neofight78 returns from his Siberian exile? [RU, ES]

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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Sat Jan 30, 2016 1:51 am

Upon recommendation I've started watching Обратная сторона луны. There are no subtitles, and I'm not yet able to always follow the dialog 100%, but I seem to be understanding enough, and the series seems quite good. I believe it's the Russian version of Life on Mars, but not having watched the original, that tells me nothing! :lol:



The lessons where we work through videos feel like they are very productive. As I mentioned before I follow up the lessons by using subs2srs to cement the material. Intensively studying the dialog in this way is hopefully helping with my listening skills, but it's also giving gobs of little constructions and expressions that are only really found in native speech. Learning these should pay off twice over, i.e. I'll understand spoken Russian better, and I'll be able to speak more naturally. So far it looks like the teacher is wisely choosing the clips, in that the speech is quite rich and not much time is wasted on pretty basic stuff. Overall I am quite pleased with this, and I'm keen to see how this study pays off in a few months time.

I mentioned previously that I wanted to move my daily reading to the morning before I leave work. I've successfully established this habit. I'm still plodding away at the Colour of Magic and I feel it's slowly getting easier, although I'm still tackling it in bite size chunks. I'm typically studying another text as well, but this is taken from varying sources.

Generally I feeling like I'm getting quite a good synergy between the aspects of study, and quite a lot of those words that I never quite understood before, due to a lack of an English equivalent, are beginning to make sense. The only thing I feel I'm lagging a bit on is the grammar study. But I'm caught up on my flashcards now, so I can resume grammar study and putting in new grammar cards.
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:02 pm

Time and health seem to be in short supply at the moment, but I'm carrying on as best I can.

I'm continuing to watch Обратная сторона луны, and as I'm watching it in short chunks it should keep me going for some time.

The reading is going quite well, I'm continuing with the Colour of Magic but I've been using some new sources of material recently too. I've been taking some entries from a children's encyclopedia, to help me get better at describing physical and mechanical things. I've also been taking the text and audio from the programme Доброе Утро, the topics are varied and the clips are a few minutes long, making them just right for studying.

I'm also going to try to get going in my area of professional interest i.e. programming. It's a tricky one as most teachers and indeed people in general don't really know much about it. I've found a couple of potential exchange partners via HelloTalk, and I'm working on getting some vocabulary lists done via upwork to help bootstrap my knowledge in this area. It'll take a while to be competent in this subject area, but hopefully I'll get there.
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby Ed1991 » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:41 pm

neofight78 wrote:I'm also going to try to get going in my area of professional interest i.e. programming. It's a tricky one as most teachers and indeed people in general don't really know much about it. I've found a couple of potential exchange partners via HelloTalk, and I'm working on getting some vocabulary lists done via upwork to help bootstrap my knowledge in this area. It'll take a while to be competent in this subject area, but hopefully I'll get there.


If you look on Russian download sites it's possible to find a ton of books regarding programming. Just pick your languages and you should be able to find some books which will introduce to the various programming languages albeit in Russian, with your background and knowledge already reading these should get you up to speed with the specific phrasing and terminology, which I'm guessing is very similar in Russian. I work in SEO and my job involves some stuff with Python and PHP, and far as I can tell a lot of the terminology is relatively similar.
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby azul » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:02 pm

I just read through some of your Russian journey, and, as a fellow learner of the language, I wanted to say that I admire your diligence! Also, it seems like you've watched a large chunk of contemporary Russian tv shows. Do you have a favorite?
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:49 pm

Ed1991 wrote:If you look on Russian download sites it's possible to find a ton of books regarding programming. Just pick your languages and you should be able to find some books which will introduce to the various programming languages albeit in Russian, with your background and knowledge already reading these should get you up to speed with the specific phrasing and terminology, which I'm guessing is very similar in Russian. I work in SEO and my job involves some stuff with Python and PHP, and far as I can tell a lot of the terminology is relatively similar.


That's sort of my next stage really. I want to quickly kickstart my vocabulary before then moving on to reading some materials. I was thinking of starting with some articles, but perhaps as you suggest there could be some good books to work on. Specifically I was thinking of this site: https://habrahabr.ru - translated articles are marked up and there are links to the English originals.

azul wrote:I just read through some of your Russian journey, and, as a fellow learner of the language, I wanted to say that I admire your diligence! Also, it seems like you've watched a large chunk of contemporary Russian tv shows. Do you have a favorite?


Thank you for the compliment! I don't know whether I can claim to have watched a large chunk of contemporary shows, but I guess I've been watching them for about 18 months by now. I'm not sure if I have a favourite, I guess I probably enjoyed Нюхач and Баллада о бомбере the most. But of course YMMV.
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Sun Mar 06, 2016 11:17 pm

Hopefully I've started to turn a corner health wise. I'm behind on where I want to be, but in reality I'm still getting a decent amount of study done. I'm about three quarters of the way through Обратная сторона луны, although I have been distracted by the latest series of Кухня in over the past week.

The reading is ticking over nicely, and I'm feeling some progress there. I'm trying to give my vocabulary a bit of a boost at the moment, so I'm making flashcards out of a lot of the previously unknown words in the texts I'm reading. Only once I've finished with a text, do I create flashcards from it. It means I already have started to learn the words, and I have some context for them too. The result being it's not to strenuous learning double the number of words each day, although I'm keeping a careful on the number of reviews of course.

I've just started today learning programming vocabulary. I'm going to keep it low key at the moment, just learning a few words each day. Then in a few months time when it's accumulated to a decent number, I'll start to more intensively study this area. At least that's the plan at this stage.

In other news, I'm planning another two week trip to Russia in April. I've received my invitation and I'm off to the visa application centre on Friday. Fingers crossed it all goes smoothly...
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Sun Mar 06, 2016 11:32 pm

neofight78 wrote:I'm thinking of trying to be a bit more systematic with my speaking practice. I have a pretty decent conversational core and can talk about most things, but I still from time to time stray into topics about which I struggle to talk. Does anyone know of a good list of topics? There are plenty of stereotypical lists aimed a tourists or students, but I don't really want to talk anymore about Russian traditions or immigration. Perhaps there's a better system than just having a list, I don't know. Anyhow, one to ponder.


This is still an unresolved question in my mind at the moment...
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Fri Mar 18, 2016 9:52 pm

As before, I'm not getting as much studying done as I would like, but I'm still getting quite a bit done. Indeed there is not a lot to update on, but I wanted to share some new material that I've been looking at this week.

It just so happened that I listened to an excellent podcast (in English) about Даниил Хармс, a Russian absurdist. The podcast itself was written in this same style and is very well done. I highly recommend having a listen:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mndbk

Anyhow, being a lover of all things daft and humorous, I've decided to introduce some of his material into my reading and listening. You can find some of his stuff at lib.ru:

http://lib.ru/HARMS/

Даниил Хармс.png


Perhaps this was already known to people, but the UK Russian newspapers Англия and Пульс are available for free download on issuu.com. So I'm also going to include the occasional article from them in my reading:

https://issuu.com/pulseuk
https://issuu.com/angliya

Of course I shall be continuing with Colour of Magic and Доброе Утро also.
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neofight78
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby neofight78 » Fri Apr 29, 2016 7:52 pm

Another long gap without an update. However, I have a bit more news to report this time round.

First of all, I'm not long back from a two week trip to Russia. This was the antithesis of my first visit to Russia. Instead of lots of lessons cramming for an exam, this was pretty much a holiday. I didn't engage with any studying, although of course I got plenty of practice by virtue of being in Russia. One thing I noticed, I seemed to have largely lost my nervousness about speaking Russian in the "real world". I am now much more comfortable ordering things for example. Most remarkable thing was that despite being in Siberia in April, the temperature was 20-25 degrees practically the whole time. I even ended up sunburnt the first weekend! The only downside is that now I have a flashcard backlog to catch up on :lol:

The second bit of news is that I handed in my notice at work today, with the result that I will be a free man in 3 months time. Finally after mulling it over for about 18 months, I'm going to head off to live for a while in Russia. The exact details of the plan are not yet set in stone, but currently the intention is to study Russian at university, specifically at НГУ. I'm looking at an academic year of study culminating in the C1 / TRKI-3. My other objective is to get my professional Russian up to scratch as well, so that working in Russia or with Russians could be a future possibility. Of course I shall be continuing with my haphazard independent study of Russian too. Some details to sort out yet, but watch this space...
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Re: neofight78's Wayward Ramble to Russian Fluency [TAC 2016]

Postby Arnaud » Fri Apr 29, 2016 8:08 pm

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