Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

[Radioclare]

22 Mar - Russian: 74 mins, German: 135 mins
23 Mar - Russian: 42 mins
24 Mar - Russian: 69 mins, Croatian: 52 mins
25 Mar - Russian: 32 mins, Croatian: 45 mins

This isn't the day of the week on which I normally update my log. At least, I don't think it is; I feel like all the days are merging into one now that I no longer have reasons to leave the house But whichever day of the week it is, it is a momentous one because I FINALLY got to the end of Penguin Russian!

To appreciate what a huge achievement this is, you need to remember that I first started studying this textbook in 2011. I mean, obviously I haven't been studying it continuously since then (Russian is hard, but not that hard ), but I have been studying it for what feels like an incredibly long time and I have had numerous attempts at it over the years, several of which I'm sure failed around chapter 7. Today I finally got to the end of chapter 30, which finishes with a short story by Chekov, and although I still feel like there is a lot in the book which has gone over my head, particularly in the final three chapters, I do now feel like I have made at least *some* progress over the past year or so

I now need to decide which resource I'm going to use next; I think it's a toss-up between Assimil or Colloquial Russian 2. I suspect that if I looked at the plans I made for this year I'm supposed to be doing Assimil next. But I'm deliberately not looking at the notebook where I wrote down all my plans for the year because pretty much all my plans for the year need to be scrapped now anyway. I have already done the passive wave of Assimil once before, so I think my hope was that I could get through that pretty quickly a second time and move on to the active wave, which was waaaaay too difficult for me the first time I attempted it (I think I quit about four lessons in!) but possibly more manageable now. So I probably will do that, but if I don't enjoy it I might give up and do Colloquial Russian 2 instead.

Otherwise there was a new Russian Progress podcast about coronavirus this week, so I listened to that on Monday. I'm just about keeping up with my Memrise reviews, but my learning of new vocabulary has become a bit erratic now that I'm not commuting. Memrise feels like an activity which is fine to do to pass the time when there's nothing better to do, but one which it's hard to do just for its own sake. I have input all the vocabulary from chapter 29 and chapter 30 into my Memrise course though, which took quite a long time; both chapters had long vocab lists.

We're only allowed to exercise outside once a day now, so I'm going for a walk at lunchtime to get as many of my 10 000 steps in as possible, and then in the evening I'm making up the remainder on my exercise bike. This is a bit sad, mainly because one of the pedals keeps falling off my bike, but the upside is that it means I have to watch episodes of my Croatian telenovela, because cycling without watching TV is a level of boredom which I'm not prepared to contemplate. I've still got 25 - 30 episodes of this series to watch, so I'm guessing this lockdown will probably be long enough for me to get through all of them and - hopefully - find something a bit more exciting to watch for the next Super Challenge.

At the weekend I also started reading a new novel - 'Fremd' - by Ursula Poznanski. It's a thriller about a woman who confronts a man she assumes is an intruder in her house, only to be told that he's her fiance. Although the rest of her memory is fine, she has absolutely zero recollection of the man and initially assumes he is a lunatic, until friends and photos confirm that they are indeed a couple. The story is really cleverly written, with chapters alternating between the point of view of the woman and the man. Very exciting and I have no idea how it's going to end

[Radioclare]

26 Mar - Russian: 56 mins, Croatian; 48 mins
27 Mar - Russian: 31 mins, Croatian: 45 mins
28 Mar - Russian: 148 mins, Croatian: 49 mins, German: 126 mins
29 Mar - Russian: 112 mins, Croatian: 45 mins

Friday was a really stressful day at work and it was closer to 8pm than 7pm by the time I finally finished. But this weekend for the first time I've felt like I do have more spare time as a result of this quarantine. I didn't have any plans to go anywhere this weekend anyway, but if it wasn't for this situation I would probably have spent the weekend either preparing for an upcoming Esperanto AGM or working on travel itineraries for trips in May and June. Now that none of those things are happening, I was able to spend a lot more time on languages than normal, as you can probably see from my stats above.

After a bit of internal debate, I did decide to start Russian Assimil. The copy I have is in German and I think I got it as a present for Christmas 2017, so the first time I attempted to work through it was early 2018. The initial lessons obviously feel quite straightforward to me now, so I am trying to get through them at a reasonable speed and so far have completed the first fourteen. Just to be clear, I'm counting the time I spend on Assimil as Russian study (i.e. not counting any time as German) although it obviously does involve spending about half the time reading in German.

Because the passive phase of Assimil is very… erm… passive, I decided I needed to try and do something more active too, so last night I decided to start working through the lessons at http://learnrussian.rt.com/lessons/. Like with most Russian resources, I've made several failed attempts at these previously, but am hoping to do better this time! My main memory from last time I used them was how useful they are for practising grammar but oh my goodness, I had forgotten how much hassle they are from a computer point of view

First of all, I spent ten minutes thinking maybe the website didn't exist anymore because I couldn’t get the page to load. Then - eventually - I remembered that it doesn’t work in Chrome (or, at least, it never works in Chrome for me) and that I normally do the lessons in Firefox. But I hadn't opened Firefox since last time I attempted the lessons, which must surely be over a year ago, and Firefox was so offended by this that it failed to open at all. I must have waited another 15 minutes for it to install updates which never quite seemed to complete, before giving up and trying it in Edge instead. Edge allowed me to log in and I felt like I was winning, not least because I remembered the email address and password I'd signed up with, but when I got into my account and found I'd previously completed around 25 lessons, I decided I wanted to reset my progress and start again at the beginning for completeness, because there was every chance that I didn't remember a significant part of the content from those lessons and would benefit from doing them again. I was absolutely positive that there would be a way to reset my progress because I was certain that I had been in the exact same situation once before, but I looked everywhere where there could conceivably be such an option and failed to find it.

I was so convinced that there must be a way to do it that I ended up re-reading my own log from 2018 in an attempt to figure it out. When I found the post I was looked for, it turned out that there isn't a way to reset your progress globally; the only way to do it is to go into each lesson and click to reset each individual exercise. So that's half an hour of my life I'll never get back! I thought I was finally making progress… then I found I couldn't get any of the audio to play in Edge. I wasted another ten minutes of my life before I realised it needed Flash… and probably another ten before I actually managed to get Flash to work.

Eventually I was ready to start the lessons. I did two last night and you'd think that scoring 100% in the first two lessons of a Russian course would not be beyond me at this stage, but OMG I had forgotten how frustrating some of the exercises were. I was flummoxed for ages by a simple exercise which wanted me to divide a group of nouns into those that should be referred to as кто and those that should be referred to as что. In the end I had to admit defeat and refer to the wondrous website https://www.explaura.net/learnrussian-rt-com/, from which I learned that семья should have been in the что category and not the кто category where I had confusedly put it

I'm now starting to feel less confident that I will get to the end of these lessons without throwing my computer out of the window

What else? I watched a Russian Progress video about the zoo in Novosibirsk. Life in the UK is at the stage where it's actually felt quite odd over the past week seeing videos and photos of Russian people visiting zoos and just generally walking around in a normal manner. Similarly, although I have been continuing to watch my Croatian series while cycling, there have been a couple of split seconds where I've wanted to shout at the characters for not observing appropriate social distancing rules, before remembering that this has actually only been "normal" for a couple of weeks

My newfound free time also enabled me to finish reading the German novel 'Fremd' which I started last week. I really enjoyed it, but the plot in the second half of the book was rather surreal. I think it's one of those where it just about makes sense if you don't think about it too deeply, but the minute you start asking "But why...?" it all falls apart.

One cool thing to happen this week was that one of my favourite bands, Dubioza Kolektiv, are playing a "Quarantine Show" from their homes every Monday evening. Below is an excerpt from last Monday; the song is from their new English-language album and even though I'm not a huge fan of their English songs, I really enjoyed this one just for the positive energy. It's difficult to watch something so energetic and stay depressed

[Radioclare]

30 Mar - Russian: 60 mins, Croatian: 46 mins
31 Mar - Russian: 43 mins, Croatian: 49 mins
1 Apr - Russian: 33 mins, Croatian: 48 mins
2 Apr - Russian: 36 mins, Croatian: 48 mins
3 Apr - Russian: 61 mins, Croatian: 48 mins
4 Apr - Russian: 76 mins, Croatian: 44 mins

Working from home has started to feel normal now. Still enjoying the extra sleep and still not missing the commute. The downsides are the fact that I seem to spend several hours per day on the phone and I don't think I've managed to finish work yet before 7pm. That said, I've managed to get into a reasonable routine for language learning. I'm going outside every day for a walk at lunchtime, but that doesn't get me to my target of 10 000 steps so I'm continuing to make up the remainder on my exercise bike in the evening (with my Fitbit strapped to my ankle ) while watching Croatian TV. Out of 236 episodes of the series 'Na granici' I've now got a mere 15 to go, so I should finish it after 15 days if I manage to keep up this routine. Then I'll have to choose another series to start before the Super Challenge kicks off again

I am definitely not a person who is into exercise, but one unintended consequence of this cycling is that I'm finding it's making me more focused in the evenings. As in, once I've finished cycling my concentration and motivation seems to be higher than before I've started. Generally, before I've started I don't feel like doing anything at all and could quite happily waste an entire evening reading doom and gloom on Twitter. But once I've finished cycling, I'm able to concentrate properly on Russian, to the extent that not only have I cleared all my Memrise reviews every evening this week, I've also learned at least 10 new words every day. This means I have finally finished learning all the vocabulary from Penguin Russian! The words this week have actually been quite tough to learn, because they were from the vocab list from the Chekov story at the end of chapter 30, so ordinarily I think I would have procrastinated learning them indefinitely.

Once I've finished with Memrise, I've then been working through the RT lessons. When I updated last Sunday I had done the first two lessons and I've now got to the end of lesson 15. After my initial struggles I've actually had fewer computer problems than I expected. Possibly Edge is the best browser to use for these. I seem to remember when I was using Firefox before that I was having a lot of issues with not being able to drag words to the correct positions, which was frustrating because a lot of the exercises are of the drag and drop variety. So far I'm finding the lessons useful and there's only one exercise (on the genitive) that I can remember having a significant struggle with. I think my next lesson is on the genitive plural though, so it may all go downhill from here

Most evenings I've then been going on to do a lesson of Russian Assimil. I have to confess, I don't really "get" Assimil. I've always wanted to try it because I've seen so many people raving about it on the forum over the years, but so far I'm not really a fan. I don't know; perhaps I can't comment because I'm not doing it properly. I'm up to the end of lesson 21 at the moment and the lessons so far have mainly been revision for me, without a lot of new content, so I'm finding if I go through the audio more than three times I get so bored I want to scream. If the entire content was new to me, I'd probably feel differently about it. And I still think I'm going to find the active phase difficult.

What else? Psihomodo Pop released a new quarantine version of one of my favourite songs 'Sve će biti u redu' this week. The title (Everything will be okay) is quite apt for now



My most listened to song of the week though is definitely 'Draga, zapio sam djecu' from the new Brkovi album.

[Radioclare]

5 Apr - Russian: 53 mins, Croatian: 93 mins
6 Apr - Russian: 56 mins, Croatian: 69 mins
7 Apr - Russian: 49 mins, Croatian: 45 mins
8 Apr - Russian: 30 mins, Croatian: 48 mins
9 Apr - Russian: 38 mins, Croatian: 48 mins

Happy that this has only been a 4-day week, even if this is not going to be the Easter any of us had hoped for. It's been a moderately stressful week at work. I was involved in a pitch for a new client on Tuesday afternoon and in the circumstances it had to be done over Zoom, so that was an interesting experience!

My stats seem to suggest that the quarantine is benefiting my language studies a bit, even if I am losing out on the time I would normally have spent studying while commuting. I'm still watching an episode of my Croatian soap every day while cycling and, now that I'm within 10 episodes or so of the end of the series, the storyline has started to get really exciting again, so that's giving me additional motivation to keep going.

I looked back at what I'd said my goals were at the start of the year. Some of them were linked to travel plans and are no longer relevant. But one of the things I'd said was that I wanted to work on my Croatian grammar, and that's something which I haven't really made much progress with in the first quarter of the year. I did start trying to read Easy Croatian on my Kindle during my commutes, but now I'm not commuting that has fallen by the wayside. So last Sunday I decided to try a new approach and start revising the big BCS Grammar textbook. It must be several years since I last read through this book so it ought to be a good refresher, and in general it's the sort of book where I pick up something new every time I look at it.

How successful I'm going to be with studying it consistently remains to be seen. My instinct is still to prioritise studying Russian and so in the evenings this week, I've only found that I've studied Croatian grammar if I had spare time left after exercising and doing my Russian and before going to bed (which some evenings I've found that I haven't had). I struggle to take grammar in if I just sit and read a textbook like a novel, so I've decided to try and take notes (which generally helps me to focus). I'm thinking that even if I don't make much progress with it during the week, hopefully I can devote time to it at the weekends because I'm unlikely to ever have as much free time at weekends as I do at the moment... so if I don't study Croatian grammar now, when will I ever do it?!

In terms of Russian, I've continued with both the RT lessons and Assimil this week. As of last night, I was up to lesson 22 on the RT website and lesson 25 of Assimil, so making reasonable progress through both. I am finding the RT lessons significantly more useful than Assimil at the moment. There have been lots of opportunities to practise case endings in recent lessons, which I've found really useful, and I've actually surprised myself by doing better at the exercises than I expected. I'm finally having some success at remembering which is which out of the dative, prepositional and instrumental plurals But I'm guessing my experience of Assimil will change once I get past lesson 35 (I think!) and start working on the active phase.

Otherwise the most exciting thing this week has been that Hladno Pivo released a new song, recorded with guest appearances from other famous artists from the region. The title 'Ovo će proći' means "This will pass"

[Radioclare]

10 Apr - Russian: 55 mins, Croatian: 85 mins
11 Apr - Russian: 103 mins, Croatian: 71 mins
12 Apr - Russian: 104 mins, Croatian: 59 mins

I normally spend Easter seeing family, but obviously that isn't possible this year so I've been using my spare time to read and study languages instead.

In addition to the above figures, I have spent an hour or so today reading my first Esperanto novel of the year: 'Averto pri murdo' by Julian Modest. I don't often read in Esperanto, but this was a short book (only 100 pages) so it didn't feel like a daunting task to tackle it. I also love reading crime fiction in any language, so I had high hopes for this book... which it didn't quite fulfil It was okay. I mean, it wasn't horrendously bad. I have definitely read worse fiction in Esperanto. But when I read something original in Esperanto, I mentally put it to the following test: "Would this have got published if it was written in English?". And in this case, I think the answer is probably "no". The story was simplistic. The characters weren't very deep. There was no real mystery or suspense, both of which are generally quite important in crime fiction! But, that said, it was very easy to read and for that reason perhaps a good book to recommend to beginners. The language used was very straightforward and I only came across three words which I didn't know and had to look up:

strabi - to squint
kokri - to cuckold
tilio - a linden tree

To be honest, I wouldn't recognise a linden tree if it started growing in the middle of my living room

As far as Russian goes, I'm still ploughing through both the RT lessons and Assimil. I'm up to lesson 32 on the RT course at the moment but I'm thinking I might go back and repeat lessons 31 and 32 again tomorrow; both were about verbs of motion, which is definitely not my strong point. There were some really good exercises in the lessons, both for practising conjugating different verbs of motion and for choosing the correct verb to use in different circumstances, but by the time I got to the final exercises in lesson 32 I was struggling to understand the reasons for the answers being what they were even when I was sitting and staring at them. So I think I'd probably benefit from revising the verbs of motion content and then trying the exercises again.

Assimil continues to bore me. I've spent a fair bit of time on it and got to lesson 36 now, which means I've just started the active wave, but I still don't feel like I'm learning anything. And I'm starting to ask myself: If I'm not learning anything and I'm not enjoying it, why am I doing this course? The main reason is that I'd like to be able to say I'd persevered to the end of it and ticked it off my list of Russian courses which I've previously started and failed. But if I'm not enjoying it and not learning anything, I'm not sure whether that is a good enough motivation to get through another 300 pages or so of content.

The time at home over Easter has also enabled me to make some progress with the BCS grammar textbook. It's a huge book so re-reading it is going to be a project which takes some time, but I'm somewhere in the middle of chapter 3 at the moment. I also learned a new word in Croatian this week: poligon. I was very confused when it came up in my series because initially I assumed the characters were talking about a shape, which made zero sense. But from context I eventually figured out that it was a test of physical ability, like an obstacle course. In the series, two characters were competing to see who would get accepted into the local association for voluntary firefighters and the two candidates had to race against each other, clearing various obstacles in order to put out a pretend fire. It was this activity which was being referred to as a "poligon". I later looked it up in the Hrvatski jezični portal to double-check, and that gives the third definition of "poligon" as "vježbalište s preprekama koje vježbač mora savladati određenim redoslijedom u što kraćem vremenu" which makes sense. But like "tilio", probably not a word I'm going to be using in conversation any time soon

[IronMike]

Thanks for the review. I will avoid that book! And thanks for the vocab. "To cuckold" Might not use that verb much.

[Radioclare]

13 Apr - Russian: 166 mins, Croatian: 92 mins
14 Apr - Russian: 61 mins, Croatian: 65 mins
15 Apr - Russian: 62 mins, Croatian: 45 mins
16 Apr - Russian: 37 mins, Croatian: 52 mins
17 Apr - Russian: 82 mins, Croatian: 46 mins

I've felt vaguely unwell for most of this week, so haven't always had days which were quite as productive as I would have liked. Monday was a public holiday though, so that was a bumper day for studying.

My main achievement this week has been persevering with the RT lessons, despite the fact that they are about verbs of motion. I've gone from being able to whizz through a lesson in 10 minutes to sitting staring at my screen and weeping, when 45 minutes in I still can't get the answers right I did go back and repeat lessons 31 and 32 again, which made me feel very virtuous, and I did legit feel like I was making some progress in understanding the uses of the basic verbs of motion. During the course of the week I've also completed lesson 33, 34 and 35; unfortunately, with each lesson the verbs of motion seem to get harder and more obscure.

The positive is that I have got loads better at conjugating them. So much of my focus so far as has been on getting noun and adjective endings right that I've been neglecting verbs a bit anyway and conjugating verbs of motion was a definite weakness, so forcing myself to do these exercises has definitely been a benefit. Each lesson is focusing on a handful of different verb pairs and one of the initial exercises is always to type out the conjugation. It sounds like that should be a simple task, but OMG you would not believe how many times I have failed to get it right, even when I've given up and looked at the answers, mostly because I've made a silly typo somewhere which I just can't spot. I have developed a strong hatred of certain verbs of motion because of this. I lost about 10 minutes of my life trying to find a typo in my conjugation of приплыть the other day, so I've decided I would rather permanently avoid swimming going forward than risk needing to conjugate it again. And verbs like подъезжать are also upsetting me, because my little finger is not very good at stretching to type ъ on the keyboard, I guess because it's not a key I would normally use for anything else.

Anyway. I officially gave up on Assimil on Monday. I don't like quitting things, but it was doubtful whether I was learning anything and I definitely wasn't enjoying it, so it was starting to feel like a waste of time. I've now started Colloquial Russian 2 instead, which so far I'm enjoying a lot more. Admittedly, it is starting with a fairly gentle recap of case endings and so far I have only got through the nominative (always my favourite case!), the accusative and the genitive singular. But overall I think this method of reading a book, making notes and doing exercises suits me better than repeatedly listening to Assimil dialogues and hoping I absorb something.

Last night I felt really lazy and so instead of doing any proper studying, I watched a travel documentary on Youtube about Saudi Arabia. I've never been particularly interested in Saudi Arabia and certainly have no intention of planning a holiday there, but it was honestly one of the most interesting travel programmes I've ever watched and I learned loads. The video is here if anyone is interested (if you turn subtitles on, they're in English).

Otherwise I've been continuing to study my BCS grammar book and watching my Croatian series while cycling. I think I've only got three episodes left now, so the storyline has become much more exciting. And I'll soon have to make a decision about what series to start next!

[Daniel N.]

I also learned a new word in Croatian this week: poligon. I was very confused when it came up in my series because initially I assumed the characters were talking about a shape, which made zero sense.

I think this additional meaning is fairly common:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poligon (Polish)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D ... 0%BE%D0%BD

[overscore]

I guess the same idea in English is "the ring"?? As a place you go to to practice boxing and stuff.

[cjareck]

Poligon is used as a name for a military training ground. Using it for a shape would be very strange. But remember that I'm military historian
There is also an adjective "poligonalny" and it is used to describe a certain shape, mostly in old fortifications.