French: I watched some programmes on Arte, including
Le Dessous des Cartes and
28 minutes. We’ve also started watching
La Promesse, which is on BBC iPlayer. It therefore has English subtitles, but at least it’s giving me a good bit of French exposure.
German: Just podcasts. I’ve still not been able to read
Portuguese: Really just classes and homework. This week I had to refer to
Gramática Ativa 2 for something. I’d put this down last year when I realised I was getting ahead of myself. I remember finding it quite a stretch (especially when compared against the first volume). It doesn’t feel like that anymore, so I have obviously got better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
Russian: This has again been my focus - I’ve spent a lot less time on languages overall, but it’s not been my Russian that’s taken the hit.
I studied a poem, which was an interesting change. In doing so I learnt about poetic forms of words. For example молочный -> млечный (as used in млечный путь), ворота -> врата, борозда -> бразда. I think the rhythm of poetry might help my accent too - I definitely found it a lot easier to read a poem out loud than I often find normal prose.
The word наследство has come up on multiple occasions this week, such that I am now pretty solid with it. This fortuitous repetition is the only way I’ve ever found to memorise vocabulary effectively, and it is why I like going through lots of different material.
I’ve continued practising summarising orally what I’d read. I think this is requiring a little less preparation beforehand than it was a couple of months ago, though it still feels like a monumental effort to string coherent sentences together… I’ve learnt терпеть не могу (I can't stand), which I think will be quite useful!
I’ve continued to work through the chapter on participles in
Let’s Improve our Russian. I think that finally I’ve absorbed it properly. This must be about the fifth or sixth time I’ve studied this topic! It’s a tough one to introduce early on because it requires comfort with the conjugation of verbs, imperfective and perfective forms, verb government, declination of nouns, pronouns and adjectives… I think I must be at a place now where all of this context is more familiar such that participles are now within my zone of proximal development
In any case, I feel solid on the formation of the four different types of participle (with the exception of past passive participles where I still falter, because there are so many exceptions to the rule that there is not really a rule to my mind…). I am also happy with when to choose each type, and when they can’t be used. I’ve still got a bit further to go in the chapter, so I’m not quite there yet, but I’m definitely feeling as though I’ve achieved some good progress here. In the exercises I came across some French borrowings, which don’t retain the same meaning but should be easier to remember by dint of the association: бандероль (small parcel (ru), banner (fr)) and тираж (circulation (of a publication) (ru), pulling, drawing, etc (fr)). I also saw шахтёр (miner), which comes from шахта (mine), which is from the German Schacht. Шахтёры бастуют, так как они недовольны получаемой зарплатой. Этим людям не хватает на жизнь получаемой зарплаты. There's a lot in these sentences. I like the puzzle element to Russian grammar.
Fitness: I have been completely failing the stretching and 10k steps a day goals. I have kept up with all my workouts, though, and am continuing to progress well there. If I aim for 11k steps a day for the rest of the month I'll have caught back up - I need to give myself this as an option or I can feel myself throwing in the towel completely. I was feeling good on the increased low-level activity, and it needs to make a return.