Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Serpent » Sun Jun 14, 2020 5:25 am

Just_a_visitor wrote: For example, гончие псы (несколько устарело, на мой взгляд; впрочем, как и само понятие псОвой охОты) = гОнчие собаки (hounds).
I'd say пёс has a connotation of a trained, working dog. So it makes a lot of sense to use it for a hunting dog or police dog. You certainly wouldn't use пёс about a semi-feral dog.
There's also the word псина, which i've just typed for the first time in my life :lol: I think it's technically the feminine equivalent of пёс??? But I never paid attention to how it's used :lol:

As for приют, yes it's a dog/animal shelter, and also an orphanage/foster care shelter for example. A shelter for adults (like refugees, homeless people or domestic violence victims) may officially also be called приют, but they appear to be rebranding themselves as центр помощи or кризисный центр, especially those that also offer other kinds of help in addition to providing shelter. It can also be called общежитие somewhat euphemistically.
Etymologically it's related to уют, уютный :) :?

My grandma says ёшкин кот all the time :lol: It's a synonym of ё-моё and can also be written as Ёжкин, referring to Baba Yaga :D The city of Йошкар-Ола also has a monument to Йошкин кот :) (the name of the city is Finno-Ugric) It's also known for its waterfront with Amsterdam-style buildings :D (about as old as the fake "ancient" ones in Skopje obviously)
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jun 14, 2020 8:36 pm

Thank you everyone for all the contributions and explanations - my dog-related vocabulary is now greatly expanded :)

Just_a_visitor wrote:What about this:
Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess,
They all went together to seek a bird's nest.
They found a bird's nest with five eggs in,
They all took one, and left four in.

? ;)
Also, Betty, Eliza... (?) Anything else?


You could also have Liz/Lizzie or Beth :D But I guess the difference is that any given Elizabeth would most likely only use one of those diminutives, whereas it feels like the Russian characters in Мухтар can be called by a different diminutive of their name every time someone addresses them :lol:

***

13 June - Russian: 65 mins, Croatian: 160 mins
14 June - Russian: 54 mins, Croatian: 121 mins

I love weekends :) I finally started reading the book which I'd been failing to open all week: 'Mali neobični ljudi' (Small unusual people) by Miro Gavran. Miro Gavran is one of the few Croatian authors who I've read a lot of. I always really enjoy his books because he has a talent for writing well without using complicated words. That makes his books perfect for when you're at the stage of language learning where you're capable of reading something written by someone more articulate than E L James, but don't want to struggle through one of those books where it feels like the author has swallowed a dictionary and is systematically regurgitating it to prove how literary they are. Basically, I don't have to look up lots of word when I read Miro Gavran, which suits me because I am lazy and don't like looking up words :D Anyway, 'Mali neobični ljudi' is a technically a collection of short stories, but the stories are quite long for short stories; long enough to be divided up into chapters. I'm about 120 pages into it at the moment and have read two stories. The first was about a patient in a mental hospital, trying to convince a doctor that he was well enough to be released by writing a history of Croatia from memory. The second was about a boy whose father and grandfather died while trying to climb a rock and how the boy's own life was subsequently dominated by an obsession with conquering that same rock.

This afternoon I revised chapter 15 of the BCS Grammar book, which was predominantly about aspect. There was loads of really useful information, including an interesting section about how the past tense of imperfective verbs is often used in fiction to set the scene and give background information, while the past tense of perfective verbs is used for the main action in the foreground of the narrative. The textbook includes some short fiction extracts to illustrate this point, with all the relevant verbs highlighted, and then an English version to show how difference nuances should be translated. I feel like this is a chapter I could benefit from reading again several times.

I've also started Chapter 5 of Colloquial Russian 2, which is about sport. Possibly the fact that it is about sport is what has been preventing me from studying grammar all week, because I'd be hard pressed to decide which I dislike most: watching sport or playing sport :lol: But actually, now I'm halfway through the chapter, it's not so bad. There was one text about gyms and a second about the politicisation of sport, which was actually quite interesting. Some of the comprehension exercises in this textbook are really hard. I spent about 20 minutes on an exercise this morning which listed about 15 words and asked you to find either synonyms or antonyms for them in the text. On the one hand, I think this is a really good exercise because it forces you to read the text in a really detailed way and challenge yourself as to whether you understand the precise meaning of individual words. This is useful practice for me, because my natural tendency is to skim a text and think "yeah yeah, I get the gist". But on the other hand, it is absolutely driving me mad when I've read a text ten times and still have one word on my list that I can't find a synonym for. I've come to the conclusion that it's a bit like a wordsearch; there are some answers you see immediately as soon as you look at it and others which you are never going to see, even if you stare at it for an hour :lol:

What else? Oh, there was an exercise on the use of который in which I only scored 50%, despite the fact that I thought this was a piece of grammar I had a pretty solid understanding of. I correctly identified the required case of every permutation of который. And then for some reason, in the prepositional and instrumental cases I applied the noun endings to который rather than the adjective endings :oops: So that was annoying!
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Daniel N. » Mon Jun 15, 2020 12:47 pm

Radioclare wrote:Another thing I've noticed is that the characters sometimes refer to the dog as a "пёс" rather than a "собака", perhaps especially if they're addressing the dog directly. "пёс" is obviously a bit reminiscent of Croatian "pas", but I've never seen it given as a word for a dog in one of my textbooks, so I'm not sure whether it's interchangeable with "собака" or has a slightly different meaning.

Of course, in most "Kajkavian" dialects in Croatia and in Slovenia, the word for dog is exactly pes. :)
https://www.pesmojprijatelj.si/
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby cjareck » Tue Jun 16, 2020 6:19 am

And in Polish it is pies (dog in general and male dog):
https://forvo.com/word/pies/#pl
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jun 21, 2020 4:33 pm

15 June - Russian: 95 mins, Croatian: 76 mins
16 June - Russian: 32 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
17 June - Russian: 44 mins, Croatian: 55 mins
18 June - Russian: 48 mins
19 June - Russian: 49 mins
20 June - Russian: 31 mins, Croatian: 87 mins
21 June - Russian: 121 mins, Croatian: 15 mins

This feels like it's been a hard week. I got off to a strong start on Monday, managing to finish work before 7pm for the first time in ages and having time to do some studying from Colloquial Russian 2 before dinner. And then after that the week went rapidly downhill :lol: I had a major client deadline at the end of the week and that means that Thursday in particular was a really stressful day; one of those where it's not clear until the last minute whether all the moving parts which need to come together to make things work are going to actually come together. Thankfully they did and the deadline was met, but the consequence of having to devote so much time to one particular project was that all my other projects fell behind and I ended up having to work about 4 hours on Saturday to try and catch up.

Oh well. I finished reading 'Mali neobični ljudi' by Miro Gavran. It was only a short book - 213 pages - so it takes me to 14.3 books for my Croatian Super Challenge. I am trying to alternate between languages, which means it's time to read in Russian now, and I've decided to tackle 'Twilight' ('Сумерки'). I have an illicit pdf copy of this from somewhere on the Internet, so counting pages is a bit more difficult. Goodreads tells me that the Russian version has 447 pages so I'm going to go with that and use my percentage completion through the pdf to calculate how many pages I think I've done. I've only read the first chapter so far, which I think is around 29 pages.

So far it's been pretty easy to read BUT I have read the first ten chapters of this book using LWT previously and looking up all the words I didn't know, so I feel like I'm already very familiar with the content. I decided not to use LWT for now, although I may go back to it if I find I'm struggling once I get further through the book. My main observation so far is that I don't really like reading books on my computer. I'm contemplating trying it on my Kindle instead.

Yesterday I finished chapter 5 of Colloquial Russian 2 and this morning I started chapter 6. Chapter 6 is about the Russian national character, which feels like a more interesting theme than sport. Chapter 5 had some useful exercises for practising superlatives and also several pages on prepositions, in particular the situations in which you use с, из and от. There was also an exercise on verbs which take the dative, on which I didn't score very highly because I still keep screwing up on dative endings vs prepositional endings. I think I am still struggling to come to terms with the fact that Russian has different endings for these cases :lol:

I'm only in the early part of chapter 6, which means so far all I've done is read a text about why Russians aren't very smiley and done one of those frustrating exercises where you have to try and find synonyms of given words in the text. There were quite a few new words for me in this text, so I probably spent half an hour on the exercise. This book is a great source of vocab and I need to work up the enthusiasm to put the new words from chapter 5 into Memrise this week.

It also makes me feel like I should make an effort to actively learn some more difficult vocabulary in Croatian, but I haven't done anything about that yet. I did read chapter 16 of the BCS Grammar book today. A lot of the chapter was about the aorist and imperfect tenses and it went a bit over my head. The book was trying to explain in which contexts these tenses were historically used in narration and there were several extracts from different books to illustrate. It was really interesting, but trying to understand the nuances made my head hurt :lol:

Otherwise I've just been continuing to watch more TV. I experimented one evening with watching Мухтар while on my exercise bike, because the films count for my Croatian SC is way ahead of the films count for my Russian one. This is partly because I watch Croatian while I cycle and I have to cycle most days to meet my goal of getting 70 000 steps a week. So it feels like I have a defined time for watching Croatian and therefore it happens most days, whereas my Russian TV-watching is more haphazard and only happens if/when I remember it and have time. I thought perhaps if I alternated between Croatian and Russian on different days it would restore some balance to my scores. It was a good idea in theory, but in practice I didn't enjoy watching the Russian while cycling. I have to play it quite loud anyway to try and catch all the words, so the extra background noise of my bike whirring away didn't help. And I didn't find it quite as gripping as Drugo ime ljubavi so my 45 minutes felt like they were going on forever. Plus Drugo ime ljubavi has lots of dramatic music, which is good for cycling fast to :lol: So I think I'll stick with how I was doing things and just try to be more disciplined with making time to watch Russian in the evenings. I'm on 21.47 films for Croatian and only 9.76 for Russian at the moment.
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jun 28, 2020 6:42 pm

22 June - Russian: 42 mins, Croatian: 44 mins
23 June - Russian: 43 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
24 June - Russian: 30 mins
25 June - Russian: 42 mins
26 June - Russian: 76 mins
27 June - Russian: 102 mins, Croatian: 26 mins
28 June - Russian: 135 mins, Croatian: 50 mins

This doesn't feel like it's been a particularly positive week, although I'm not sure what the reason is for that. I guess life is so upside down at the moment that there will be weeks which just aren't great. I had a stressful deadline on Wednesday, so that dominated the first part of the week, and then the second half of the week the weather was very hot by English standards, so it just felt hard to get anything done. In fact, I discovered something I miss from being in the office - air-conditioning! The office has the most wonderful air-conditioning; it's so cold that even on the hottest of days you need to bring a cardigan to wear inside. So I spent a couple of days fantasising about that while working from my rather hot and sticky home :lol: It seems like it will be September before the office is open again, and even then only at partial capacity, so I'll need to get used to working without air-con this summer. That is the only thing I miss about the office though, so on balance I'm still winning :) Not having to commute and getting a lie in every day are a bit of compensation for having all my travel plans for this year cancelled.

One thing I have enjoyed this week is reading 'Twilight' in Russian. I've 26% of the way through the pdf now, which I estimate at about 116 pages. So far I haven't been looking many words up, but I'm still reading chapters which I've previously read intensively using LWT. Even despite that, I think my Russian reading level is ahead of where my Croatian reading level was when I first read 'Twilight' in Croatian towards the start of my first Super Challenge in 2014. I can remember having to read a synopsis of some chapters on an English-language Twilight fan site when I was struggling to follow parts of the plot. Admittedly, the storyline was completely new to me then, but I'm definitely not struggling to understand anything fundamental this time around. This is giving me hope that being able to read for pleasure in Russian is an achievable goal, even if I never master listening to/speaking/writing in Russian :lol:

I haven't been very dedicated with my textbook study this week but I did finish chapter 6 of Colloquial Russian 2 this morning. The grammar in this chapter was about active present and past participles. I am not a fan of participles so I wasn't very enthusiastic about the grammar exercises, but actually they were quite useful. Most of the exercises I've done before have just been about correctly forming participles, whereas these were about using them in sentences, getting them in the right case etc, which was quite useful.

I've also finished reading chapter 17 of the BCS grammar textbook. This one was an overview of cases, but rather than talking about the case endings (which have already been covered in previous chapters) it was a comprehensive overview of when to use each case, including some really detailed explanations and examples with prepositions. I think it's always hard when learning a language to get the hang of which verbs are followed by which prepositions and then which cases those prepositions take. There were so many useful examples in this chapter that I felt like I ought to type them all up into Memrise to learn (but I haven't done that yet).

I've been a bit lazy with Memrise in general this week, but yesterday I did enter all the new vocabulary from chapter 5 of Colloquial Russian 2. I'm still only partway learning all the new vocabulary from chapter 4, so I'll have to try and devote a bit more time to it this week.

I also haven't been very successful at watching TV. It felt too hot to cycle on my exercise bike in the living room, so there were several evenings where I went out for a second walk in the evenings instead. That was all good from the point of view of hitting my 70 000 steps a week goal, but not so good for language learning. I've watched three episodes of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' and only one of 'Мухтар. Новый след', so not much to report there.

Not counted towards my Super Challenge, but I have been watching some Youtube videos made by a Russian lady living in the UK. Listening to what she finds odd about the UK is an interesting way of finding out about things which are culturally different in Russia. One thing which surprised me this week is that she thinks houses in England are cold. She was commenting on the fact that the recommended room temperature here is 18 degrees; it sounds like people typically heat their rooms warmer than that in Russia and they don't need to use draught excluders or hot water bottles. Another thing which surprised me was that she found it concerning (from a security point of view) that English houses sometimes have glass in their doors. It sounded like in Russia, lots of people have iron doors (or some sort of metal, I understood it as iron) and that sometimes people who live on the ground floor even have bars on their windows :o I'm not 100% sure I can have understood this correctly :? But it's nice to be learning a big language where there is all kinds of random Youtube content like this to watch. I rarely find anything interesting to watch in Croatian!
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby aaleks » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:20 pm

It sounded like in Russia, lots of people have iron doors (or some sort of metal, I understood it as iron) and that sometimes people who live on the ground floor even have bars on their windows :o I'm not 100% sure I can have understood this correctly :?

You understood correctly. Those irone doors and bars came to fashion in the 90's. It wasn't safe back then here so people "fortified" their homes.
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed Jul 01, 2020 7:36 pm

Thanks aaleks, that's really interesting to know! I watched an episode of Мухтар yesterday and I was looking at doors a lot more attentively :lol:

***

Yesterday was 30 June and that means we're halfway through the year :shock: I think it's fair to say that 2020 has turned a bit differently to how all of us hoped when we woke up on 1 January and started making plans for a new year. I was determined I was going to track all my language time in a super-duper spreadsheet and I set it up on 1 January with an extra column for "location", the intention being that I would record where I'd done each bit of studying and, by the end of the year, have lots of interesting data about how much studying I'd done on my commutes vs while being at home. Looking back at it now, I can see that the last time I did any studying outside of my home was on the morning of 16 March, when I did 19 minutes of Russian Memrise on the train to Birmingham. I had no idea that morning that it would be my last commute for several months, but that evening I got a text telling me to work from home for the foreseeable future... which at the time I thought might be for 2 or 3 weeks... but now it's 1 July and it turns out the future really wasn't foreseeable because there's no prospect of the office opening again before the autumn. The location column in my spreadsheet is therefore rather redundant, but I'm still filling it out every day with "home". I guess in a way it's capturing the strange reality of this year.

It's easy to get caught up in thinking what a dreadful year this has been so far. I haven't seen my parents since 7 March. I had six really exciting international trips planned, all of which are now cancelled. I'm particularly sad about losing my trip to the Azores, which was booked for June, and my trip to Albania which was planned for September. But I'm trying to hang on to the positives too. I got promoted in March, which wasn't on my bucket list at all. I am enjoying the extra sleep which comes with working from home at the moment. The extra coffee and cake which also comes from working at home means I haven't necessarily lost as much weight as I planned, but I have managed to stick to my new year's resolution of getting 70 000 steps per week even during the strictest part of the lockdown. No one in my family has caught the virus so far. And I've had a lot more time to spend on learning Russian than I would have done if I had anything more exciting to do :lol:

Goodness knows what the next six months of the year will bring, but I figured now would be a good time to take stock and look at my goals from the start of the year.

Radioclare wrote:I really want to try to keep up the consistency of language study which I somehow managed during 2019. I've signed up to the 2020 365 challenge with "generic", because I want to continue to study for 30 minutes per day, but I don't want my focus to be exclusively on Russian.


So far, so good. I've managed at least 30 minutes of Russian every day this year so far but I've also made an effort to get more Croatian in. My spreadsheet tells me that I've spent 309 hours on languages in the first six months of the year, of which 174 hours were spent on Russian.

That said, I do want to try and maintain the momentum which I've had with Russian during 2019. Specifically, I want to feel by the end of 2020 that I have a better grip on Russian grammar. I still have a pile of courses which I want to work through. My initial plan is to finish Penguin Russian, which I'm currently partway through (chapter 19). I haven't made a firm decision about what to do next, but I have a German-language version of Russian Assimil which I'm considering going back to (I completed the passive wave a couple of years back, but was totally out of my depth with the active wave. I'm hoping that I've improved enough to be able to manage the active wave now). I also have Colloquial Russian 2 and some new B1 textbooks that I got for Christmas. Plus I would like to finish the RT online Russian lessons, because I think they're a really cool resource.


I'm not sure I have a better grip on Russian grammar, but there's still time :lol: I'm making good progress with the courses though. I finished Penguin Russian in March and that felt like a big achievement. I flirted with Assimil for a while but I just couldn't get into it. I was disappointed because I've seen so many people singing its praises, but I just don't think it's for me. I finished the RT online lessons in May though and I feel like I got loads out of those :) I'm also six lessons into Colloquial Russian 2; the chapters are incredibly long, but hopefully the next six months will be enough time to finish it and start my B1 textbooks :)

I don't want to be completely obsessed with completing Russian courses though, so I think this needs to be the year I start trying to read in Russian. I have a small pile of books which I hope to at least start tackling this year. If the Super Challenge starts running again in May, I might sign up with Russian to give me the motivation to get started with this.


Well, I'm now signed up to a Russian Super Challenge :) I've read two Agatha Christie novels in Russian and I'm partway through the first Twilight book, so I think I'm on track with this goal.

At the end of 2020, I want to re-take the Online Diagnostic Assessment for Russian and score higher than I did at the end of 2019 (I scored 1+ in Dec 19).


I can't face taking the test again today so this one will have to wait until December :D

I want to restore some balance between studying Russian and studying Croatian during 2020, because I feel like Croatian lost out quite a bit to Russian in 2019. This is sad, because Croatian is definitely my favourite language. This is the first time I've studied two languages from the same family and so I'm also a bit nervous about the potential for me to start getting Croatian and Russian mixed up, i.e. that my Croatian could become worse the better I get at Russian.


I am trying quite hard with the balance at the moment. I'm alternating between reading a book in Croatian and a book in Russian for my Super Challenges, for example.

I don't think I can come up with a measurable goal for what I want to achieve with Croatian this year, but I'm planning to track my time spent on all languages this year (in 2019 I only religiously tracked Russian time) and so hopefully by the end of 2020 I can at least see that I have spent a reasonable amount of time on Croatian. Obviously I want to continue reading in Croatian, and I have a pile of novels to get through, both translated and original. I want to finish watching the second series of 'Na granici', which I'm partway through, and then find another series to get hooked on. But I think I also want to do some proper "studying"; perhaps revise some textbooks, work through some of the Croatian-language grammar books I have, maybe even deal with the 2000+ outstanding vocab reviews that I've had pending in Memrise all year :lol: Once I've done all that I should probably try to start writing in Croatian again (but I am definitely not signing up for an Output Challenge!)


I've spent 116 hours on Croatian so far this year. I haven't got figures from last year to compare, but it feels like more. So far I've read four novels in Croatian this year, one of which was a translation from English, while the others were original literature. I did indeed get to the end of 'Na granici' (41 episodes watched this year) and got successfully hooked on a new series, 'Drugo ime ljubavi' (55 episodes). I have been slowly revising grammar using the 'BCS - A Grammar' and will hopefully get to the end of this within the next month or so, so that I can move on to other books. I still have 2000+ outstanding vocab reviews in Memrise :lol: And I've done zero Croatian writing.

I want to continue reading in German, which is something I really enjoy. My active German is rusty at the moment, but the fact that I continue to be able to read in German with a level of ease that I could only dream of achieving in Croatian (or even in Esperanto!) reassures me that I haven't lost it.


I've only read four novels in German so far and most of those were in Jan/Feb. I was planning to do lots of German reading in April and May in preparation for a trip to Liechtenstein at the end of May but yeah, that didn't happen!

I also received three novels in Esperanto for Christmas and they are all things which I genuinely want to read, so I guess I have a goal of reading at least three books in Esperanto this year :)


I've read one of them but I wasn't very impressed. I don't think it passed the "Could this have got published if it had been written in a language other than Esperanto?" test. The other two books I've got are translations so they should be fine, I just need to make time to read them.

I would like to have time to start learning Bulgarian, but I'm not sure how realistic this will turn out to be in 2020. I'm not planning to do anything in the first quarter of 2020 anyway; it will be later in the year, if I do start.


Unfortunately I think Bulgarian is off my to-do list for this year. I was hoping to plan another holiday to Bulgaria in 2021, but if it's possible to travel normally again in 2021 I want to prioritise re-booking all the trips I had planned for 2020. So I can't see that I'll be going to Bulgaria before 2022 at the earliest.

So overall I seem to be doing surprisingly well against my goals, despite everything. I think my main focus for the next six months will be getting stuck into my Super Challenges and progressing through my more advanced Russian textbooks. And who knows, perhaps at some point my "location" column will start to regain a bit of variety :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jul 05, 2020 8:01 pm

29 June - Russian: 41 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
30 June - Russian: 79 mins
1 July - Russian: 70 mins
2 July - Russian: 40 mins
3 July - Russian: 36 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
4 July - Russian: 74 mins, Croatian: 44 mins
5 July - Russian: 170 mins, Croatian: 12 mins

I think this week has been a bit more positive than last. I was finally able to see my parents and sister on Saturday, after nearly four months. It was a little bit weird because we had to meet outside in a park and stay 2 metres apart, but it was really nice to see them again :)

Otherwise the most fun part of my week has been continuing to read Twilight in Russian. I'm 57% of the way through now which I think equates to 255 pages and brings me a total of 17 books for my Russian Super Challenge. Partway through the week I passed the point which I'd previously read intensively via LWT, so it's a relief that I'm still going strong. I have looked up a few words which have been repeated frequently enough for me to be irritated by not understanding them. These include щека (cheek), трактовка (interpretation, treatment) and чересчур (too, too much). I should probably look up more words.

The films part of my Super Challenge is lagging behind my reading. It's sad that we don't have the bot this time around because I normally find it quite motivational for forcing myself to do more listening. This week I've tried to alternate a bit between watching Croatian and watching Russian while on the exercise bike, because I'm currently on 24 for Croatian films and only 12 for Russian. So I've watched three episodes of 'Мухтар. Новый след' this week plus three episodes of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' (and I had one lazy day when I didn't cycle :lol:). I tried watching one of the Мухтар episodes without subtitles but it wasn't a huge success. I understood enough for watching not to be a complete waste of time, but I missed out on some of the subtleties of the plot. I understood who had committed the crime and what they'd done/how they'd done it, but not necessarily why. So I think watching with subtitles remains the best choice for now.

Russian grammar study this week has been chapter 7 of Colloquial Russian 2. The chapters in this book are so long! The theme of chapter 7 was mass media and there was a lot of new vocabulary for me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a chapter devoid of difficult grammar points though :) Rather than one big topic, there were lots of little ones like using то, что/тот, кто in sentences, the difference between после as a preposition and после того как as a conjunction, and the difference between when to use благодаря vs из-за. I'd already covered that latter point in quite a lot of detail in one of the Russia Today lessons, so conceptually it felt like there wasn't anything new and difficult in this chapter. Despite that, I still managed to screw up some of the exercises :oops: Yet again I'm letting myself down by getting case endings wrong and this was particularly true on the тот, кто exercise, from which I mainly learned that I don't know how to decline тот :lol: Part of me wants to pause Colloquial Russian 2 and go back to Schaum's Russian Grammar to work through all the declension exercises. The problem is, if I read a chapter on the dative and then do a whole load of exercises on the dative, I can probably score 100%. But if I read a chapter on the dative, then read a chapter on the instrumental, then do an exercise about something entirely different which only coincidentally requires a noun to be put in the dative, I'll almost certainly correctly identify that the noun is dative and then equally certainly get the ending wrong. I don't know what the answer is to this except to try harder :lol: For some reason it just feels like Russian case endings are harder than Croatian case endings and they don't stick in my brain for more than a few minutes.

This afternoon I read chapter 18 of BCS Grammar. It was a rather technical chapter, all about word formation, and although there were some interesting parts to it I don't think there was anything which has useful practical application. There was lots of useful vocabulary though so I am still toying with the idea of putting it into Memrise. We'll see. I think my Memrise usage is having a post-6WC slump because I don't seem to have succeeded in putting a lot of time into it recently. I've only just finished learning the vocabulary from chapter 4 of Colloquial Russian 2. I did enter all the vocab from chapter 6 this week, but I haven't done chapter 7 yet. Maybe tomorrow evening!
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Radioclare
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Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
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Re: Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jul 12, 2020 9:20 pm

6 July - Russian: 43 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
7 July - Russian: 73 mins
8 July - Russian: 32 mins, Croatian: 47 mins
9 July - Russian: 50 mins
10 July - Russian: 51 mins
11 July - Russian: 79 mins, Croatian: 66 mins
12 July - Russian: 208 mins, Croatian: 54 mins

I don't feel like I've been very diligent this week. I'm on holiday from work all next week, because I need to take the time off which I would have spent in the Azores, so I'm hoping to make more progress then.

My main achievement this week has been that I've finished reading 'Сумерки' (Twilight), my third completed book in Russian :) I'm counting it as 447 pages, which is what Goodreads gives as the page count for the Russian version. This takes me to 21 books for my Russian Super Challenge, which is more than I expected. Some of the words I looked up this week:

отряд - in the context of vampires, this was the word used for "coven"
ядовитый - poisonous
шея - neck. I realised towards the end of the book that I'd been confusing this with щека (cheek)

It is very tempting to go on a Twilight binge and start the next book already, but I should probably take a break and read something in Croatian instead :)

In terms of my films Super Challenge, this week I've watched 3 episodes of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' and 2 episodes of 'Мухтар', plus one Russian Progress video. That takes me to 13.5 films for my Russian challenge and 26.5 films for my Croatian challenge. 'Drugo ime ljubavi' has been really exciting for the past few episodes and I'm still finding it easier to cycle to than 'Мухтар', which I think is partly because of the music. The music in 'Мухтар' is pretty mediocre, whereas Croatian telenovelas always have really cool music and that makes it easier to cycle fast. I normally really enjoy the Russian Progress videos, but the one I watched this week was an interview with Steve Kaufmann and I didn't really feel like I got anything out of it. I know some people get really excited about these polyglot videos, but if you're trying to learn Russian then I don't think there's a lot to be gained by listening to someone who isn't Russian speaking the language imperfectly.

What else? I haven't done a lot of structured studying this week. I'm still partway through learning the vocabulary from chapter 5 of Colloquial Russian 2 in Memrise. I started chapter 8 of the book yesterday, which is about Russian culture, but I haven't got very far yet. I have read two more chapters of the BCS Grammar and I've finished the "grammar" part of the book; the final few chapters are sociolinguistic commentary instead. Hopefully I'll have time to get to the end of the book this week :)
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