Образование в России

[arseniiv]

ayashay в сообщении #1203945 писал(а):

Я поправляюсь ... is that correct? :)

Almost so. I think an average native speaker will be somewhat surprised but will do get the desired meaning. Usually for an animate subject «поправляться» means
• to correct oneself (after a mistake etc.);
• to be recovering from an illness;
• to put on weight [for which there is a somewhat less neutral variant «толстеть» which almost literally translates as «to become more thick/fat», but some people don’t like that be said about them or someone else].
For «get better» used with an animate subject there’s a more preferred translations such as «исправляться» (yeah, subtleties of verbal prefix usage in Russian are a mess alike English phrasal verb preposition ones) or «улучшаться» (almost the same as «становиться лучше», almost literal translation of «get better») or something. Although, in this case I think a more specific phrase such as <oops, can’t conjure anything good at the moment; I hope someone will help me!> seems more natural.

There are discussions about this stuff on russian.stackexchange and Tatoeba forum but sporadically they are misleading (after all it’s the internets), e. g. natives and non-natives alike often tell nonexistent things about phonetics and phonology.

[ayashay]

rockclimber в сообщении #1203949 писал(а):

Я поправляюсь

I guess I am not getting better, then.

How do I say "My Russian is getting better, I think"
?

[Munin]

There is no natural way to say this exact phrase in Russian :-)

[arseniiv]

Why, how about e. g. «мой русский всё лучше»?

[rockclimber]

1) Учу потихоньку ("there is a progress, but not very big")
2) Всё лучше и лучше ("every day it is getting better" - in a case it is really good)

[Munin]

arseniiv
It's unnatural. You can say

Мой русский лучше, чем месяц назад.
Мой русский становится лучше с каждым днём.

but in Russian they don't use the concept of "better" without any reference point. To translate this to Russian you should first ask yourself: "better with respect to what?".

If you have spoken to the same person a month ago, you can say

Мой русский всё лучше и лучше.

meaning "better than a month ago."

But if you haven't, you'd better say something like "I'm making progress."

[arseniiv]

I imagine situations where I think «лучше» without any explicitly worded reference point is quite normal. For example, «всё лучше и лучше!» said sarcastically in worsening circumstances. Implicitly, there is a reference to the moment of speech. Nonetheless, I’m ready to agree it’s too subtle a detail to discuss here now.

[rockclimber]

Munin
It looks like we speak different Russian languages

[arseniiv]

It could be dialect/idiolect differences.

[Munin]

There's an influence of English words and idioms on Russian lately. Mostly because of bad translators who make lazy translations word-by-word, and rarely search for better ways to express the same idea.