Конец игры

[Xmmm]

My two year anniversary for Russian is coming up and I'm pretty dissatisfied with the level I'm at. I thought I'd be B2 across the board right now, but I'm at more of a B1 receptive and A2 productive level.

Actually, that's pretty good going. How are you assessing your level? If it's self assessment, your level might be higher than you think. If memory serves I passed the B1 exam after 2.5 years, so your progress seems pretty good to me. Perhaps you are not where you wanted to be, but give yourself more credit, Russian is hard. I'm pretty certain that with a burst of concentrated effort you could get production up to B1 pretty quickly.

Well, it's self assessment because I don't know what the alternative to self-assessment is. I'm under the impression the nearest TRK? testing center is several thousand miles from where I live (West Coast of US). I've googled a few times and it seems like I'd have to fly to New York (?) or London. I'm aware of the temptation to inflate any self-assessment, so I try to be hard on myself.

reading: I can read a random page from a novel if it's light on description, or a random radio interview transcript, or a random TV show transcript, without a dictionary and tell you a lot of what's going on. So I often feel like I'm B2. But if you give me, you know, an article about hockey or a set of instructions of how to assemble something, I would be lost. I still don't have generalized and extensive everyday vocabulary. So I mark that as B1+, and I feel like I've been stuck there for almost a year.

listening: I've done quite a lot of listening to cop/action TV shows and radio interviews. I can listen to those eyes closed and usually tell you the gist of what's going on although there will be scenes where I have no idea. But if it's the nightly news and the news is unusual, or if it's the kind of show I don't customarily watch, I'll get lost again. So I mark that as B1-. Sadly, my understanding of spoken Italian is just as high ...

speaking: I was speaking very fluently with lots of grammatical mistakes before I shut down my Italki experiment last year. But I was only fluent in vague, opinion-oriented conversations "What do you think of Vladimir Putin", "What do you think of this movie", etc. If I had to describe what was going on in a picture, it was much more difficult. I also used plenty of clumsy workarounds to get around lack of active vocabulary. I give myself an A2 for this.

writing: I know a lot of words and I know a lot of set phrases. On the downside, I still get cases wrong a lot. I could certainly write a paragraph on a given topic and it would be understandable even though the teacher gave me a D to teach me a lesson about making a mockery of the Russian language. A2.

[neofight78]

Well, it's self assessment because I don't know what the alternative to self-assessment is. I'm under the impression the nearest TRK? testing center is several thousand miles from where I live (West Coast of US). I've googled a few times and it seems like I'd have to fly to New York (?) or London. I'm aware of the temptation to inflate any self-assessment, so I try to be hard on myself.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a criticism. It's just that if it's self-assessement then in all probability it'll be too low. Of course sitting TRKI is usually super expensive depending on one's location. A good alternative is to go through a mock exam with an online tutor, you can get a good assessment of what your level is and more importantly find out what the gaps might be. The result will be a pretty reliable indicator. Of course, there is no need to do it if that kind of thing doesn't interest you.

Judging by your description I would say you probably could pass the B1 exam with some work on your writing and maybe plugging a few grammar holes (it's hard to tell where your grammar is from the description). Although you have doubts about your listening and speaking, it sounds like B1 level to me.

[Xmmm]

Italian Update: 200 Hours

Italian is coming along well. Although I never studied it prior to this year, I had previous exposure to French and Spanish. I would venture to guess my receptive skills are in the B1 range, although there's a huge gap opening up with my productive skills which are probably A1 or less.

I've almost finished Duolingo. Other than that, the bulk of my time has been watching TV in Italian:

House of Cards (65 episodes)
Montalbano (5 episodes)
De Luca (2 episodes)
Fog and Crimes (3 episodes)
Roman Empire: Reign of Blood (6 episodes)
Frontier (4 episodes)
Paranoid (2 episodes)
Marcella (6 episodes)
Marseille (2 episodes)
War Machine

After this big push (with huge benefit to listening comprehension) I'm burnt out on watching TV in Italian (especially dubbed) and am back to reading. Via LingQ, I found that La Voce della Russia has a number of interesting radio series. One is about stops on the Moscow metro, one is about the War of 1812, and one is about ancient Russian cities. That will keep me busy a while.

I've started using Clozemaster based on Expugnator's recommendation. Right now, my plan is to go through the Fast Track to Fluency "learning" 50 sentences a day with text completion, and doing all reviews via multiple choice.

[Xmmm]

L4 update:

I've been pretty good keeping my nose to the grindstone with Russian and Italian, but every once in a while I black out and wake up 100 study hours later with another failed L4 experience. To recap:

I spent about four months on Norwegian, even going to the trouble of ordering a physical Norwegian book with audio from Norway. But I soured on the language because of several issues: it was a little close to English for me, there was the issue of dialects, there was the fact that I didn't find the culture or study materials particularly compelling, etc. Not for me.

So I dabbled in Turkish. That seems like a really cool language and, if they are short on original Turkish books, they certainly make up for it in the TV department. However, it would be at least as hard for me as Russian and Russian is already killing me, so ... I have to let Turkish go until Russian is in maintenance mode.

Then I spent a few weeks on German (not documented here). I took four years of German in high school so theoretically I could ramp pretty fast in that language into the intermediate levels. And I really liked German back in the day -- had all of Falco's albums, etc. But ... tastes change and I really am not interested anymore, alas.

So my next failed L4 endeavor will be Esperanto. I started a week ago and am about 1/3rd of the way through the Duolingo tree, after which I'll head straight to LingQ.

I might get farther with Esperanto than I have done with my other L4s. Presumably, it's easier. In addition, there exists an actuall Esperanto club I could get to once a month, as well as a UEA-KER exam that I could drive to. But of course this is probably just wishful thinking on my part and I'll get over it in a month or two.

The same rules apply as for my other L4s ... Russian comes first, period. If I'm not doing a bare minimum of an hour a day of Russian, I'm not touching Esperanto.

Mi volas lerni Esperanto cxar gxi estas kauxzas perdita ...

[Xmmm]

A couple of weeks ago I set a goal to hit 17,500 known words in Russian by the end of July (up from around 16,200 at the time). I've just hit that goal ... Although I had to read four chapters of Обитаемый остров this weekend to do it and have the headache to go with that right now. I also managed to pick up about 1000 words in Italian (read all of La bufera napoleonica on LingQ). I also managed to pick up 711 words in Esperanto by reading three chapters of La luna sfingo. Basically I spent all weekend reading.

So ... maybe thirty day goals can work for me. I will try for the following by the end of August:

Russian: 20000 words
Italian: 11000 words
Esperanto: 2000 words

[Xmmm]

Meta:

I can 'learn' about 150-200 words in Esperanto per hour. This is just a question of marking 'birdo' and 'boato' as known. On the other hand, I have to work very hard to mark 30-40 words as known in Russian in an hour. The words are longer, less common (because I've already learned most of the common ones), and harder to remember.

I last read "The Moon Moth" almost forty years ago so I only vaguely remembered the flavor of it and none of the details ... what a great story. And ... compelling content really makes a difference. I was driven to find out what happened.

Esperanto:

Mi finis legi La Lunan Sfingon. Mi ege sxatis tio rakonton. Mi scias 1921 vortojn kaj mi legis 24848 vortojn (mi legis ankaux multajn artikolojn de RetRadio).

Italian:

Io guardo "Marseille" en Italiano e un po' de Ozark. Però io penso che forse Ozark è possibilemente troppo grottesco per me. Io provato leggere "Il fu Mattia Pascal" e io continuerò ma in realita è troppo difficile per me perciò a volte io leggerò "Anna Karenina".

Russian:

Мне нравится «Мажор» и «Нюдач». Я читаю тексты, а затем смотрю эпизоды. Я также читаю книгу братьев Стругацких, но это не особенно интересно.

[reineke]

Every paragraph starts with a version of "I". English is more forgiving with this than some other languages. Io guardo doesn't sound natural and you're mixing in some Spanish in that sentence too.

[Xmmm]

Every paragraph starts with a version of "I". English is more forgiving with this than some other languages. Io guardo doesn't sound natural and you're mixing in some Spanish in that sentence too.

Grazie! So che mio capacità di scrivere è molto debole ... imbarazzante, in realtà ...

[aaleks]

Я читаю тексты,

We call transcripts - "транскрипты", i.e. the same word but just written in cyrillic

[reineke]

La mia capacità...
"Mio capacità" and Io provato = I tried (literally) tells me that you are likely translating using headwords. Try with "ho provato a"... and spend more time with a good dictionary. Realita is Czech. My guess is you mixed up Latin realitas, English reality and Italian realtà.