Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 12, 2020 10:41 pm

9 Jan - Russian: 32 mins, Croatian: 26 mins
10 Jan - Russian: 37 mins, Croatian: 88 mins
11 Jan - Russian: 39 mins, Croatian: 180 mins
12 Jan - Russian: 38 mins, Croatian: 9 mins

I thought I'd better post again to prove that I survived my enforced socialising :lol: I thought it was a highly tedious evening, but all the younger staff seemed to enjoy themselves, which was the objective. And despite the socialising, I did manage to get my minutes in on Thursday, doing some Memrise on the train and starting to revise some of the earlier chapters of Penguin Russian via a pdf on my new Kindle.

Over the past few days I have finally got to the end of chapter 20 of Penguin Russian. All the motion verb stuff was pretty heavy going. At the end of the chapter there was a final exercise to practise translating sentences with verbs of motion into Russian and I scored a rather uninspiring 4/12 :( Not all of the mistakes I made were specific to verbs of motion; some of the errors were in aspect, and I also couldn't remember whether you go "в" or "на" the Kremlin and guessed incorrectly, so I got that sentence wrong even though, frustratingly, the verb of motion in it was correct.

There was also an exercise at the end of chapter to practise everything which had been learned in the preceding 20 chapters. I was a bit nervous about this because I still feel like I can't remember which endings belong to the dative, prepositional and instrumental plurals (for example), so I expected to score quite badly. But actually, when I sat down and focused on it, I managed to do significantly better than I expected. So I think the endings are beginning to sink into my head; it is just a very slow process!

This afternoon I input all the new vocab from chapter 20 into Memrise but I didn't get all the audio uploaded because I was having a technical problem with Forvo again. I'll try again another day; I'm quite behind on Memrise, only learning the vocabulary from chapter 17 at the moment, so it doesn't really matter.

I have been virtuous on the train a few days this week and started trying to get through my thousands of outstanding Croatian reviews in Memrise. I'm only doing 100 words at a time, so it's going to take some time to clear them.

I was hoping to study some Croatian this weekend, but I got distracted today and spent most of the day planning my summer holidays. I'm going to the Azores for two weeks in June, and it involved booking a lot of flights and ferries today. It also seems likely that I'm going to go to Albania for at least a few days in September, which is exciting. Although I don't think I can commit to trying to learn Albanian!

I'm continuing to read 'Poslije svega' and I've done about 250 pages now. Between that and watching 'Na granici' I have learned a few new words in Croatian this week, but I haven't written them all down and now I can't remember them :oops: Well, I learned the word "stjenica", which is a type of bug. I'm pretty sure it's a bed bug, because the context was that a character was staying in a cheap hotel and had been bitten overnight. I also encountered the verb "propiti se" and I'm not 100% sure how it translates, but from context in the series I think it means to start drinking excessively/to become an alcoholic.

Finally, YouTube made a cool suggestion of something for me to watch in Russian this week :)

5 x

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 19, 2020 4:50 pm

13 Jan - Russian: 40 mins, Croatian: 59 mins
14 Jan - Russian: 34 mins, Croatian: 29 mins
15 Jan - Russian: 38 mins, Croatian: 74 mins
16 Jan - Russian: 40 mins
17 Jan - Russian: 36 mins
18 Jan - Russian: 41 mins
19 Jan - Russian: 39 mins

This week hasn't been quite as productive as I'd hoped. I unexpectedly caught a cold, which I was a bit annoyed about because I had a cold in December, so I felt like I ought to have had my quota of colds for a while :lol: It wasn't actually a very bad cold, but I used it as an excuse to be lazy and not do any Russian grammar study for several days. A lot of my Russian time this week is therefore either listening to Russian Progress videos/podcasts or doing Memrise.

I'm still having a technical issue with Forvo, but I did find a workaround for it which enabled me to upload the audio I needed to my Penguin Russian course. My motivation for Memrise is a bit low at the moment though, so some days I've only been doing about 10 minutes on the train. I was particularly fed up one day when I logged in and found I had 500+ reviews due for vocab in my Colloquial Russian course. I have no idea why so many words have become due for review at once; I don't remember that happening before.

I have been enjoying the Russian Progress content. There was a video this week about strange words in Russian and it included my favourite word - достопримечательность :D

Now that I'm feeling better, I have gone back to Penguin Russian and started chapter 21. Chapter 20 had been so difficult that I was kinda dreading it, but chapter 21 is about свой and using чтобы, both of which are comparatively simple grammar points. Perhaps the author deliberately put an easy chapter in after verbs of motion to try and cheer everyone up. If so, it worked :) I got 100% on the exercises in this chapter, which isn't something that happens to me very often!

In Croatian, I finished reading 'Poslije svega' (454 pages). It was such a good book! There's a limit to what else I can say about the plot without completely spoiling it for anyone else, but it was incredibly sad towards the end. If you don't mind a book that makes you cry, I'd recommend it.

I spent a lot of yesterday booking accommodation and car hire for my trip to the Azores in June. And I've also booked a flight to Dubrovnik for September :) Very excited about that, because I didn't go to Croatia at all last year. My plans aren't fixed at the moment but I've got a return flight booked from Tirana in Albania two weeks later, so the intention is to spend a few days in Dubrovnik, then travel to Kotor in Montenegro and ultimately from there to Albania. I'm not sure yet how many days I'll spend in Montenegro vs Albania. I'm excited about going to Albania but also a bit nervous about the language barrier. I suspect that at some point in the year, fear will probably drive me to try and learn some survival Albanian. Maybe a 6WC at some point.
5 x

User avatar
Chung
Blue Belt
Posts: 529
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 9:39 pm
Languages: SPEAKS: English*, French
STUDIES: Hungarian, Italian, Ukrainian
OTHER: Czech, German, Polish, Slovak
STUDIED: Azeri, BCMS/SC, Estonian, Finnish, Korean, Latin, Northern Saami, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish
DABBLED: Bashkir, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Inari Saami, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Meadow Mari, Mongolian, Romanian, Tatar, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uzbek
x 2309

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

Postby Chung » Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:10 am

I saw this on a friend's Facebook wall and thought of your log.

Image
3 x

Daniel N.
Green Belt
Posts: 357
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2015 12:44 pm
Languages: Croatian (N), English (C1), German (beginner)
x 733
Contact:

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

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:38 pm

That"s a rather local joke, a lot of references to stuff going on in Croatia. Even someone in Serbia would only partially get it.
0 x
Check Easy Croatian (very useful for Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian as well)

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 26, 2020 11:29 am

20 Jan - Russian: 42 mins, Croatian: 44 mins
21 Jan - Russian: 40 mins
22 Jan - Russian: 50 mins, Croatian: 44 mins
23 Jan - Russian: 32 mins
24 Jan - Russian: 32 mins
25 Jan - Russian: 100 mins

I've felt loads better this week than last, but still don't seem to have been very productive.

I did finish chapter 21 of Penguin Russian. It was a good chapter for grammar, but there was a huge vocab list at the end of the chapter and a lot of the words in it were completely new to me, so I spent a couple of evenings working on putting them into Memrise. I've still been having technical problems with Forvo this week, but yesterday I finally managed to get it to work for long enough to download all the audio I needed.

I've just started chapter 22, which is all about numbers so definitely not such a nice chapter! I've also been revising some of the initial chapters of the book using my Kindle on the train. I've got through the first four or so chapters so far, which are obviously all pretty straightforward, but I find that when I reread earlier chapters like this I can pick up on more minor points which I overlooked on my first pass through the textbook when I was just trying to grasp the key points.

I've tried to be a bit more disciplined with Memrise and I've finished learning the vocabulary from chapter 17 of Penguin Russian now, plus started chapter 18. Chapter 18 was the chapter on comparatives, so there's loads of vocabulary to practise there. I've temporarily given up on trying to clear my Croatian backlog in Memrise, because I found when I was doing the reviews that I really missed having audio (I've never added audio to my Croatian courses, only to the Russian ones). So then I was tempted to go back and add audio. That would take an enormous amount of time and be incredibly boring, but it is also the sort of thing I could be doing in the background while watching TV, for example. It would depend how much Croatian audio there is on Forvo whether this is even worth attempting, and given how many technical problems I've been having I decided to put this idea on hold for the time being.

Otherwise I've been continuing to watch Russian Progress videos and I did listen to one podcast on the way to work on Tuesday, but apart from that I haven't quite got into the swing of listening to podcasts again since Christmas. I continue to make slow progress with the Croatian series I'm watching, although the end of it does seem to be in sight now; I've only got about another 35 episodes to go :)

In general I feel like I'm lacking a bit of direction with my studies, so maybe need to set myself some clearer goals as to what I want to achieve when!
4 x

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Fri Jan 31, 2020 9:32 pm

26 Jan - Russian: 31 mins
27 Jan - Russian: 53 mins
28 Jan - Russian: 38 mins
29 Jan - Russian: 46 mins, Croatian: 12 mins
30 Jan - Russian: 55 mins
31 Jan - Russian: 54 mins

Wow, January is over. I would say that it feels like it's gone really quickly, but actually I think it feels like it's been January forever :lol:

How have I been doing against my goals this month? Well, I have managed to keep the consistency of doing at least 30 minutes of study every day. So far this has meant at least 30 minutes of Russian every day, although technically I'm doing the 365 challenge with "generic" this year.

After saying in my last post that I felt a bit like I was lacking direction, I've attempted to come up with a brief plan of what I want to achieve with my languages this year, then broken that down into what makes most sense in which quarter. I'm going to Croatia and Montenegro in September, so I want to do lots of Croatian reading and listening leading up to that. I'm going to Switzerland and Liechtenstein briefly in May, so if I'm going to read in German it makes sense to do it before then. I know I've got to go to the British Esperanto Conference in April, so April would be a good time to read Esperanto novels and bring Esperanto back to the front of my brain. The Super Challenge (presumably?) starts again in May, so it doesn't make any sense to start trying to read in Russian before then. Etc...

Doing this has helped me to visualise where different things will fit in my year and then for the first quarter of the year, I've started trying to break down what I want to achieve on a monthly and weekly basis, with the result that I set myself some weekly goals this week. I've tried this before and not found it hugely motivating, so I was viewing this more of an experiment than as a commitment to actually do everything I'd written down, but it turns out that I have actually found having little goals this week really helpful. When I didn't feel like doing Penguin Russian mid-week, I was able to force myself to open the book anyway because now I've mapped it out I can see that at my slow rate of one chapter per week, it's going to take me until almost the end of March to finish this textbook and I really want to start a new resource in April. I'm going to try and keep this goal-setting up for as long as it continues to feel helpful :)

I don't feel like I've done a great job of restoring balance between Croatian and Russian this month. Out of the 31 days of January, I did something in Croatian on 14 of them. This has essentially been reading one novel, watching 9 episodes of my TV series, suffering through a few speed review sessions of long overdue vocabulary on Memrise and starting to reread the beginning of TY Croatian. I want to try and do better in February.

What else? A lot of my Russian studying this week has been devoted to chapter 22 of Penguin Russian. It hasn't actually been quite as bad as I was expecting when I saw that it was about numbers. A previous chapter did touch on the declension of numbers and this chapter starts with recapping everything which was covered previously, then adds more detail, which I found useful. The focus was then on more minor points of dealing with numbers in Russian, like how to say "both", how to say "one and a half", large numbers (millions, billions etc). I have to admit that I didn't really get the hang of all of these and only scored about 50% in the exercises. I thought the book was well written though, because it makes it clear how you can rephrase your sentences to avoid some of these more complex constructions. So at least now I know what I need to avoid :) There was also a section on collective numerals which I didn't excel on, but to be honest I probably wouldn't excel at an exercise on these in Croatian either. I think some of these things are more important to be able to recognise than to be able to reproduce!

Also this week, I finished reading a Boris Akunin novel in English. I mention it only because I think reading Boris Akunin might have been the first thing which made me consider learning Russian. It must have been at least 15 years ago that I started reading his novels in English and I was frustrated about how slowly they were being translated, so started wishing that I could read them in Russian instead :)

Dubioza kolektiv released a new album this week but it was a bit disappointing (for me) because all the lyrics were in English. This slightly bizarre song about learning French did make me laugh though :lol:

5 x

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Mon Feb 03, 2020 9:05 pm

1 Feb - Russian: 54 mins, Croatian: 38 mins
2 Feb - Russian: 65 mins
3 Feb - Russian: 35 mins, Croatian: 24 mins

One of my goals for this week was to finish chapter 23 of Penguin Russian and, surprisingly, I've surpassed my own expectations and finished it already! This chapter was about "time expressions" and so I didn't initially have high hopes for it because, after numbers, one of my least favourite topics is telling the time. But this chapter was actually really useful. It gave a coherent summary of which prepositions (and which cases) to use in different time-related expressions and presented the information in ways which made it easy to remember. There wasn't actually a lot of new content, with many of the points having already been covered to some extent in previous chapters, but it was really useful to have all the time-related stuff summarised in one place :)

I still have to enter all the new vocabulary into Memrise; that will be a task for tomorrow!

What else? At the weekend I started downloading Croatian audio from Forvo for my Memrise courses. Adding audio to Memrise courses is a mind-numbingly tedious task, so I only downloaded about 250 words before I lost the will to live and gave up.

This morning while I was commuting I started revising some more chapters of TY Croatian and I'm up to the end of chapter 4 now. Obviously I'm hoping to speed through this book rather quickly and then move on to more challenging content. Out of all my textbooks I mainly chose to revise this one first because I got a new Kindle for Christmas and I have a proper Kindle version of this book.

I spent a lot of the weekend planning my September holiday and trying to decide how much time I was brave enough to spend in Albania. I've got two weeks off work, so I've ended up with a plan of splitting the first week between Dubrovnik and Kotor, then spending the second week in Albania. I'm planning to travel from Kotor to Shkoder, spend a few days hiking in the Albanian Alps and then travel to Tirana. I'm also hoping to visit Berat, which looks like a really interesting town. The hiking part of the trip is going to potentially be a bit challenging but the scenery looks absolutely stunning and I'm hoping that planning something which feels like it's at the edge of my capabilities will give me some motivation to lose weight/get fitter before September :lol: I also do think that learning some survival Albanian is likely to be on my to-do list at some point this year, although probably not this quarter. If anyone has recommendations for Albanian resources, please let me know!
6 x

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun Feb 09, 2020 8:09 pm

4 Feb - Russian: 52 mins
5 Feb - Russian: 31 mins
6 Feb - Russian: 35 mins, Croatian: 23 mins
7 Feb - Russian: 35 mins
8 Feb - Russian: 50 mins, Croatian: 27 mins
9 Feb - Russian: 36 mins, Croatian: 62 mins

When I finished chapter 23 of Penguin Russian last Monday, I was feeling optimistic that I might be able to get ahead of my schedule and finish chapter 24 this week also. That didn't happen, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I had about 10 goals for this week, of which finishing chapter 23 was only one, and so I felt like I ought to complete my other goals first before surpassing the Penguin Russian goal. Some of those goals were not language-related and took time away from learning languages. I have a goal of getting 70 000 steps per week at the moment, for example, which requires a fair amount of my free time each day to meet, and I was also in the middle of an approx. 900-page book of short stories in English which I wanted to get to the end of. Secondly, a couple of minor but annoying things randomly went wrong. My wireless earphones stopped pairing for no clear reason, so I wasted most of my spare time one evening trying to reset them. And on another evening, the desktop version of OneNote bizarrely decided to delete all my notes, also for no clear reason. I also spent a not insignificant amount of time sorting out logistics for my holiday to Albania. I got a bit stressed out when I read articles about how many hotels collapsed in the dreadful earthquake which struck Albania last November because they had been built illegally (i.e. without proper planning permission). So I may have spent a bit of time on booking.com looking at pictures of hotel facades and trying to weigh up which ones were least likely to kill me if they fell on me :lol:

Anyway. In the end I did actually achieve most of my goals. In addition to finishing chapter 23 of Penguin Russian, I got all the new vocab from that unit inputted into Memrise and downloaded/uploaded all the corresponding audio from Forvo. I also learned all of the vocabulary from chapter 19 of the book in Memrise, albeit that was a chapter which was fairly low on new vocabulary. Learning the vocabulary from chapter 20 is going to be much more of a challenge, because that was the verbs of motion chapter.

I am on a mission to revise the earlier chapters of Penguin Russian, because my main focus so far has been on trying to move forward, but I still feel like all the cases endings aren't sticking for me. So this week I used my Kindle to revise chapters 8 - 11. As I mentioned last week, I'm also trying to revise Teach Yourself Croatian, and this week I read chapters 5 - 10. I'm hoping I might be able to finish it during the coming week and move onto something a bit more challenging. I also downloaded audio for another 250 Croatian words from Forvo to add to my Memrise courses. Again, this was mind-numbingly boring and I think it would probably be better if I did it in the background while watching TV or something similar.

That brings me to the goal which I failed this week: watching five episodes of the Croatian TV series I'm following. I ended up watching a grand total of zero episodes. In fairness, this was mainly because of the problem with my headphones, so I'm going to try again this week. I do feel like I need more Croatian input at the moment, to counteract the amount time I'm spending on Russian.

So far I have continued with at least 30 minutes of Russian study every day in 2020. This is mainly because I don't feel like I'm making much progress even with studying for 30 minutes a day, so I'm clearly not going to make any progress if I don't even spend 30 minutes per day. That said, I think there has to come a point in 2020 when I decided to break this streak and make Croatian my exclusive focus for a while. I don't want to be in Croatia/Montenegro and struggling to find the correct words because its Russian words which are at the front of my brain.

Russian input was not one of my goals this week, but I did end up watching an episode of the travel show 'Орёл и Решка' one evening this week when I felt too tired to do anything else in Russian. This was partly inspired by Ironmike and partly because I'd wanted to try it for a while anyway (some of the Russian travel videos I've been watching on Youtube about Iceland, Slovenia, Switzerland etc have been by Anton Ptushkin, who was a presenter on the show at some point, so it was on my radar as something to watch). I chose an episode about London, because I think that if you're trying to watch something above your level it helps if you at least understand the subject matter to start with. I thought some of the programme was really good; I didn't catch the names of the presenters, but it was the male presenter who ended up with the small budget, and I thought he had some really good tips for saving money. I even learned some things about London that I didn't know :) I thought the rest of the programme was kinda dreadful because I found the female presenter completely unbearable. I don't know if she was deliberately being unbearable because she won the toss or whether she's like that all the time, but once I'd met my 30 minute Russian target for the day, I actually switched the programme off because I couldn't take her any longer :lol: I did return and watch the rest of it the next day, when I was perhaps in a slightly better mood, but I still didn't really enjoy the luxury travel segments; it all just seemed too unrelatable. The good thing about choosing this programme though was that it had Russian subtitles. I don't know whether all the episodes on YouTube have subtitles or whether I just got lucky, but I definitely wouldn't have understood anywhere near as much as I did without them, so that was good :) I'm wondering whether watching this show would count towards a Russian Super Challenge or whether it's too far away from the concept of a film? I need to hunt down a copy of that diagram that explains what is/isn't within the spirit of the challenge.

I think that's pretty much it for this week. I've just booked a trip to Latvia for a week in August. I won't be learning Latvian but who knows, perhaps I'll get to use some Russian while I'm there. I've been to Latvia once before in 2013, but I only saw Riga and a bit of the seaside, so I'm looking forward to seeing more this time :)

Oh, inspired by Xmmm's log, I tried the Leipzig vocab test for Russian. Somehow I managed to score better on Level 4 than on Level 2 and 3, which doesn't make a whole load of sense. I found it really hard anyway so I took the German test afterwards to make me feel better amount myself :lol: I only did the receptive tests, but will try the productive ones at some point in the future.

rsz_2020-02-09.png

rsz_2020-02-09_1.png
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
3 x

User avatar
cjareck
Brown Belt
Posts: 1047
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2017 6:11 pm
Location: Poland
Languages: Polish (N) English, German, Russian(B1?) French (B1?), Hebrew(B1?), Arabic(A2?), Mandarin (HSK 2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8589
x 2979
Contact:

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

Postby cjareck » Sun Feb 09, 2020 8:50 pm

Congratulations on your excellent test results!
Radioclare wrote:I think that's pretty much it for this week. I've just booked a trip to Latvia for a week in August. I won't be learning Latvian but who knows, perhaps I'll get to use some Russian while I'm there. I've been to Latvia once before in 2013, but I only saw Riga and a bit of the seaside, so I'm looking forward to seeing more this time :)

I think that speaking Russian in Latvia is not the best idea. Due to their history and current politics. I would advise you trying to communicate in English first and only if it fails to use Russian. In 2006 I was with my wife in Vilnius. We went to a bookstore there and I wanted to buy some Russian books. I spoke poor Russian but the lady was simply impolite. I asked our friend (a Polish girl from Vilnius who studied in Toruń) why she was like that. The answer was simple: "What you had expected? You were trying to buy a Russian book and spoke Russian". I suppose it may be similar in Latvia now. Especially after what happened to Ukraine.
3 x
Please feel free to correct me in any language


Listening: 1+ (83% content, 90% linguistic)
Reading: 1 (83% content, 90% linguistic)


MSA DLI : 30 / 141ESKK : 18 / 40


Mandarin Assimil : 62 / 105

User avatar
Radioclare
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2250
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 12:59 pm
Location: England
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Esperanto, German, Croatian
Learns: Russian
x 10434
Contact:

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun Feb 09, 2020 9:16 pm

cjareck wrote:I think that speaking Russian in Latvia is not the best idea. Due to their history and current politics. I would advise you trying to communicate in English first and only if it fails to use Russian. In 2006 I was with my wife in Vilnius. We went to a bookstore there and I wanted to buy some Russian books. I spoke poor Russian but the lady was simply impolite. I asked our friend (a Polish girl from Vilnius who studied in Toruń) why she was like that. The answer was simple: "What you had expected? You were trying to buy a Russian book and spoke Russian". I suppose it may be similar in Latvia now. Especially after what happened to Ukraine.


Yes, good point! Sorry, I meant only if I am somewhere where people seem to be speaking Russian. When I went to Riga before, I was staying in a part of town where there seemed to be a lot more Russian spoken than Latvian. And when I went to the seaside, it seemed like there were a lot of Russian tourists, so I remember going to a cafe there where the menu was in Russian and I got served by a Russian-speaking waitress.

My boyfriend and I have been to Lithuania a few times and in general found that people speak amazing English. I think probably the only times we've used Russian there is when travelling in the region around Ignalina, which is a bit off the beaten track for tourists. And I think it's a bit of a special case in Lithuania, because there is a nuclear power station nearby which historically lots of Russian speakers came to work on.

There is a really good book about Russian speakers in the Baltic countries, which I read a few years ago; unfortunately I think it is only published in Finnish, Swedish and Esperanto, but I recommend it to anyone who speaks one of those languages :)
3 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: philomath and 2 guests