Я не понимаю

Yesterday I went through Pimsleur's Russian I lessons 1 and 2 two times each, and I repeated them both on my way to work this morning. It is taking me some extra time to grasp the sounds made by these speakers, although I can't fault them for being indistinct: these recordings are rather clear, if somewhat, um, nasal? pinched?

Part of it, I'm sure, is my visual learning style. (It's funny that I see driving as a time to learn anything, because my memory certainly responds better to written input than to aural.) With German words I had two years of college study to provide a foundation, which made it easy to imagine how any given word might be spelled. Similarly, as I was listening to Italian I and II I could imagine possible spellings based on the international pronunciation of letters in the German and Spanish alphabets. (I took two years of Spanish in academy.) Although merely imagining these spellings might leave me with inaccurate writing, if not further trained, the visual/analytical process at least gave me something solid to hang on to, a picture for each word describing at least how I thought it sounded, visually.

This has not been easy to accomplish with Russian, since the sounds are significantly different. But after three times through each lesson, I'm starting to make connections.

The words in the title above are what I get from the Bablefish when I ask it to translate "I don't understand." The phrase I hear sounds something like this:

Yah nye panyemaio

[Why is there no schwa symbol in HTML?]

Not having learned how to pronounce Cyrillic characters, I can only guess that AltaVista offered a fair translation this time. Someone please leave a comment to let me know how close this is. <grin>