Asarena's Log

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Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
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Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Tue Sep 29, 2020 5:04 am

DaveAgain wrote:
Asarena wrote:At one point I was really burned out when it came to Anki, and I couldn't even bring myself to open the app. Now, I can use Anki again without that feeling of dread, so I'm making new cards and reviewing old ones. I'm trying to use it in moderation this time though.
Have you put an upper limit on the number of cards the app shows you each day?


No, I haven't tried that yet. I haven't been making that many vocab cards since I started using Anki again though, so I'm not sure if I need to add an upper limit at the moment anyway. Maybe if I start making a lot more cards
1 x

Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Thu Mar 04, 2021 4:52 am

Finally back with another post for my log! For Korean, I haven't really switched up my methods at all. I've been reading extensively, reading intensively, sentence mining, reviewing Anki cards, watching videos, listening to songs, and so on. The amount of time I spend on these activities varies day to day, but reviewing Anki cards and doing at least a bit of intensive reading and sentence mining is the bare minimum.

However, the reason I'm updating my log today isn't really because of Korean. I'd been wanting to start on another language for a while, and three months ago today I did just that. So, what language did I start learning? Well, I gave it some thought, and I was leaning toward Spanish. I had some previous experience with trying to learn it before, and it just seemed like a reasonable choice. So I started learning Russian on December 3rd, 2020. I started off with learning the alphabet, mostly using this Anki deck, this website, and this website. Reading was like pulling teeth for the first week or two. It was so slow and frustrating, and I felt like I was reading everything wrong. I also had to learn how to do an alveolar trill, which took about a week to accomplish. Also, to keep this organized, I'm just going to go talk about each resource I've used so far.


Drops
I only used this app for about 10 days, but it was a fun, short bit of study to do every day at the beginning of my Russian learning journey. I still remember a few of the words I learned from it, so I guess it worked fairly well. There wasn't really a reason I stopped using it. I just skipped using it one day and never used it again. Such is life.


The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners
When I started off learning Korean I worked through a series of books called Korean Grammar in Use, and I found that I really enjoyed studying grammar. I've seen some people say they don't enjoy this sort of study, but for me it's quite interesting. So, bearing this in mind, one of the first things I did was to look up good books for learning Russian. This one came up on all of the lists I looked at. At first the lack of audio was a bit of a turn off, but in the end I decided to give it a shot. I located a PDF of the book and began working through the first lesson on day one. Also, I've taken to checking Forvo for audio, and a good chunk of the example sentences from this book are actually on Forvo, so that's nice. I've also added some of the sentences without audio to Forvo, and so far the ones I've added have had their audio added to the site by a few helpful Russian speakers. Seriously, all but a few were done by the same person, so kudos to them!

As for what I've actually learned about from this book, I'll start by listing things from the titles of the lessons I've done: Alphabet and Pronunciation, Transliteration, Everyday Phrases, Naming Things, Basic Grammar, Gender, Verbs, Personal Pronouns, Present Tense, Conjugations, Word Stress, Nouns and Cases, Asking Questions, The Prepositional Case, Indeclinable Nouns, Possession, Going Places, The Accusative Case, Russian Personal Names, Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter Adjectives, 'What Kind of...?', 'This' and 'That', Prepositional and Accusative Cases of Adjectives, Adverbs, Plurals, Spelling Rule 1, 'Is there...?', Spelling Rule 2, 1-5,000, Genitive Singular and Plural, Quantities, Rubles and Dollars, Buying Things, Genitive Pronouns, 'There Isn't', Prepositions Taking the Genitive, Genitive of Adjectives, 'Whether', The Past, Reflexive Verbs, The Future, Imperfective and Perfective, 'To Want', Dative, 'To Give', 'To Please', Spelling Rules 3 and 4, Prepositional Plural, Aspect in the Past, Use of Tense, Aspect of the Infinitive, Reported Speech, More about 'Whether', Aspect in the Future, and Impersonal Constructions.

I'm currently at the end of lesson 14, and I'd say that I have varying degrees of understanding when it comes to the topics I've covered so far. My weakest point is probably case endings, but I'm making an effort to know those better! Also, one memorable thing I learned from this book aside from grammar is that apparently there were some Russian names from the revolution where the person's name would be formed from initials of unions, relevant individuals, and so on. I've never heard of someone being named using the initials of something before, so that was an interesting bit of history to learn.


Real Russian Club and Amazing Russian
To help me gain a better understanding of cases and their endings, I've taken to watching videos about the cases from these two YouTube channels. I feel like watching these videos is helping me a lot, and I try my best to follow along and guess the case endings of the nouns, adjectives, and such in the example sentences before they're revealed. Another channel that seems good is Boost Your Russian, but I haven't used it much yet.


Assimil
I wanted to give Assimil a try since I've heard it mentioned before. So far I've only done one lesson, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing another, but it seems like a good resource.


Duolingo
I've poked around a bit with Duolingo before, but from my understanding is isn't the best for Korean, so I didn't give it much more than a passing glance. I've decided to give it a shot for Russian though, and so far I've worked on the first two skills a bit. I'll probably keep doing a tiny bit of Duolingo each day for now.


Anki
I've been using Anki with Russian as well. With Korean I started off using the Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita deck and added to it as I went, so this time I'm using a similar deck for Russian grammar and sentences that I'm making as I go. I also have a vocabulary deck as well. The grammar deck currently has 1,208 cards, and the vocabulary deck is at 819 cards. I've mostly been using Forvo for audio to put on the cards, but I've also used AwesomeTTS and Wiktionary for a few cards.


To finish off this log post, it's time to talk about history, music, and other things that aren't specifically related to learning the Russian language itself.

It occurred to me pretty much from the start that I didn't actually know much about Russia. Of course we learned a bit about things like the Cold War in school, but I can't remember ever learning any in-depth Russian history. So I decided to head to YouTube, and these are some of the videos I watched involving Russian history: The Russian Revolution - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), WW1 - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), WW2 - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), The Cold War - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), and The Russian Civil War in Early 1919. I also watched some other videos such as Geography Now! RUSSIA, RUSSIAN REPUBLICS Explained (Geography Now!), Life in a small town in the far east of Russia / Spassk-Dalny VLOG, Visit Russia – ST. PETERSBURG by train – Russian trip vlog, Moscow Russia Aerial Drone 5K, and St. Petersburg 8K. I plan to watch more videos and continue learning about Russia.

As for music, one of the first things I did when I started learning Russian was to start my hunt for some Russian songs I'd like. Some of the songs I've found are: Ленинград и Глюк’oZa - Жу Жу, IC3PEAK - Плак-Плак (Boo-Hoo), Дора & Таня Волкова - Дорадура, SLAVA MARLOW - Ты говоришь как огонь, and Полина Гагарина - Колыбельная.

Well, that's all for now. I might do another log post soon comparing my Russian learning journey to my Korean learning journey, but this post is already long enough.
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Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun May 02, 2021 11:28 pm

I've been thinking since yesterday that it would be a good time to make a new log post, so here I am. I've been learning Russian for about five months now, and there are a few things I wanted to note down.

The first thing I want to mention has more to do with English than Russian, but I was watching a Twitch stream yesterday, and the streamer I was watching was having a conversation with two other streamers. I forget how the topic came up, but one of them mentioned that they hated military time, and that led to the streamer I was watching adding that she didn't like it when people said things like, "half past/a quarter past 7," and the other two agreed. This conversation was funny to me because not too long ago I went through the lesson about telling time in the book I'm using for Russian, and the English translations involved expressions like "half past". What I realized while working though that lesson is that I never use any of those expressions myself in English. I always just say the time. I also feel like I don't hear people use those expressions much where I live, other than "a quarter till." I do hear that one sometimes. I wonder if it has something to do with digital clocks and it being quicker to just read off the exact time.

Now that I've got that thought on English logged, let's move on to the languages I'm learning. I'd say my Russian is progressing well, although I feel like my progress is slower than it was in Korean at the start. Korean grammar always felt fairly straightforward, while Russian grammar seems a bit more difficult in terms of cases and verb conjugation in particular. I'm definitely improving with those, but Russian grammar still feels less intuitive to me than Korean. As long as I'm progressing, I'm not too worried though. I've noticed my comprehension improving with the beginner Russian videos I watch on YouTube and stories for beginners that I've found online as well. At first Korean grammar also seemed to interfere with my acquisition of Russian grammar. I kept wanting to put Russian sentences into Korean sentence structures, or I'd find myself expecting the verb to be at the end while reading a Russian sentence. That mostly stopped happening about a week after I wrote my last log post though, so I think my brain finally figured out that Russian wasn't Korean at that point. Other than that, I've been keeping up with Anki reviews and making new cards. I've still been using Forvo to get audio for the cards, and that's been going well. The sentences/words/phrases I add usually have a pronunciation added when I check back a few hours later. In the end, I'm glad I decided to use The New Penguin Russian Course even though it doesn't have audio. Of course the quality of the audio from Forvo may not be as good as the audio from a book that comes with its own audio, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers. I'm just thankful to the people who take the time to record the sentences I add.

As for Korean, I'm reading a book series called 고양이 학교. It's a series of chapter books about cats who attend, as mentioned in the title, a cat school. The main characters are cats who are part of the crystal (수정) class, which is the class for cats who learn magic. There are also human characters though, mostly cat owners, particularly children. One of the characters in the part of the story I'm reading is actually an autistic girl. As someone with autism, I can't help but love it when there's an autistic character, and I didn't even know that there was one in this series. It's just a series I saw recommended on Reddit once. I feel bad for this character though. She reminds me of myself as a little girl in some ways, with the rocking and not replying when spoken to for example, but she also seems more affected by her autism than I am. I wonder what her role in the story will be. I'll have to keep reading to find out! For videos, I'll just dump a list of some channels I watch videos from: VOGUE KOREA, SBS Entertainment, MBCentertainment, MBC 공식 종합 채널, S.K.Couple, DeevaJessica, KBS WORLD TV, IU Official, 포프리쇼, and so on.
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Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun May 16, 2021 5:16 am

For Russian, I started working through the podcasts here in the last week or so. I've gone through three of them so far.

I've been working through each podcast like this:
1. I listen to the podcast.
2. I read through the transcript, looking up every unknown word on Wiktionary. I put the text into RussianGram to see the stress of each word. Once I finish reading through a paragraph, I translate it using Yandex to check my overall comprehension of what I've read so far.
3. I watch the podcast while reading both the English and Russian subtitles. (The videos have English and Russian hard subs, so I just glance between them.)
4. I listen to the podcast while reading along with just the transcript.
5. Finally, I listen to the podcast once more without the transcript or subtitles.
After that I throw the video into my repetitive listening playlist on YouTube. Aside from the podcasts, I have some other beginner listening videos in there so far. I usually relisten to a couple (or more or less, depending on the length of the particular video(s)) of them while I'm getting ready for bed at night.

And of course, who can forget music?
For Russian music, here are some songs I've been listening to recently: дора — втюрилась, Клава Кока & NILETTO - КРАШ, NILETTO - Голос, МЭЙБИ БЭЙБИ — ТАМАГОЧИ (w/ алена швец), Ваня Дмитриенко - Венера-Юпитер, etc.

And Korean music: 비비 (BIBI) '인생은 나쁜X (Life is a Bi...)', 우예린 (Woo, Yerin) - 해어화(解語花) (Lonely Flower), Weeekly(위클리) _ After School, NCT DREAM 엔시티 드림 '맛 (Hot Sauce)', HOSHI ‘Spider’, etc.
4 x

Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun May 23, 2021 11:40 pm

3 x

Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun Jul 25, 2021 3:55 pm

I felt like it would be a good time to make my next log post, so here I am! I'm almost finished with The New Penguin Russian Course. Honestly I could have finished it by now, but I've been focusing on other things. I kind of combined the last two lessons and went through all the grammar points for both lessons, then the vocabulary for both lessons, and now I just need to do the exercises. I plan to continue my grammar studies once I finish the book. The first thing I want to do is to review each case.

I've been spending more of my study time watching videos and reading/listening. When it comes to videos, I've been mainly been watching videos from Russian With Max, In Russian From Afar, Maria Petrova, Comprehensible Russian, and Real Russian Club. I watch some of them without subs, some of them with Russian subtitles, and some of the ones that have both English and Russian subtitles using Language Learning with YouTube or CaptionPop. When I use one of those I have it set so that the English subtitles are hidden and I can reveal them as needed. I prefer LLWY; I only use CaptionPop when I'm on my iPad.

For reading, while I was looking up reading resources I came across this app, so I did the 7-day free trial and grinded through all of the currently available stories. The stories are fairly short for the most part. They have audio and the ability to toggle on and off the English text. I liked the app, but they only add one new story a week, and I already read/listened to all of the current ones during the free trial. I've found plenty of other reading resources though, so I think I'll be fine in that department. I've also found a bunch of podcasts for Russian learners, some with transcripts, so I'd like to work through those as well.

I'll probably start with one of these podcasts first since they have transcripts:
Very Much Russian
Slow Russian Podcast
Mighty Russian
Ракета
Next Level Russian
Learn Russian with Алёнка
Russian Progress
Kak Pushkin
Proper Russian

And for reading I'll probably start with these:
https://www.russianforfree.com/texts.php
https://pa-russki.com/category/stories-and-novels/
https://www.skazki.irlc.msu.ru/
Learn Russian Through Stories
Olga's Blog
https://onlinerussianlanguageschool.blogspot.com/p/russian-reader.html
Russian Through Real Stories
https://everydayrussianlanguage.com/en/stories/

I've kind of been focusing more on Russian, but I still watch random videos in Korean and do some intensive reading as well. I try to keep up with making and reviewing Anki cards for both languages.

My Russian music playlist has grown, although I haven't fully listened to the majority of songs on it. I just kind of go through Russian playlists on Spotify, listen to 5-10 random seconds of a song, and add it to my playlist if those 5-10 seconds sound good enough to me. I do this with Korean music as well sometimes. I can always remove a song if I end up not liking it once I listen to it in full. I don't really have any standout favorite Korean or Russian songs recently, so I'm just putting two of my playlists instead. Maybe they can be helpful to fellow learners, although I'm not sure how many other people share my taste in music!
Korean (It's lacking in Kpop group music though because I have multiple Kpop playlists made over the years that I throw Kpop songs into.)
Russian
So far I don't like my Russian playlist half as much as my Korean one, but it might be better once I fully listen to the songs and delete ones I don't like as much~
7 x

Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun Aug 29, 2021 9:39 pm

Migraine days are the best days for log updates! The migraine began yesterday, so I didn't do my Anki reviews yesterday, and I still haven't done them yet today. But the migraine is just now fading, so I thought a log update made sense. Also, after a migraine I'm just happy the migraine is over, so I don't mind doing a lot of Anki reviews. Anything is better than a migraine! Well, that's probably not entirely true, but eh. You get the point.

Now on to the language learning stuff! Russian grammar is really hard. Aspect, gender, multidirectional and unidirectional verbs, cases, etc... My poor brain. My understanding of Russian grammar is slowly improving, but I feel like it doesn't stick as easily as Korean grammar at all. Due to that I've kind of taken a break from direct grammar study and am focusing on podcasts and reading instead for the time being. I listen to a podcast once and then I work through the transcript. After that I download the podcast and add it to a folder on my iPad so that I can easily listen to it again. For the Slow Russian Podcast, Daria reads a short text and then breaks it down with explanations in English, so I usually cut out just the Russian reading to listen to again. I also add sentences and words to Anki as I see fit.

Also, speaking of the difficulty of Korean versus Russian, I often find myself wondering if Russian feels harder due to lack of exposure. With Korean I'd been listening to songs and watching shows for a couple of years before I started learning Korean. I watched the shows with English subtitles, but once I started learning Korean I'd often find myself thinking, "Oh yeah, I think I've heard that word before." On the other hand, I never really listened to or watched anything in Russian before I started learning Russian, and I never think that something sounds familiar unless it's a cognate of an English word or such.

I've also been continuing my quest to learn more about Russia. I've been watching videos from AllAboutRussia and Sebastian ioan about the different federal subjects and people groups.

For Korean, I've been listening to more Kpop again lately. I hadn't been listening to it as much in favor of other Korean music, but there have been some really good Kpop songs released in the past couple of months. I also want to try reading Harry Potter again. I tried it before, but the translation in the PDF I found seemed awkward. Sometimes the names weren't even spelled consistently. A name would be spelled one way and then another way later on. However, I recently found a newer translation, and I can tell it's better just comparing the first few pages. It's from Pottermore, so I'll probably just buy the rest of the books if reading the first book goes well. I kind of feel like I should try reading some books that aren't part of the fantasy genre, but fantasy is my favorite genre by far. I guess horror and mystery/detective/crime novels can also be fun to read though. I've also become more interested in history lately, so maybe I could try reading some books about history.

And now that I've finished writing this, my migraine is almost completely gone, so I should probably start working on those Anki reviews.
4 x

Asarena
Green Belt
Posts: 280
Joined: Thu Jun 28, 2018 11:11 pm
Location: USA
Languages: English (N), Korean (Intermediate), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 95b1dac51f
x 313

Re: Asarena's Log

Postby Asarena » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:16 pm

For Korean, I've started reading Harry Potter again. I think it's going okay. I make Anki cards from sentences with one new word in them. I'm already listening to less Korean music again, but I'm going through a period where I'm not listening to as much music in general. That happens from time to time. I really feel like I need to start listening to and watching more Korean content. I've been too focused on reading. (And as a side note, I'm now the OP of the Korean Resources thread, so please share any resources you like there! I'm still adding things here and there myself.)

For Russian, I've started working through this Russian Learner's Dictionary which has 10,000 words in frequency order. I'm not sure how far I'll actually work through it, but I thought it would be nice to fill in some gaps in my vocabulary. So far I've just been zooming in on the example sentences column and reading through those. When I get to an example sentence where I don't know a word then I make Anki cards from the words and sentences. Sometimes the unfamiliar word isn't the word that the example sentence was actually for though. So far I'm at word 550, and there are only example sentences for the first 600 words, so I'm not sure what I'll do after that. I might go down the word column and use https://en.openrussian.org/ for example sentences. Aside from that, I try to watch videos here and there from the channels I've mentioned previously. I also relisten to the podcasts/texts I've listened to previously. I need to start listening to more podcasts again though.
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