: Assimil Le Russe
: Duolingo Russian
: Дэвид Эддингс - Обретение чуда
: LWT Known
Finished:
Russian Pronunciation Trainer
Russian World 1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.2
It's been 4 weeks since I came back to Russian. I've done about 25% of the Assimil passive wave and I'm halfway through the Duolingo tree, which is a couple skills further along than where I stopped last time round. Working on my pronunciation and shadowing has really helped - some of those sentences they picked in Assimil - Le Russe are a truly good workout. I'm still struggling with rolling Rs mid word, but it's improving a lot now. Still not quite there, but good progress! One high frequency word today was a real test of patience - it's so close to my own name that it was super hard not to fall into the wrong stress. And it totally explains why my mum has difficulties pronouncing my name sometimes. I always wondered why that was - now I know! It's great to be connecting with my mum like this and I look forward to sharing more with her. She keeps recommending movies and books that aren't translated into any language I know, so it will be great once I break that native material barrier.
Speaking of native material, I finally abandoned graded readers this last week and started the first David Eddings book in translation. I'm still at the stage of deciphering it like Latin, but it's getting a little quicker every day. Yesterday I only needed 45min for 200 words rather than an hour and I didn't get a headache either. Slow progress still, but I'm following the story just fine now. It's becoming less and less guesswork and I rarely need the French translation to check whether I'm on track. Early days, I'm not even through the prologue yet, but I feel like I'm making progress. Still a long way to go until I hit my goal of having added 35,000 word forms to the LWT database, but at least I'm already dealing with native content rather than dumbed down teaching texts.
Also, I understand about 70% of Russian teaching videos on Youtube. I think they're a little bit of a waste of time normally, so I don't really watch that kind of stuff. However, the other day I watched a mildly interesting interview with a Russian teacher in Kiev and I could follow it just fine. With the limited vocabulary of those videos I'm not really sure that's a real achievement though. While listening to ночной дозор I still understand nothing. A word here or there, sure, but understanding not even one whole sentence while listening for 10 minutes is a bit sad. I listen to it only for the rhythm of the language while reading along, so understanding isn't a priority, but I wish I would get more details than just the vaguest notion of what's going on. I also wish I had an audiobook for Обретение чуда, that would be a bit more sensible than listening to another book! I don't think it exists though sadly.
By the way, I stumbled over a link to emk's post on the old forum about
The Cheating & Consolidating Method. It's exactly what I did with French too and this is what I'm trying to do with Russian as well. With Russian it's definitely a lot more difficult to get to the stage where one can start to decipher, because there are just so many things that seem bonkers when encountering them for the first time! I tried to do intensive reading during the last time I attempted Russian and I just couldn't figure out who was doing what to whom and why there were always at least 2 verbs with the same meaning and all that crazy stuff that we all love about Russian grammar. And the most baffling part: why on earth does the Kindle pop up dictionary give me the translation "to eat" when I'd expect "to be"?! Funny in retrospect, but super frustrating when all your other study is traditional grammar torture and anki. Worst part: Anki was truly and completely a waste of time, because that only stuck short term, by now it's all gone. I can basically remember that I've seen certain words before, but not what they mean. At least all that grammar torture last time round did some good though. I wouldn't expect to be deciphering anything but graded readers until I'd be finished with all of Assimil if I hadn't done all that grammar torture before. It definitely helps not to have to look up declination and conjugation tables for every single word as well! If I had to do that, it would really be Latin 8th grade all over.