Caromarlyse’s log (French/German/Portuguese/Russian)

[Radioclare]

I'm in awe of how many hours you manage to fit in, especially for Russian

[Caromarlyse]

I'm in awe of how many hours you manage to fit in, especially for Russian

I'm not sure you should be, given I'm trying to cultivate a more relaxed attitude!

[Caromarlyse]

FEBRUARY REVIEW
I finally caught Covid and was properly ill for a good week and still don't feel great. I have still been able to read, though, so I've got through a number of books.

French

- 10.10 hours total
- Read Il est grand temps de rallumer les étoiles by Virginie Grimaldi. This wasn't a bad book, but the premise (road trip to discover yourself) was a bit too similar to another French book I've read recently, so I didn't really enjoy it that much.
- Bits and pieces of listening/watching, including several episodes from the L'heure du crime podcast and some episodes of Le dessous des cartes

German

- 13.12 hours total
- Read Grau wie Asche by Ursula Poznanski. This was the sequel to the book I read last month. I'm enjoying this series a lot, and thought this book was even better than the first one
- Only Easy German podcasts

Portuguese

- 38.92 hours total
- Read Eleanor Oliphant está muito bem by Gail Honeyman. I liked this book a lot. It had been on my radar to read for a while, and when I saw that it was available in Portuguese translation, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. The translation did have a few issues: it's hard to know without having the English original to compare, but it seemed that there was the common issue of the word "tea" causing confusion, plus the word "cloakroom" in the sense of toilet was translated as a place to hang coats, which rendered one paragraph completely nonsensical
- Watched the film AmarElo: é tudo pra ontem and listened to a podcast. Not much, now I come to write it down!
- 5 hours of classes and another almost 4 hours of freer speaking practice. I had to cancel some classes when I wasn't well
- Various prep for those classes

Russian

- 57.06 hours total
- Read След смерти by Blake Pierce (translation) and Комфортная книга by Matt Haig (also translation). I didn't like the first one - I am going to move on to some "better" fiction as this was a bit too trashy even for me. The second one was non-fiction and made me realise that I'm better off with fiction, as the story pulls me along and makes it easier to keep going. I have now got the word отчаяние (despair) down, though!
- Listened/watched to some stuff from Easy Russian, Russian with Max, Давай поговорим, Russian twist and something from the Lifehacker YouTube channel.
- 8 hours of classes, plus another 2 and a bit hours of a speaking club. Again, I had to cancel some
- Various prep for those classes

[Caromarlyse]

MARCH REVIEW
I didn't read anything but I did do a lot of other stuff!

French

- 7.92 hours total
- Just various podcasts. I listened to one entitled "faut-il repousser ses limites ?", which gave me a lot less actionable advice than I was hoping for

German

- 5.87 hours total
- Only Easy German podcasts again

Portuguese

- 44.68 hours total
- Watched the films Depois do universo, Pelé, Tudo bem no Natal que vem, Kardec, and Carnaval, and listened to a few podcasts
- 8 hours of classes and another almost 8 hours of freer speaking practice
- Although I didn't read a book, I did read a couple of short stories from a textbook, including my first by Jorge Amado
- Various prep for those classes

Russian

- 86.55 hours total
- Listened to quite a few true crime podcasts, mainly going for ones where the matter was familiar to me already (which gives me a fighting chance of keeping up). (One of my current class topics is "crime and punishment", so these podcasts made sense in terms of practising the vocabulary.) I also discovered the О русском по-русски YouTube channel and (when I wasn't feeling up to much) binged on quite a few videos there about materials to learn Russian at different levels and a couple of interviews with students who've learnt Russian to a high level
- Finished working through my vocabulary book, Русская лексика для жизни: теория и практика. It is well designed, bright and clear, and comprehensive (it says B1+ on the cover, but a video I watched from the above-mentioned channel suggested that being able to use the vocabulary from the book actively in writing would give you enough for the B2 level). I felt it was a bit sexist, though - lots of women doing the housework and losing weight whilst men were building muscle - but otherwise I thought it was very good
- Some grammar - numbers (again!) and lots of verbs with prefixes (ones I'd already studied but they are not going to stick for at least another two years)
- Watched the Soviet film Москва слезам не верит, which I absolutely loved
- 12 hours of classes, plus 45 minutes of a speaking club. I'm doing a lot of retelling the content of what I've read, which I think is getting easier. Also, although I say I haven't been reading, I have been re-reading a graded reader for the purposes of telling the story of one chapter per class and doing translations (English-Russian) based on the text
- Various prep for those classes