I’ve been too lazy to update, and I have mainly been doing Russian. I think I might have to accept that Portuguese is officially on hold right now. It is fairly easy to keep my hand in with French and German because I first started learning them so long ago and have worked and studied in both languages, but Portuguese requires more effort, and I don’t have enough of it to go round. It wasn’t so bad during lockdowns etc, when external demands were reduced, but it doesn’t work well with the “return to normal”.
Monthly totals
French: 5.87 hours
German: 13.3 hours
Portuguese: 3.12 hours
Russian: 92.72 hours
French: I’ve kind of kept up with the Super Challenge (50 minutes short on listening), but only since I was already ahead on reading. I have got some listening done, mainly stuff from Arte and some podcasts on geopolitics.
German: The usual diet of podcasts and videos. I was quite excited that I could speak (with monolingual English speakers) about a scandal that the satirical show ZDF Magazin Royale uncovered a couple of weeks before the story broke in the English media. I’ve also started listening to a Spotify exclusive on the Qatar World Cup, which is a similar format to the exclusive on Wirecard that I have previously enjoyed on there. I’ve read a tiny bit (enough to keep my Super Challenge on track almost but not quite); my current book feels like quite a grind.
Portuguese: Only some more episodes of Bom dia Verônica (a bit too harrowing for me, really) and some LingQ podcasts that I found on YouTube.
Russian:
Lots! And lots of thoughts. I’ll divide them up into skill areas.
- - Listening: I’ve started to listen each day to the Russian news live broadcast on Deutsche Welle. I don’t get it all by any means (and sometimes that is frustrating, because I’d actually like to understand the content), but it still feels like a worthwhile exercise. I have also discovered the podcast Давай поговорим, and have listened to episodes on tracking (time, money, calories, etc), the fear of making mistakes, and whether higher education is necessary. I then tried to listen to one today entitled Никогда не молодец, или ощущение недостаточности, but gave up when I was not following anything. Oh the irony. I'll put it down to a slow brain day and try again later. Apart from today, I have found that I can follow these podcasts pretty well. This has now had the effect that Russian with Max sounds quite slow! I definitely think that I have had a little burst of progress here. I want to try videos on Maxim Katz' channel next.
- Speaking: This is probably the skill I always feel the least confident in, whatever the language. I also tend to be pretty critical of myself. However, I am (I think!) holding my own when speaking in a group with other students who are supposedly at a higher level than I am, so I think this is going ok too. Though some days I think all is well, and other days I'm close to giving up...
- Writing: I find this skill really hard to judge, because with time and access to resources I think I am pretty strong (and this is an accurate reflection of how people these days write), but I don’t test myself much with what I can produce with just a pen and paper. If I do end up wanting to take an exam, I’ll have to change this, but then you’d end up memorising stuff to shoehorn in anyway. So I think it’s fine to keep going with the occasional writing task I do as homework for now and work on it as an exam preparation task if it comes to that.
- Grammar: I’m trying to get through revision of all the topics that are examined at the B2 level but were already introduced earlier, i.e. topics where you are just expected to make fewer mistakes than previously. This includes participles and gerunds, verbs of motion, aspect, numerals, cases… I’ve rewatched videos from the tips4russian site, which are excellent. He gives little explanations that make memorisation so much easier because you’re led to understand why something is a certain way, not just that it is. I’ve also done most of the relevant tests from my Тесты, тесты, тесты book. I’ve almost finished volume 1 of Let’s Improve our Russian; I just need to finish going through the chapter on reflexive verbs - a topic I tend to think I’m ok with, but I always mess up when speaking. The plan for next year is then to study/consolidate the grammar topics that are new for B2, chiefly verbs with prefixes and verb governance (not entirely new, obviously, but newly in focus). I’ve started both of these already, but I notice that the verbs with prefixes I have tried to learn have generally not stuck very well - I seem to need to go over most grammar topics in Russian tens of times before I properly absorb anything, and the fact I haven’t done this yet here is showing.
- Reading: I haven’t done any reading "for pleasure" this month. However, I have been working through a graded reader and doing the exercises for my teacher to correct. I wouldn’t really classify this as reading, though: the text is pretty easy to understand for me. It is still proving to be useful, because the exercises really help to activate the language and structures from the text. They’re quite demanding because they really go into detail and require precision. I obviously then have stuff to read in course material, plus I skim Russian-language accounts on Instagram most days.
- Other: I have continued to work through Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced, and am on track to get through the first five chapters by the end of the year. According to the introduction, the difficulty then ramps up in the last five chapters in the sense that the topics should no longer be as familiar, so it will be good to work through these next year at the same time as upping the difficulty on my grammar study. I’ll have to revise some of the content again, though: some verbs with prefixes have already been introduced, for example, and as mentioned above I don’t yet feel confident that I’ve retained all of the differences.
Fitness: I've just about made it to an average of 10k steps daily. I've been fairly diligent with the yoga, and have kept up with my workouts, with the usual peaks and troughs in performance.
I should probably try to update here more frequently: I'm sure I had more thoughts, but I can't now remember them.