JUNE REVIEWMonthly totals
French: 1.3 hours
German: 17.68 hours
Portuguese: 5.45 hours
Russian: 88.62 hours
It's been a month of two (unequal) halves, with the first 12 days on holiday and the rest back at work and catching up on the backlog that had built up whilst I was on holiday. Holiday was great for language learning, even with it obviously only being something to be done before and after outings. I deliberately didn't do any study, but just read and watched/listened to things in all of my languages, and enjoyed doing so. Getting back has been trickier - work is such a time suck
I've done very little
French or
Portuguese since, really just a little reading in Portuguese. Reading generally hasn't gone that well - I've been doing social things in the evenings so haven't had the time. The focus on Russian has also sapped a lot of energy.
On my personal Super Challenge, I'm well ahead on the listening part for all languages apart from French. I just haven't yet got enough compelling go-to's in that language. I keep trying various options but nothing really works. In contrast, with German I always seem to find loads of stuff. I need to do better with reading, in all languages apart from German. I don't even think I need a challenge for
German - it just seems to keep pulling me in!
So,
Russian. I decided when I got back from holiday to try out some new teachers. The history one seems to be working quite well. It's definitely challenging having to follow essentially a lecture in Russian. The reading for it has been interesting - a lot of the stuff about Kievan Rus' is taken from a children's book, and the word order is very different from that presented in simple Russian texts for foreigners. I assume it's a more natural word order, but one that, for whatever reason, is not introduced to foreign learners until later in the learning process. It's also been interesting from a content point of view - I've been comparing with what is written on the same period in English texts, and there is a very different emphasis (and different inclusions/omissions). It's definitely challenging following the lectures - I let a lot wash over me and then re-read the slides afterwards, but I have to keep up so I have a chance of answering the questions that keep getting thrown in. It's also difficult answering the questions because I generally know what I want/need to say, but it's quite complicated to formulate the response. I'm definitely learning a lot of new words, but the big benefit here is that they tend to get repeated a lot.
The other new class I haven't yet made my mind up on - the last class got cancelled fairly last minute so we'll see. My usual classes have continued as before. I definitely have peaks and troughs. These tend to correlate with how familiar the topic is to me - I dealt with the topic of sport again this week for the second time (with a different teacher), and could definitely tell how the repetition was making it easier for me. The word выносливость (stamina), which had caused me problems with teacher no 1, now just slips off the tongue. I also experimented with sharing my (typewritten) preparation for a class with the teacher, and that worked quite well, as she could make a couple of corrections and then we still managed to do a lot of talking, expanding on what I'd written. I think I've sorted my handwriting issues too, because stuff I wrote by hand went unremarked (apart from two really stupid mistakes I made not using the genitive when I knew I needed the genitive and the form was really simple
).
I've done my usual listening of
Russian with Max and
Russian Twist podcasts. I've also started watching a series. It's hard and my motivation is correspondingly low, but I do think I should try to press on. My listening has definitely improved, but still needs improvement, and I think pushing the difficulty should help. I'm not going to ditch the learners' material yet though - it's good for learning new words and giving me stuff I can use when speaking. I haven't been reading
Atomic Habits in Russian as I said I would, but I have been reading a lot of other stuff so I can't be too annoyed with myself. I've started looking at quite a lot of things in Russian on social media, which has been nice in showing me that it is accessible to me now (and I have stolen some expressions to use myself), but I don't want to spend too much time on this as this activity can quickly become depressing and draining, whatever the language!
Fitness: average daily steps for the month: 11,470.4. This figure came down loads in the past couple of weeks when I had to rest my hip. Less movement doesn't make me feel good mentally, so I need to start ramping it back up. I also need to keep up with my rehab and yoga so I don't break when doing so!
PLANS FOR JULYTo be formulated over the weekend. I feel I'm running to stand still at the moment and need to get a plan to get everything back together. But first I need to get through Friday!