be discussed. Topics covered include just about anything and everything including Leadership, Hoolignism, Viral Epidemics, Spoiled Children, Kitchen Equipment, and Secret Agents! Nothing is off-limits and all sorts of spicy content is included in this unit. This unit also pays more attention to current worldwide news events than any other previous unit. As an interesting topic comes up, a video about it can be made. This provides a huge amount of flexibility and lots of room for creativity.

Sixteen lessons have been posted with four more to go. Quite a few topics have been covered so far including Class Clowns, Dress Codes, Writing Utensiles, School Rules, and Summer Vacation. Each lesson includes at least one joke. If you watch the videos for this unit, then you will learn that some jokes don't translate well between languages, while others still make sense. After the completion of the SCHOOL STUFF unit, Rusky Ed will turn his attention to a unit on Science and another on the topic of Russian Songs.

Finally surpassing the quarter million mark on YouTube, Rusky Ed has been producing videos since 2008 with a total of approximately 600 videos. In fact, the ten year anniversary of the Rusky Ed channel was just a couple weeks ago! The current plan is to continue the present unit, called SCHOOL STUFF, for at least another year with monthy installments being added on the first Saturday of each month as usual. Hopefully viewers will enjoy watching the videos as much as Rusky Ed enjoys creating them.

Although new lessons may still be added to the Scratch Unit (aka, Rusky Ed Draws Stuff) from time to time, a new unit called School Stuff has been launched. The words for the first unit, along with the quiz and game, are already available. Keeping with the pattern of posting videos on the first Saturday of each month, the plan is to post the first video of this unit on November 4th. This new unit will feature a new intro song: Download the song!

There are fourteen videos posted on YouTube in this series now with several more planned for the upcoming months. At this point five songs have been featured in these videos which demonstrate how to draw a variety of subjects such as bats, turtles, snails, cars, houses, and trees. Be sure to check out this series of videos which are featured in the Rusky Ed Draws Stuff playlist available at this link: RUSKY ED DRAWS STUFF

The first lesson has been posted! It includes a video presentation, a concentration activity, and a quiz. An index page complete with vocabulary for each unit provides quick access to all three items. Additionally, a link from the video lesson at YouTube takes viewers straight to the concentration activity, which in turn provides a link back to the unit index page. A special feature of this unit are traditional Russian songs which play while the visual lesson portion of each video is being presented. This is definitely a departure from previous units, but it's often good to try something new. Click here to check out the unit!

There's just one more lesson to post in the Geography Unit and then Rusky Ed will begin a series of Drawing and Animation lessons. This unit will feature Russian tunes, instructions in Russian, vocabulary quizzes, and visual demonstrations of how to draw and animate various objects.

So the Red Coder Channel didn't amount to much, but the Geography unit is still growing. The plan is to add a few more monthly installments and then to start a new unit focusing on current news events in Russia. Look for the Russian News unit around April or so.

Rusky Ed is launching a new YouTube channel on which he is sharing coding tips with viewers. He's also sneaking in a little Russian language vocabulary along with the tech tips.

So far Rusky Ed has posted new videos to the Russian Geography unit according to plan with a new video being posted on the first Saturday of each month. Seven lessons have been posted so far and another is currently being put together and is scheduled to be posted on October fourth. Not only has Rusky Ed been presenting information about various geographical sites and features found in Russia in this unit, but he has also been reviewing vocabulary words and providing other useful information along the way!

Following the completion of the Rusky Review Unit, a new unit on the geography of Russia has been initiated. The unit will present information about cities, mountains, and bodies of water, as well as other interesting landmarks. The plan is to post either twenty or twenty-four video lessons in all. Due to a rather crowded schedule, video lessons will only be posted once a month, usually on the first Saturday of each month, at least that's the plan!

So far this review unit has gone as planned and Rusky Ed is scheduled to upload the fifteenth lesson in this twenty-lesson series on Saturday (November 30, 2013). At the current rate this unit should be complete sometime in February of 2014, as originally projected. Rusky Ed has been considering various ideas for the next unit, but so far has not settled on anything in particular. Stay tuned for further developments!

With the completion of the tenth unit, Rusky Ed has embarked on a ten month review project. He will upload two videos each month for ten months. So far three of these videos have been uploaded with each video covering half of a unit. The first video dealt with material presented in the first twenty-five lessons of Unit One and the second video dealt with the second half of that unit. Rusky Ed plans to proceed in this manner until a total of twenty review lessons have been uploaded. This should take until approximately February of 2014, assuming, of course, that everything goes according to schedule!

Although Rusky Ed has not yet reached his goal of creating 500 lessons, he has uploaded his 500th video. That's a lot of videos! At this point Rusky Ed is within four video lessons of completing his goal. If Rusky Ed stays on schedule the 500th lesson will be posted on May 4th. Stay tuned for more spicy details!

Just a few lessons left in Unit Nine and so it's time to start preparing for Unit Ten! The intro and outro songs are ready! Many details remain to be finalized for this unit, but at least the songs are ready! Check them out here:

Unit Ten Songs!

With only a couple lessons left to go in Unit Eight, the new song for Unit Nine has finally been recorded and here it is! The format to be used in Unit Nine will be slightly different than what was used in Unit Eight. While units seven and eight were focused on reading Russian, the new focus will be on translating Russian. Stay tuned to see the changes!

Unit Nine Intro Song!

Unit Seven is now complete and so Unit Eight is ready to roll! And you know what that means: A NEW INTRO SONG! But before we get to that, Unit Eight will be the second Reading Russian unit. BTW, units nine and ten will focus on speaking Russian and so those of you who obsess over proper pronunciation will have to wait until then to satisfy your desire for perfect articulation!

Check out the new song for Reading 02!

The Rusky Ed channel on YouTube has surpassed 100,000 views! It took only three years and a few months to make it this far. Hopefully, the next 100,000 views will come much more quickly. In fact, at the current average of 750 views per week it should take approximately two and a half years to reach 200,000 views! What Rusky Ed lacks in speed, he makes up for with persistence!

Rusky Ed is just about done with the third grammar unit. That makes a total of six units completed so far! The seventh unit will be called Reading 01. The format for this unit will be slightly different from the format of previous units. Since the emphasis will be on reading, students will be presented with a short paragraph written in Russian at the beginning of each lesson which they will be asked to translate. After students have attempted to translate the paragraph on their own, Rusky Ed will take them through the paragraph line by line.

Check out the new song for Reading 01!

Rusky Ed is currently on his third mustache. He's worn out two so far and chances are that he'll need a few more before he completes all ten of the planned units! This photograph is from the end of one of Rusky Ed's videos.

The first lesson of the third unit on Russian grammar is expected to be posted on Saturday (November 6, 2010). The first unit covered parts of speech other than verbs and the second unit covered verbs. This third unit will deal with all the parts of speech and more! It's not so much a review unit as a unit that is intended to consolidate and coordinate what was covered in units one and two. From the perspective of an English speaker there's a lot to keep track of when it comes to Russian grammar and Russian Grammar Unit Three will keep track of all the picky details!

Check out the new video intro song!

Recent research has shown that students trying to learn a new language take longer when the language is modeled by speakers with an authentic accent. They actually do better when the language is mispronouced slightly to conform to the phonemic structures of their own language. This way the words are different, but not too different. So, at first it is best not to concentrate so much on proper pronunciation. Build vocabulary and master the grammar first and then worry about working on proper pronunciation and accent!

Worrying about picky details and trying to do everything perfect are enemies of progress. As Noam Chomsky observed in Syntactic Structures (1957), children have an astonishing facility to learn "the rules of natural language no matter how complicated" and they do so "incredibly quickly from what are often imperfect and degenerate samples." People make lots of mistakes when they are learning something new and often their teachers and the materials they use while learning are less than perfect, yet with persistence all the imperfections get worked out and coherent knowledge emerges.

Rusky Ed presents his lessons with a strong accent of unknown origin and many claim that he often mispronounces Russian words. While this is true, the tendency to over-emphasize pronunciation early in the learning of a lesson is counter-productive. First one develops a basic vocabulary, then one learns the grammar, next reading and listening fluency become the focus, and only after all these stages does pronunciation become of prime importance. So, keep this in mind and concentrate on the appropriate focus at each stage of your learning of the Russian language!

Rusky Ed is just about through with his second review video for the first Russian Grammar unit. Rusky Ed is putting out one lesson per week at this time, but hopes to increase his output in the not too distant future. Rusky Ed is also quite pleased to have accumulated over one hundred subscribers on YouTube. It is his hope that all who view his videos are either entertained or edified, or a little of both!

The long awaited units on Russian Grammar are now being produced and uploaded. The introductory lesson for this unit can be viewed by clicking here! As has always been the case in the past, a new introductory song is used for this unit.

Rusky Ed kicked off the Russian Verbs unit just a few days ago. You can watch the preview video for this unit by clicking here! As is the case with the previous units, this unit will include a total of fifty lessons.

UNITS 1 to 3: Vocabulary Building - Introduce various categories of words with an emphasis on spelling. Grammar and pronunciation are not priorities here. In fact, grammar is pretty much ignored and pronunciations are a bit Americanized without attention paid to stress or anything like that.

UNITS 4 to 6: Grammar - After a foundational vocabulary of about 900 words has been built up it is time to start worrying about word forms and stringing words together to form phrases and sentences. Pronunciation is still not a priority.

UNITS 7 and 8: READING - The goal in these lessons is to develop reading fluency and seconarily to work some on writing skills. Pronunciation is still not really an area of focus.

UNITS 9 and 10: SPEAKING - At this point grammar rules should be understood and it is now time to work on real time production of language. This is where pronunciation becomes a key focus.

Video Intro Song Video Conclusion Song

The Super Note contest was a little contest held between some prominent YouTubers to see who could accumulate the largest number of video responses in which people held a note on a single breath for as long as possible. The winner was determined by adding up the total number of seconds that notes were maintained in their video responses.
Super Note Song

Click here to watch СВЕРХНОТА (supernote) at YouTube!!!