17 OctoberToday was somewhat dominated by an Esperanto meeting.
RussianI did a bit of Memrise in the morning before the meeting. I haven't logged in most days this week so I've built up quite a backlog of reviews again.
Once the meeting was over I spent half an hour or so on Schaum's grammar. Although I feel like I've been quite disciplined at studying this book in the evenings this week, it was only today that I finally got to the end of the section on the nominative singular
The first bit I studied today was about the different masculine/feminine endings for names of professions and nationalities. I felt like I was already quite strong on the nationalities, but a lot of the words for professions were new to me. The second part I looked at was about the gender of indeclinable words of foreign origin. I have to confess, I had assumed these were all neuter (except кофе, which is always given in textbooks as an exception) but it turns out that, like everything in Russian, it's more complicated than that. Lots of the names of towns are masculine (based on the word for town, город, being masculine), while the names of rivers are feminine (after река). There was a whole list of rules like this and it reminded me of the very distant past... probably over 15 years ago now... when I was trying and failing to remember lists of rules about noun gender in German. I can visualise a page in my grammar book which explained that the gender of rivers in Germany is always feminine (except for when it isn't - der Rhein, der Main), while the gender of rivers outside of Germany is always masculine (again, except for when it isn't - die Themse). In the end I just gave up and decided never to talk about rivers in German
In the same vein, I've decided never to talk about US states which share their names with rivers in Russian; Mississippi and Colorado, for example, are apparently masculine if you're talking about the state but feminine if you're talking about the rivers. The chances of me ever getting that right are nil
This evening I spent some time reading Agatha Christie and got through another 30 pages. The main word I looked up today was "няня" (nanny).
Total - Russian: 100 mins