Radioclare's 2020 log (Russian, Croatian)

[Serpent]

In Russian it's a restricted area used by the government, mostly for military activities. Also includes places where nuclear bombs were tested, where nuclear or regular waste is stored, and where people were shot and buried. See ядерный полигон, мусорный полигон, полигон НКВД. Some of the latter can now be visited to pay tribute to the victims.

[IronMike]

Here's a couple pictures of two polygons I visited while in Kyrgyzstan.

[Radioclare]

Thanks all - really interesting stuff I have definitely learned something today!

My understanding from the Hrvatski jezični portal was that "poligon" has three meanings in Croatian. The first is a shape, the second is a military training ground similar to what you've said for Polish/Russian, and then the third sounds like an obstacle course, which was the meaning it had in my TV series.

There's a short clip below of some of the characters taking part in a 'poligon'; in this instance it was a competition for the local fire service, which involved jumping over various obstacles to rescue someone pretending to burn in a fire

[jeff_lindqvist]

Here's a couple pictures of two polygons I visited while in Kyrgyzstan.

For a second, I misread the link in your signature as:
My 2020 Polygon Fitness Challenge

[Radioclare]

18 Apr - Russian: 69 mins, Croatian: 47 mins
19 Apr - Russian: 54 mins
20 Apr - Russian: 69 mins, Croatian: 62 mins, German: 10 mins
21 Apr - Russian: 52 mins, Croatian: 51 mins
22 Apr - Russian: 41 mins
23 Apr - Russian: 31 mins, Croatian: 49 mins
24 Apr - Russian: 35 mins, Croatian: 58 mins
25 Apr - Russian: 47 mins, Croatian: 76 mins

This week doesn't feel like it's been quite as productive as last. I had an Esperanto-related obligation on Wednesday evening, which meant that I didn't have much time for studying, and then work spilled over later than I would have liked into Thursday evening.

My main achievement has been finishing the RT lessons on verbs of motion. I completed lessons 36 - 40 this week and I continued to feel like I was making progress. As I said last week, I definitely feel more confident on the conjugations now and I think I've also made a slight improvement in judging which verb to use where. Lesson 39 was the one I struggled with the most; that lesson dealt with the verbs сходиться/сойтись and расходиться/разойтись and to be honest, most of it whooshed straight over my head. Lesson 40 was then a bit of a recap using all the verbs of motion, which I didn't find too bad, and then there was a test. I got 57% which doesn't sound amazing (especially because it was multiple choice ) but it's definitely a lot better than I would have scored if I hadn't worked through the lessons. I moved on to lesson 41 this morning and it was a walk in the park in comparison to the past 10 lessons; the exercises were mainly just choosing whether to insert что or чтобы into a sentence I'm hoping I might progress a bit faster with the lessons now I've got out the other side of the verbs of motion.

Because I've prioritised the RT lessons, plus clearing my Memrise reviews, I haven't been studying Colloquial Russian 2 on the days when I've been short of time, so I'm progressing with that quite slowly. I'm still in chapter 1 (though I anticipate being in chapter 1 for several weeks - it's about 40 pages long) and I'm moving slowly through the recap of case endings. I think I've finished the genitive, dative and instrumental since my last update, so I've just got the prepositional to go. In general I think the prepositional is quite a simple case, but I do have a tendency to get muddled with the prepositional pronouns, so a recap will be good.

Being short of time means I also haven't got much further with my revision of the BCS grammar textbook and am currently at the end of chapter 4.

My big Croatian achievement for this week though is that I finally got to the end of 'Na granici'! I've calculated that I must have spent 177 hours watching this series and, in all honesty, it wasn't my favourite. While I enjoyed individual episodes, overall it was a light comedy without a strong plot. The main conflict was how the hero (a policeman) was going to marry the heroine (a smuggler) without compromising his integrity. This was neatly resolved when the smuggling villagers joined forces with the local police force to fight against a common enemy - Frontex, the European border agency, who were threatening to close the local police station and build a wall across the border. In order to make the local police look competent, the villagers agreed to stage some smuggling across the border, allowing the police to capture three of the main smugglers and send them to jail. It was actually a really good ending, with some emotional scenes while the characters who had chosen to sacrifice themselves and go to jail said goodbye to their families and the rest of the village. I learned that cycling on an exercise bike is actually quite difficult while you're crying

This means that later in the week I had the excitement of choosing a new series to watch. This always feels like a big decision when I know I'm going to devote so many hours of my life watching something I also felt slightly nervous, like starting a new series is a test of whether I can really understand Croatian or whether I can just understand the way it is spoken by a limited number of actors in a particular series. I remember when I started 'Na granici', I felt like it took me a while to get into it and be able to understand some of the characters, particularly the middle-aged male ones, who had a tendency to mumble.

Anyway, I finally chose a series called 'Drugo ime ljubavi' (Another name for love). This one is partly set by the coast, which will make a nice change from the previous series which was completely in inland Croatia. It looks like it's going to be pretty exciting. There's a handsome pilot who may or may not have murdered someone, a heroine who seems to be married to a petty criminal and who had her baby stolen from her 10 years ago, and a heiress going blind in a big villa by the sea. There's already been a dramatic car crash, which appears to have killed one of the main characters and put another one in a coma. And I've only watched three episodes The best thing is that every time there's a moment of high suspense, which seems to be every 10 minutes or so, it is accompanied by suitably dramatic music which seems to motivate me to cycle faster. So I am getting plenty of exercise And my boyfriend has bought me a new exercise bike, so now I don't need to worry about cycling the pedals off any more I've also not had any problems understanding the dialogue so far, which was a nice relief.

I think that's all. I've been reading in English, getting a few things I really wanted to read out of the way before the Super Challenge starts. I'm feeling a mixture of excited and nervous about the Super Challenge, because I'm going to start trying to read in Russian. My plan is to start with one of the Agatha Christie novels I have, see whether I find it too hard, and if I do switch back to reading Twilight via LWT. Part of me wants to go straight to Twilight tbh But the other part of me will be a bit gutted if after all this effort, I'm still not good enough at Russian to understand anything in an Agatha Christie.

We'll see. I also need to find some TV to watch in Russian, but I'm less nervous about that because I think my Russian listening is ahead of where my Croatian listening was when I started my first Croatian Super Challenge, so I'm hopeful this won't involve as much pain as that Super Challenge did Ideally I want to find a series with a lot of episodes involving the same characters and preferably something that's available on Youtube so that I don't have to try and figure out how to subscribe to a Russian TV series.

[Daniel N.]

Poligon in Croatian does mean polygon as well.

https://enciklopedija.hr/Natuknica.aspx?ID=49164

[Radioclare]

26 Apr - Russian: 43 mins, Croatian: 50 mins
27 Apr - Russian: 64 mins, Croatian: 54 mins
28 Apr - Russian: 43 mins, Croatian: 49 mins
29 Apr - Russian: 46 mins, Croatian: 52 mins
30 Apr - Russian: 39 mins, Croatian: 49 mins
1 May - Russian: 57 mins, Croatian: 49 mins
2 May - Russian: 85 mins, Croatian: 45 mins

This somehow felt like a difficult week. I spent a lot of last weekend preparing for an Esperanto meeting this weekend and that meant when I went back to work on Monday, I felt kinda worn out like I hadn't really had a break. Then on Thursday I had one of the most difficult and unpleasant meetings I've had in my entire career - apart from anything else, it was scheduled for 2 hours and ran to 4 hours 20 minutes - so by the time I got to the end of it, I just wanted to go and lie in a darkened room So I feel like I've been lacking the energy and motivation I would have liked for studying in the evenings. But the good news is that it's now the 6WC! And the Super Challenge! So if that doesn't give me motivation to try harder, I don't know what will

Now that I'm through with verbs of motion, I've been making lots of progress with the RT lessons. Last time I posted I'd just completed lesson 41 and this afternoon I finished lesson 51. This week's lessons have mainly focused on the difference between words which are similar, but not the same. For example there was a really useful lesson on when to use из-за and благодаря, plus an explanation of the difference between тоже and также which was so clear that I almost understood it So I've been enjoying working through them, even if after 50 lessons I still log in every day and wonder why I can't get the audio on the opening dialogue to play, then remember it's because I've forgotten to turn Flash on in my browser before pressing play. I've literally forgotten this 51 times in a row; not the sort of streak I was aiming for

Somehow I find that when I'm tired, clicking through a grammar lesson on the computer is easier than opening a book to learn grammar on paper, so I feel like I've been making slower progress with Colloquial Russian 2. I'm still in chapter 1; I've finished nouns and adjectives now and just moving on to the recap of verbs. I spent a few evenings working through exercises on case endings; these were in the form of a text, where certain words were in brackets and you had to put them into the correct case. The exercise actually told you which case each word needed to be in, so theoretically it shouldn't have been very hard but I still managed to make errors The fun thing though is that because this is a more advanced textbooks, the texts themselves were actually really interesting. There was one about the disintegration of the USSR, for example, and I learned some useful conversational vocab like "переворот" (coup) and "чрезвычайное положение" (state of emergency) I've not been doing much Memrise recently but now I'm starting to wonder whether there's so much useful vocabulary in this textbook that I need to start a new Memrise course.

I've signed up for the Super Challenge in Russian, which feels slightly daunting. I started my first proper book today: 'После похорон' (After the funeral) by Agatha Christie. The first book I ever read in Croatian was an Agatha Christie, so this feels like a fitting start. Except in Croatian I read 'Murder on the Orient Express', which was a book I'd read a couple of times in English already, whereas I'm not sure I've ever read 'After the funeral' in English. If I have, I really don't remember it at all. Anyway, I bit the bullet and started today and I felt pretty proud once I'd read an entire chapter. It was painful, in that it felt like it required a lot of concentration, but not impossibly so and I found I knew enough words to understand the gist without having to stop to look things up. This is all positive. However, then I looked at my timer and realised the chapter was only 16 pages, but it took me 40 minutes to read it. This is less positive I haven't started the 'films' part of the Super Challenge yet.

I've also signed up for the Super Challenge in Croatian, because I want to make sure I read/listen to at least as much Croatian as Russian so that I don't regress. I've been watching an episode of my new series 'Drugo ime ljubavi' this week and it continues to be very exciting. Some days I haven't really felt like exercising but then I've wanted to watch another episode to see what happens next, so I've made the effort in the end. I guess this is good

I haven't made much progress with studying the BCS grammar book this week. In fact, possibly I haven't made any progress. It's on my list every day, but it's the final item because I'm also trying to get my Russian study in first, and then it keeps not happening. It would probably help if I tried to finish work earlier in the evenings, so that I had more time to get through my list!

[Serpent]

Респект!!! (I've just realized the best English equivalent is something like kudos )
Чрезвычайное положение has been getting used a lot recently because of the coronavirus situation
It can be shortened to чп btw, this one is also used more colloquially when something goes wrong, including relatively mundane stuff (like idk, your cat staging a переворот in your room ) It's pronounced as че-пэ. The tone matters a lot, since if the speaker isn't slightly amused it can also imply something more serious.

16 pages in 40 min is a lot by my standards

[IronMike]

Now that I'm through with verbs of motion...

hahahahahahahaha
.
.
.
breath
.
.
.
hahahahahahahahaha

You will NEVER be done with verbs of motion.

[Radioclare]

3 May - Russian: 62 mins
4 May - Russian: 68 mins, Croatian: 57 mins
5 May - Russian: 46 mins, Croatian: 55 mins
6 May - Russian: 51 mins, Croatian: 58 mins
7 May - Russian: 44 mins
8 May - Russian: 82 mins, Croatian: 78 mins

Yesterday was a public holiday in the UK so I only had a 4-day week at work. That was nice, although I was supposed to be in the south of France this weekend (I wanted to tick Monaco off my list of unvisited European countries!) so the fact that I am at home instead is slightly sad. I had a couple of other trips booked for May and June which now need to be cancelled as well, which is also sad. Sometimes I find myself thinking that 2020 is just a write-off and I wish it was 2021 already - at least, assuming that 2021 will be better! But then it's not really very healthy to start wishing a year of your life away and there's still rather a lot of 2020 left. So I'm trying to remember that there have been some positives this year: I unexpectedly got promoted at work and despite the lockdown I've managed to stick to my new year's resolution of getting 70,000 steps per week (so far!). And I'm reading my first novel in Russian, which has to count as an achievement Even if it hasn't felt much like an achievement as I've been painfully making my way through it this week

Actually the reading is probably going better than I expected. I was genuinely nervous about trying to read in Russian, because I don't feel as confident about my ability in Russian as I did about my ability in Croatian when I started my first Croatian Super Challenge. But I genuinely haven't needed to look many words up. I hasten to add that this is partly because I have a pretty high tolerance for unknown words when doing extensive reading and generally I'm too lazy to look something up unless it's seriously preventing me from understanding the story. So the main word I've looked up so far is "топор" (which turns out to be like an axe or hatchet) and that was because it was the murder weapon; I could tell that someone had been murdered, but not what they had been murdered with.

Anyway, I've read 91 pages and I think Agatha Christie is the right level for me at the moment. It is much much easier as a beginner to read translated books where you're already familiar with the style and background and don't have to worry about cultural misunderstandings. When reading an English book in another language, it's interesting to see what the translator has footnoted to explain to foreign readers. I was surprised to see yesterday that the word "overdraft" was given an explanatory footnote in this book. Perhaps overdrafts aren't common in Russia? It may also have taken me a few seconds to figure out that Пуаро was Poirot

So I feel like I'm making reasonable progress with the reading part of my Russian Super Challenge, but I haven't started the films part yet. To be honest, I haven't figured out what I'm going to watch; I was hoping the SC bot was going to come back online and then I could start stealing other people's ideas In some previous Super Challenge I have a vague recollection of lots of people who were doing Russian watching a programme called 'Кухня' and I think I've found it on Youtube, so I might try that. I was hoping to try it yesterday but I was having an issue with my wireless earphones refusing to pair.

My Croatian Super Challenge is currently the opposite of my Russian one in that I'm doing better with films than books. I've watched an episode of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' almost every day while cycling and it's exciting enough that I don't keep looking at the clock and wondering whether it's time to stop cycling yet For the reading, I've started a book called 'Pohvala tijelu' (In praise of the body) by Pavao Pavličić. I've read several of his books before, but those have been murder mysteries and thrillers. This one is completely different; a series of essays about different parts of the body. It's not quite what I expected, but he writes well and it's quite amusing in places; it's kind of like reading a Croatian Bill Bryson. And the good thing about the essays being short is that I can pick the book up and read one even on evenings when I don't have much time. I'm 55 pages in at the moment.

I have made zero progress with studying BCS grammar this week. Mainly because I've made zero progress with finishing work before 7pm. But my boyfriend helped me get my paper copy of the textbook off the shelf (it was right at the bottom of a huge pile of textbooks!) and I'm hoping that having the physical book sitting on my table looking at me will make me more likely to open it and do some studying (compared to relying on me finding motivation to open the pdf I was using before). We'll see!

In terms of Russian grammar, I'm still making progress through the RT lessons and completed lesson 60 yesterday. There were a couple of lessons on comparatives, which were useful, followed by a few on the imperative which I found painful because I just don't enjoy the imperative in any language. After that there were some lessons on active vs passive voice, which I got through pretty quickly, and one on the use of когда vs пока where I scored surprisingly badly in the exercises.

Overall I'm still finding the lessons really useful and I'm hoping to press on through them and get to the end within the next couple of weeks. Dividing my time between these and Colloquial Russian 2 means that I'm not giving Colloquial Russian 2 as much focus as I'd like and some days I'm not finding time for it at all. I'm still in chapter 1, which maybe sounds pretty bad, but I am on page 34 out of approximately 40 pages of chapter 1, so the end is definitely in sight. I think I've pretty much covered all the content on revising verbs now and just have a few pages of exercises to get through. I obviously don't have a lot on for the rest of the weekend, so should be able to make some more progress