Postby Caromarlyse » Sun Aug 01, 2021 5:14 pm
END OF MONTH REVIEW
I’ve done very little German this month, though I did have a nightmare in German this week (in which I was arguing with a ticket inspector as to why I had not bought a ticket…). I know how my subconscious got the idea, but why it decided to play it out in German, I don’t know. Perhaps it was trying to make up for my wakeful neglect?!
Portuguese has continued with classes, homework, podcasts, and now some reading. Listening to podcasts in particular took a big leap forward (the main beneficiary of German being ousted). I have a couple of news podcasts that produce content daily or very regularly, so there is almost always something there. I also have one sports podcast I go to, but less regularly. Some of the time the sound just washes over me, but I do follow the stories too. In particular I enjoy getting the Brazilian (and Brazil’s “near-abroad”) viewpoint, because it’s different from what’s covered in the news in the UK.
I’ve done a lot of Russian (July was my best month yet for both Russian and Portuguese, time wise!). However, it has felt very up and down. On the positive side, I think I might have sorted a new routine, or at least the skeleton of one.
I have one new teacher who really delves into the minutiae. For a start, we stick to the same topic for a long time, which helps me remember the vocabulary. She seems (so far!) patient in correcting my errors in stress. I am really not skilled in pronunciation. Even when I read about English sounds, I am completely lost. I’m not an auditory learner. What I do seem to remember is if I see words written down with the stress marked, especially if I’ve just made a mistake with it, and then the correct version is written down for me. She’s doing that. I manage to pronounce even simple words that I know very well incorrectly, but at least there I seem to be able to take on the correction immediately. It’ll be good to get rid of these mistakes, as I can see otherwise it would be really easy for someone to conclude I know nothing! My goal is just to get to a point where I am understandable - it is truly beyond me to have a “good” accent in a foreign language, so a comprehensible foreigner is good enough for me! Also, when a new word comes up, this teacher will stop and we’ll make loads of sentences using that word. She does something similar with grammar, breaking off and drilling whatever I got wrong. I’m doing some writing again, and she’s marking it. She also gives me a lot of listening exercises to do (at home), which we discuss together, and she then provides the transcripts, so I get active listening practice.
The other teacher follows an approach more similar to the one I’ve used to date - she introduces a topic on the day, which we then discuss, with some new words/grammar introduced. I don’t get to learn words beforehand, which generally I’m not sure I find too helpful, though given I’m doubling back and these classes have quite a bit of repetition with what I did with my old teacher, having to pull words from my long-term memory on the spot is not such a bad thing. I’m not asking for/getting homework from this one, which is what I want, and I think it’s working well because I get to spend more time revising what we covered, as well as continuing with my own study. The numbers that I was studying on my own did end up coming in useful in class, and I even got some of them right! I need to go back and look at the various tables of declensions again, though. I have concluded that the most common case that will come up is the genitive, so I might focus just on that for the time being; it will be a bit like, as a child, having to know only the answer to 7x8 to prove to random people who care to test you that you know your times tables.
As for self-study, I’m 27% through my Russian book. I have continued with podcasts. I listened to one (for native speakers, from the list above) about how much money you need to live in Moscow. I understood a lot more than I feared I would. It helped that there was a lot of repetition - the hosts were interviewing people one by one on what they did, how much they earned, what they spent on eating out, when they last bought a mobile, etc. I really enjoyed it. It’s always fascinating to hear about other people’s lives.
NEXT MONTH - GOALS
German: read my next Krimi. Get back to listening to an hour of podcasts a day. I have a small backlog, which should keep me going.
Portuguese: classes + homework. Finish my book (currently 29% of the way through). Podcasts as and when. Grammar exercises where appropriate to support class work.
Russian: classes + homework. Finish my books (one in Russian; one in English about Russia). Podcasts as and when. Verb drills when they come up. I also want to make working on Let’s Improve our Russian a more regular thing. As a sub-goal, in the first two weeks of the month I want to finish chapter 1, module 2 of my B1.2 book, as that will keep me on track to get to the end of it by the end of the year. I’ve made a start today, and since this module in the B1.2 book covers verbs of motion, I’ve decided to use Let’s Improve our Russian on the same topic. Hitting it from all the angles! I'm still going to have questions (that I hope I can get a teacher to go through with me in due course), but so far the explanations in Let’s Improve our Russian seem pretty good. Or maybe I've just covered this topic so many times now, that something finally has to start sinking in!
8 x