Russian Study Group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
Arnaud
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby Arnaud » Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:54 am

Subtitles in russian (and sometimes other languages) have been added to Барбоскины
Personaly, I find it difficult to understand so I check regularly if I can understand it better (general answer: nope ;) ) and this morning I discovered the subtitles (perhaps they were uploaded a long time ago, I don't know)
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Teango
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby Teango » Tue Mar 07, 2017 10:39 am

Arnaud wrote:Subtitles in russian (and sometimes other languages) have been added to Барбоскины

I recognize those voices...it's my ol' buddy Лунтик and his friends in disguise! ;)
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blaurebell
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby blaurebell » Fri Mar 10, 2017 3:54 pm

I just got Modern Russian 1 in the mail. Couldn't find it anywhere online so I bought myself a copy for a couple of €. First impression: Very very thorough. 447 pages in total and it covers everything, minimal pairs listening drills and even cursive. And if 447 pages weren't enough, there is also a workbook which I haven't received yet + Modern Russian 2, which is probably just as long! Wow, quite a mission! I thought I could try to do it in 3 months, but 5 pages a day + workbook seems a little heavy! Has anyone here actually finished this one?

Of course it still amuses me that this is modern Russian from 50 years ago :lol:
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: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
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MamaPata
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Languages: English (N), French (C1*), Russian (B1), Spanish (B1).

Long lost: Arabic and Latin.
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby MamaPata » Sat Mar 11, 2017 8:28 am

Thought some of you might be interested in this e-mail list. A Russian literature company set up a programme which sends you a Pushkin poem every day for a year. Obviously the vocabulary isn't always the most practical (today I learned the word for poppy, which doesn't come up that much in my day to day life), but I know there's a few people learning Russian so as to read classic literature in the original, so this might be a good entry point! The poems are (so far!) reasonably short so it's a nice way to encorporate a little Russian into your day.

I will also be creating a memrise course with vocabulary from the poems so can send that to people if they are interested.
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Arnaud
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby Arnaud » Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:49 pm

Алексей from Italki has started to subtitle in russian the 4th season of кухня
The subtitles can be also found on tvsubtitles.net.
I don't know if he'll be able to do the whole season, it's an enormous work, but anyway having a few more episodes than the 3 first seasons for free is already a treat.
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neofight78
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby neofight78 » Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:01 am

When thinking about aspect beware! Here are some lies told to learners of Russian about aspect:

  • Verbs come in pairs, one imperfective and one perfective.
  • Imperfective is about process, and perfective is about result.
  • Conjugated perfective verbs are either past tense or future tense.

They might do as approximations to the truth in the very beginning, but stick with them for too long and it'll harm your Russian. Perhaps there will be some additions to the list before I get to C2...
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blaurebell
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby blaurebell » Fri Mar 17, 2017 11:05 am

neofight78 wrote:When thinking about aspect beware!


As my dad says: Aspect is the perfect tool for catching spies. Producing correct aspect as a foreigner requires some arcane black magic for sure :roll: ...! He said to me once that he very much doubts that he always produced correct aspect even after speaking it daily for 13 years! :?

And no, definitely not just pairs, I keep coming across verbs that seem to have 2 or 3 options for the perfective, not all of which appear in the dictionary and are slight variations on the same meaning. When to use which, no idea! Sometimes they seem to be used interchangeably, sometimes not *sigh*

By the way, for all speakers of German, this book seems rather good: Aspekt verstehen: Übungen zum russischen Verbalaspekt in Texten. Seems to be 100 pages of just verb aspect drills. Not sure whether understanding any German is really necessary, I haven't bought the book yet. I also haven't found any books like that in English yet, I wonder whether they exist and I just missed them. Verbs of motion, yes, but nothing on verb aspect. Not that I'd have problems with the German, I just find it weird! Surely English speakers must have even more problems with verb aspect!
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: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
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Fortheo
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby Fortheo » Fri Mar 17, 2017 11:14 am

blaurebell wrote:I just got Modern Russian 1 in the mail. Couldn't find it anywhere online so I bought myself a copy for a couple of €. First impression: Very very thorough. 447 pages in total and it covers everything, minimal pairs listening drills and even cursive. And if 447 pages weren't enough, there is also a workbook which I haven't received yet + Modern Russian 2, which is probably just as long! Wow, quite a mission! I thought I could try to do it in 3 months, but 5 pages a day + workbook seems a little heavy! Has anyone here actually finished this one?

Of course it still amuses me that this is modern Russian from 50 years ago :lol:


Nice. I'm looking forward to reading what you think of it after you use it. I've always planned to use it in a year or two once I get out of the A levels.
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blaurebell
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby blaurebell » Fri Mar 17, 2017 1:36 pm

Fortheo wrote:Nice. I'm looking forward to reading what you think of it after you use it. I've always planned to use it in a year or two once I get out of the A levels.


I'll definitely keep you guys updated on my progress with it. I have given myself a good incentive and will start it as soon as I finish/abandon Duolingo, so probably tomorrow.

With Duolingo I'm down to the last 9 skills and I've been swearing so much, I think it's become useless! Understanding the Russian is no problem at all, only the damned English translations are. They either make no sense at all or have too few alternative correct answers! For someone mostly used to British English the last stretch of this course is such a pain in the neck. I had to guess both the American vocabulary as well as the strange way of translating whatever weird Russian construction is being practiced! Besides, Russian and English is so far apart that translating from one into the other is just a grim exercise for longer sentences. It's really not a good language combination for Duolingo in general. I think German and Russian would be much easier, but there isn't such a course yet. I'm going to consider Duolingo as finished after the last two grammar skills which I will do today. I have no interest in the final 7 vocabulary skills: It's the kind of vocabulary I will either pick up from reading or not at all. No interest in prolonging this useless suffering! Up until the last checkpoint it's definitely good and fast for getting a grammar overview though! I also make hardly any mistakes in the Assimil exercises thanks to all the practice I got along the way with Duolingo. A good combination for sure.

As for mistakes in producing Russian in Duolingo: I sometimes surprise myself with correct answers on long sentences. However, I think I would cry if I would attempt the Duolingo reverse tree now :lol: It really doesn't help that each sentence has like 3+ opportunities to get a case or conjugation / aspect / verb of motion wrong! Substitution drills would be so much less discouraging! With a language like Russian making just one mistake per sentence seems already like a huge success to me :D That's not good enough for Duolingo though, which means that you will have to judge for yourself whether you're improving or not, even if Duolingo marks virtually every Russian sentence you produce as wrong. In my case it definitely helped, I think Assimil would have been really tough without it. I did 100XP per day for 47 days with at least 5 new lessons a day, strengthening for the rest. In total it took 28h so far and it was time well spent. Not quite there yet on my production, but a good start. Nevertheless, it's time to move on to less frustrating drills for a while.

Modern Russian: After looking at the audio in more detail I think it might actually not be as bad as I thought. There are 50h of audio for both Modern Russian 1 & 2 and the whole content in the book is just grammar explanations + a transcript of most of the audio drills. So, how long it takes depends only on whether I need one or two passes to master the audio drills and how much time the workbook exercises take up. The workbook is for writing exercises only and as far as I can see I can probably skip a whole lot of "Answer in English" exercises. Or maybe I try to answer them in Russian instead, I'll see. There is no answer key, so I will check my answers with lang8. My copy has a few pencil markings from someone who apparently reached the end of it though, which is not a bad sign at all! Even with some second passes I expect no more than 100h for the whole course, so with 1h a day I should ideally finish it about the same time as I finish the Assimil active wave that starts in a couple days for me. So, any noticeable progress when I try the Duolingo reverse tree after Modern Russian will likely come from both courses.

And you're right Fortheo, I think Modern Russian would be a little tough for a beginner. The first chapter doesn't look very difficult to me after half of Assimil and most of Duolingo, but it looks like it would have been very very difficult for me right at the beginning. It's a little hard to tell though, maybe it seems more difficult than it is. Listening to Assimil dialogues for the first time also makes little sense and at the end it's all clear and easy. In any case, no matter how difficult it is, I will probably whine a lot about it on my log for the next 3+ months, since it's dry and boring drilling after all, not exactly my favourite activity :D I hope there are many sentences about spies at least to lighten things up!
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: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

Arnaud
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Re: Russian Study Group

Postby Arnaud » Fri Mar 17, 2017 2:11 pm

blaurebell wrote:I hope there are many sentences about spies at least to lighten things up!
You're going to be disappointed ;)
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