Still learning French, and now starting Russian

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blaurebell
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby blaurebell » Sun Mar 26, 2017 8:28 am

Fortheo wrote:Thanks for visiting Lilly. I was actually just reading your log and for a while I thought it was strange how we seem to be interested in the same languages—German, French, Russian, and Spanish—then I saw that you're interested in Japanese as well, which is a language that I actually spent a solid year and a half studying when I was about 18 and I'd love to get into it one day. It's just interesting that we're drawn to the same languages . If you mention that you're also interested in Norwegian, then I'll be convinced that you're some kind of alternate me from an alternate time line.


It's indeed interesting that we seem to like the same languages! That said, I come with German built in, so I didn't really have a choice there. It is a really beautiful and complex language for writing though, so I'm not complaining :D Learning English was definitely much easier than learning German would have been! Spoken German, not such a big fan, especially these days, but I still read German, especially literature from the beginning of the 20th century.

I'm not interested in Norwegian, *but* I have always been fascinated by Icelandic which is essentially very very old Norwegian. :D So, even there we have some overlap! Icelandic is not a particularly useful language to learn though, so I've not really done much with it apart from staring at grammar tables. I usually only learn languages that are in some way useful to me, so unless I wanted to move to one of the Scandinavian countries I probably wouldn't learn any languages from that group. And moving there is really highly unlikely because I don't like cold weather. Swedish perhaps - I grew up with a lot of Swedish literature -, but essentially I don't have a good enough reason. The only temptation is that by learning Swedish you can read Danish and Norwegian too. Essentially learn 1 get 2 for free. If it had more overlap with Icelandic I'd be tempted to learn Norwegian, but actually Icelandic grammar is much more complex, because it hasn't changed much in the last 500 years.

Xmmm wrote:I'm eighteen months into Russian and have read 6000 pages, but when I pick up The Head of Professor Dowell, LingQ tells me that roughly 15% of the words are words I've never seen before. This makes it 'easy' reading for me, because when I pick up Azazel by Boris Akunin, LingQ tells me that 25% of the words are words I've never seen before. Russian has a lot of words!


Oh dear, I thought it was bad, but I didn't think it was that bad! How many known word forms do you have in your LingQ so far? For comparison sake: I have roughly 28,000 known word forms in my LWT for French and can read without a dictionary with good precision. I stopped using LWT after 5000 pages. I've seen all sorts of estimates for Russian, between 35,000 and 60,000. I'm optimistic/deluded and still hope for 35,000 :lol:
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Arnaud » Sun Mar 26, 2017 10:41 am

Xmmm wrote:I'm eighteen months into Russian and have read 6000 pages, but when I pick up The Head of Professor Dowell, LingQ tells me that roughly 15% of the words are words I've never seen before. This makes it 'easy' reading for me, because when I pick up Azazel by Boris Akunin, LingQ tells me that 25% of the words are words I've never seen before. Russian has a lot of words!
I've also found that reading Akunin is more difficult than reading Tolstoï, for exemple. Try to read Anna Karenine and you'll be nicely surprised, it's not that difficult. I'm also reading The Head of Professor Dowell, and I'm at 6% of unknown words, so if you're B2/C1 it's a good try: not too difficult.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Xmmm » Sun Mar 26, 2017 3:00 pm

blaurebell wrote:
Xmmm wrote:I'm eighteen months into Russian and have read 6000 pages, but when I pick up The Head of Professor Dowell, LingQ tells me that roughly 15% of the words are words I've never seen before. This makes it 'easy' reading for me, because when I pick up Azazel by Boris Akunin, LingQ tells me that 25% of the words are words I've never seen before. Russian has a lot of words!


Oh dear, I thought it was bad, but I didn't think it was that bad! How many known word forms do you have in your LingQ so far? For comparison sake: I have roughly 28,000 known word forms in my LWT for French and can read without a dictionary with good precision. I stopped using LWT after 5000 pages. I've seen all sorts of estimates for Russian, between 35,000 and 60,000. I'm optimistic/deluded and still hope for 35,000 :lol:


I know 14,500 words on LingQ and actually Professor Dowell for me is more like 12% unknown. I didn't upload all the chapters at once so I can't get an estimate of the overall book--I just have to eyeball the unread chapters and I think my previous guess of 15% was a little high. I'm not finding it difficult to read, but I do have to look up maybe ten words a page.

I would actually say it looks like the easiest novel I've read. Here they are in order of difficulty:

1. Голова профессора Доуэля
1. Скверный анекдот
2. Мы
3. Собачье сердце
4. Пикник на обочине (only read first five chapters)
5. Белая гвардия

Something like that. Архипелаг ГУЛАГ also doesn't look overwhelmingly hard. I read about five chapters of part one. Very grim of course, but what makes it readable is Solzhenitsyn's light conversational style and mordant humor. And it didn't hurt that I'd read it in English, although that must have been ten years ago.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby blaurebell » Mon Mar 27, 2017 7:44 pm

Xmmm wrote:I know 14,500 words on LingQ and actually Professor Dowell for me is more like 12% unknown.


6000 pages and only 14,500 words? Must be different how LingQ counts those words. Or maybe all that typing in LWT is more effective? I'm at 5000 known words with Russian in LWT and that's after 150 pages.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Xmmm » Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:18 pm

blaurebell wrote:
Xmmm wrote:I know 14,500 words on LingQ and actually Professor Dowell for me is more like 12% unknown.


6000 pages and only 14,500 words? Must be different how LingQ counts those words. Or maybe all that typing in LWT is more effective? I'm at 5000 known words with Russian in LWT and that's after 150 pages.


If you know 5000 words after 150 pages ... to me that sounds unusual. Perhaps you have a photographic memory? 150 pages is only 37,500 words and a lot of them are repeated. So you're saying that you "know" essentially every word you encountered in that 150 pages and you will not forget them when you pick up the next book and there they are again. There are certainly people that have that kind of gift. If you're one of them, congratulations.

By contrast, I know 14500 words, but have around 100,000 lingqs. These are words (yellow color) that I've seen before and that seem familiar, but that I might not instantly know the meaning of. You seem to be saying that for you, you don't have words in the yellow category. That's a nice superpower to have, but I don't have it, alas.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby blaurebell » Mon Mar 27, 2017 9:16 pm

Xmmm wrote:By contrast, I know 14500 words, but have around 100,000 lingqs. These are words (yellow color) that I've seen before and that seem familiar, but that I might not instantly know the meaning of. You seem to be saying that for you, you don't have words in the yellow category. That's a nice superpower to have, but I don't have it, alas.


I have about 10,600 words in the database in total, and the 5000 are those that I can remember with precision. There are also about 900 that I can guess from context or I can say roughly what they mean, e.g. "some kind of tree", "some type of clothing". LWT not only has known, seen before and new, but you can set a status between 1-5. I don't have a photographic memory, but I think it helps that I use LWT pretty much every day and that I type the meaning and base word for each entry. It means that for all the different conjugations and cases I will type the meaning and listen to the dictionary pronunciation to check that I'm not mixing up letters. It's more active engagement than just reading the meaning in the dictionary. Those 5000 known word forms are of course different word forms of the same high frequency vocabulary. Picking up low frequency vocabulary takes much longer and they might disappear again if I then don't read any books on the same kind of topics. So, 6000 pages is about 100,000 word forms in total? With French I had 35,000 total for 5000 pages. By the end I knew about 28,000 of those with precision. With these numbers I'm kinda sure now that I'll need 10,000 pages to get to a similar known vs unknown ratio for Russian. :?
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Fortheo » Tue Mar 28, 2017 3:27 am

Ani wrote:I think you are way closer to reading anything you want happily and comfortably in French than you think. I've put in 3000 pages since we discussed La Délicatesse and they just keep getting faster and easier. It's been a huge change from last year (started reading my first book in French in December 2015 and read about 5000 pages in 2016).

How are the Musso books content wise? Good reads?

You'll have to keep a list of "easy" Russian material. I won't get there until next year at least but I like your strategy with translated children's books and manga. (Wonder if they've translated Magic Treehouse into Russian? :)


La fille de Brooklyn was very engaging, so if you like thrillers then you might enjoy that. Although, I did find that it seemed to try too hard to constantly have yet another twist. I'm enjoying Seras-tu là? more-so thanLa fille de Brooklyn, but I'll hold my tongue on giving my full thoughts until I finish it. The book that a lot of Musso fans usually cite as their favorite is Central Park, so maybe if you try a Musso book you might want to start with that one (I'll likely read that one next).

As for being able to read anything that I want in French, I definitely can feel that my reading has been improving very quickly these last six months, so I hope you're right. The strange thing is that when I first started learning french, it was a method to distract myself from my depression and anxiety disorders; and it was also simply a personal challenge. But because of those somewhat vague, endless goals, I've never really saw a fixed point in the future where I can say, "finally, I've reached my goal, I can do whatever I want with the language." Now that I'm finally making my way into authentic French, I'm realizing that I don't know what I want to do with the language in general—my depression makes it difficult to want much of anything—so I definitely need to figure that out before I can even "read whatever I want" as you say. Sociology interests me a little bit, so maybe if I can read some Durkheim or Frantz Fanon I'll feel like I've "made it" in terms of reading French, but I honestly don't know. I think my French studies will always just be more about the journey rather than the destination. Long story short: I don't know what I'm doing and I'm just keeping myself busy until I figure things out in my life haha. It's strange how a comment about reading spurred such a rant out of me :lol:

One last thing: You read fast! I don't think I've even read half the amount of pages you've read this year! I read like 100-150 pages a week, but that doesn't include manga or comics or blogs. You're easily doubling my pace! it's impressive.

Oh, and I'm not sure about the Magic Treehouse series in Russian, but to be honest, even though the first few hundred pages of that series helped me start reading french, I don't think I'd want to read it again. Animorphs on the other hand..... I've already found that series in Russian, so I'll definitely be using it again.


Also, I think we're approaching Russian at a similar pace, so I doubt I'll start reading books before you do. I actually enjoy taking Russian slowly because I'm not experiencing what I use to call "language headaches", which were month long brain numbing headaches I had while I was doing French Assimil lessons each day for months on end.
Last edited by Fortheo on Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Ani » Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:56 am

Fortheo wrote:
As for being able to read anything that I want in French, I definitely can feel that my reading has been improving very quickly these last six months, so I hope you're right. The strange thing is that when I first started learning french, it was a method to distract myself from my depression and anxiety orders; and it was also simply a personal challenge. But because of those somewhat vague, endless goals, I've never really saw a fixed point in the future where I can say, "finally, I've reached my goal, I can do whatever I want with the language." Now that I'm finally making my way into authentic French, I'm realizing that I don't know what I want to do with the language in general—my depression makes it difficult to want much of anything—so I definitely need to figure that out before I can even "read whatever I want" as you say. Sociology interests me a little bit, so maybe if I can read some Durkheim or Frantz Fanon I'll feel like I've "made it" in terms of reading French, but I honestly don't know. I think my French studies will always just be more about the journey rather than the destination. Long story short: I don't know what I'm doing and I'm just keeping myself busy until I figure things out in my life haha. It's strange how a comment about reading spurred such a rant out of me :lol:


Haha. I definitely was not considering this depth when I made my comments :) I was only responding to how you said you were sticking with Musso because it was a good level for you and I think you are getting to the end of the choosing books by difficulty phase. I understand crashing distractions from anxiety and I do understand very well the feeling of not knowing where the finish line is. I don't really know what I want to do with French either. I have self-created some circumstances where I need it, but I could just as easily drop it tomorrow with no consequence. I've started day dreaming about studying for a C2 exam just to win myself a trophy at the end of all this. Not really sure that is the direction I'll go though.

Anyway, I could be into Animorphs. I am not sure how much Jack and Annie I could take anyway. Just a couple of those though and you'd sure have the phases for "Jack called out..." and "Annie turned and looked. In the sky she saw..."down pat !
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Carmody » Tue Mar 28, 2017 2:55 pm

Fortheo
...
Long story short: I don't know what I'm doing and I'm just keeping myself busy until I figure things out in my life haha.
Fortheo, you put up brilliant and insightful comments in your threads. I am 75 y.o. and am still trying to "to distract myself from my depression and anxiety disorder " and "to figure things out in my life haha." Seriously.

I do taichi and the teacher says that once you have truly figured it all out in the form, then, you have lost touch with it.

Suggestion: that physical exercise and work outs are important. I found I can't always do everything in my head. I need to daily exercise with the body. It is not The Answer, but it definitely helps greatly.
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Re: Still learning French, and now starting Russian

Postby Fortheo » Fri Mar 31, 2017 1:52 pm

Ani wrote:
Haha. I definitely was not considering this depth when I made my comments :) I was only responding to how you said you were sticking with Musso because it was a good level for you and I think you are getting to the end of the choosing books by difficulty phase. I understand crashing distractions from anxiety and I do understand very well the feeling of not knowing where the finish line is. I don't really know what I want to do with French either. I have self-created some circumstances where I need it, but I could just as easily drop it tomorrow with no consequence. I've started day dreaming about studying for a C2 exam just to win myself a trophy at the end of all this. Not really sure that is the direction I'll go though.

Anyway, I could be into Animorphs. I am not sure how much Jack and Annie I could take anyway. Just a couple of those though and you'd sure have the phases for "Jack called out..." and "Annie turned and looked. In the sky she saw..."down pat!


I think the C2 exam is a fine goal. At least it's something concrete to aim for. For me, I'm really wishing that I lived in or near a francophone country like Belgium, switzerland, or slightly more realistically (for me anyways), Quebec. I think all of us language learners dream of moving to a country where our target language is used. Also, I think you're right about me getting to the end of choosing books by difficulty :o, which is weird because it opens up a whole world of new options for me. I do still struggle with the first few chapters of a new book from time to time, but I think that's mainly because it takes me a little while to get used to the author's style, but for the most part my reading seems to be coming along nicely. Out of curiosity, do you read silently or out loud?


Carmody wrote:Fortheo, you put up brilliant and insightful comments in your threads. I am 75 y.o. and am still trying to "to distract myself from my depression and anxiety disorder " and "to figure things out in my life haha." Seriously.

I do taichi and the teacher says that once you have truly figured it all out in the form, then, you have lost touch with it.

Suggestion: that physical exercise and work outs are important. I found I can't always do everything in my head. I need to daily exercise with the body. It is not The Answer, but it definitely helps greatly.



Thanks, Carmody! I really appreciate messages like this. It's been a tough few years for me, and even though I don't really talk about my depression and anxiety much—I never found talking about it to really help me—I don't hide it either. I don't act like it's not a major factor in my life. It's always there. It's why I study languages. It's why I can't hold down a full time job, and it's why I isolate myself so much. Like I said before, talking about it has never really helped me, but I do think it's good to be able to talk about it, and acknowledge it without shame, even though it is still hard to do with certain people.

Anyways, as for languages, I had a decent week. I did have a bad day today, but then I realize that if an hour and a half of french and 30 minutes of Russian is what I consider a bad day, then it's nothing to really beat myself up about. I've been going to work for ten days straight without a day off (not full 8 hour shifts, but still it's mind numbing ), but after today I'll have the weekend to spend some quality time with my languages.


I've also realized that I really want to find a language exchange partner who won't suddenly become busy every-time I want to talk to them. This has been a trend with my language partners. We have one or two really great convos, but then they're always busy with school or work or whatever. I can honestly scroll through my messages with my french friends, and the last messages sent from all five of them read very similar to "I'm busy with work, or exams." It's very discouraging sometimes, but I guess I need to try to be understanding while also looking for more stable conversational partners. I told myself that this year was the year where I would at least try to do some consistent work on my output, so finding a consistent language partner is important.


One last thing: I need some comedy in my life. If anyone knows and funny french movies, books, shows, whatever, please suggest them. Thanks :)
Last edited by Fortheo on Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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