Learning Russian

There's a limit to what you learn in a homestay. Sure, you'll get basic conversational russian and a bit of vocabularly, particularly relating to different kinds of bedding, hot water (or lack of), toilet paper plus various sorts of food, arrangements for keys, times of arrival and departure and so on

But to learn properly you need someone who can teach, not just speak fluently. For example, your average russian instinctively uses case endings and verb conjugations. Learning as an adult simply by imitation is difficult, much better find someone who can actually teach.

You don;'t say where you're form, but for some nationalities and some kinds of visas there's a registration process that more complicated if you stay in people's homes rather than official hotels.

You are currently in Russia with what sort of visa?

There are many language schools where you can take courses for a couple of weeks. These schools have teachers who can help you with the basics and who can place you in a homestay.

As Andrew notes in a homestay you may learn basic conversational Russian but the residents will not stick around all day to have conversations with you and the quality of their Russian instruction will vary with their education and ability to explain things which may or may not be particularly good.

The average native English speaker doesn't understand tenses, voices, parts of speech and neither does the average Russian speaker. The problem arises in that in Russian particular parts of speech have particular endings, prepositions require certain cases, there is agreement between nouns and adjectives, verbs have conjugations. Perhaps this is familiar to you from Thorn Tree world, but most native English speakers with no experience learning foreign languages don't understand these things intuitively.

You might want to look at sites like studyrussian.com, masterrussian.com and others to learn more about short term programs. I seem to recall that there is one in Irkutsk and another in Ulan Ude if you like Siberia and there are several in Moscow and Petersburg. Often they have 2-4 weeks programs.

Ruth

Hello Andrew and everbrite,
Thank you very much for your quick answers. I completely agree with you that Russian can´t be learned just through staying in a family which is why I want to get a private Russian teacher at the same time.
The reason why I prefer a private teacher to a ´official` course is that most often you´ll meet other foreigners there and you´ll find yourself speaking other languages in your free time; this I was hoping to avoid (at least partly) by staying in a Russian family, where I thought I could at least use right away some of what I´ve learnt. Apart from that private teaching is a lot more flexible in many aspects (speed, commitments for shorter periods of time, that can be prolonged etc.. I had a former university teacher as a private teacher in Petersburg some time ago, which helped a lot and thus makes me look for something similar now.)
Maybe I also have to add that I´m not a beginner (I started learning Russian in 2003 (with qualified teachers), so I have some experience with the many problems of this language) and thus don´t have to start but improve my Russian (sorry if the title was misleading).
Matt
P.S. I´m in Russia on a business visa.

My guide at Irkutsk was a linguist. She said I should not be embarressed at how bad my Russian was since most Russians can't speak it properly :-)
Her classmates at university often pick each othe up on their bad Russian she said with the comment "You call yourself a linguist. You cant even speak your own language".

If you want to learn it properly, you will need a real teacher I think. There are a number of organisations on teh web that can help.