Конец игры

[geoffw]

Overall

I think I've made a tactical error in pursuing so many courses (memrise, duo, assimil, glossika) at the same time. So even though I've downloaded cortina russian and am thinking of downloading Russian FAST, I'll hold off.

I know the feeling! I just discovered some other resources today, in fact. I'm a believer in diversification because it can help to avoid monotony, thereby making it easier to stick with the language. But when it becomes a chore of trying to meet a bunch of quotas at one time, it becomes a problem. Occasionally I start to chastise myself for making too little forward progress in Duolingo, Assimil, or Glossika, and I have to remind myself that I'm putting in plenty of total time and keeping a sufficiently diverse focus (grammar, vocab, sentence SRS, reading, listening) such that I'm clearly advancing, whatever my progress meter for a particular course says.

[Teango]

There's a shift that takes place. It changes from a sort of travelogue of the future by a rational narrator into an "am I dreaming, am I sick, am I dead, am I awake" sort of thing. Lots of green fog and glass and splintered sunlight on cabinet mirror-doors and scary invisible curves that contain the square root of -1. Completely lost.

Yep...this is probably where D-503 really starts venturing outside his comfort zone and freaking out! *lol* In essence, it is a rather odd novel, but at least it's considerably slimmer than Война и мир. I agree with your strategy of reading the English translation here in combination with the original (and a parallel text would be even better). Another idea would be to see if you can find the chapter summaries online to give you some of the key context, vocabulary, and plot points for each chapter beforehand.

[Xmmm]

конспект: игонь. у меня есть утка. пингвины с шариками. фабрика.

overall

I put in plenty of hours and made progress on paper, but the "robo" programs like memrise and duolingo are starting to burn me out a bit.

memrise


For one thing, there seems to be something wrong with the "10,000 most common russian words" course on memrise. I've only done 668 words, but here is a sampling:

завод, экономический, политический, работий, общество, современный, комитет, человекический, условый, энергия

So this list must be "the 10,000 most common words found in government documents".

assimil

I did lesson 14 in the active wave. Was pleasantly surprised to get two-thirds of the sentences error free despite doing it "cold" without review. So no doubt there will be a third wave in my future but for now I'm happy with my progress on the course.

интерны

I've started reading the transcript before watching each episode and I've seen my listening comprehension surge from about 1% to about 2.5%. So I guess I'm going to be looping on the first ten episodes for a while.

fun fact

I notice that, this week being the first week I started to feel some burnout, this was also the first week I started thinking about the greener pastures of other languages. I'm determined not to start another language until Russian is at a decent level (far above the current). But just to play with fire and see what's popular on this forum I searched on each language and wrote down the count of references. Here is the unscientific survey:

2526 french
2021 spanish
1598 german
975 russian
887 italian
540 japanese
453 swedish
402 portuguese
392 mandarin
250 irish
242 esperanto
215 arabic
166 finnish
143 thai
100 tagalog
43 persian


: 63 / 100 Assimil Passive
: 14 / 100 Assimil Active
: 668 / 5000 High Frequency Words (5000)
: 25 / 104 Glossika GSR 1
: 28 / 79 Duolingo
: 167 / 250 Hours 2015
: 247 / 10000 10000 pages
: 540 / 10000 10000 minutes

[geoffw]

конспект: игонь. у меня есть утка. пингвины с шариками. фабрика.

Извини...что за чёрт?

[Xmmm]

Извини...что за чёрт?

я "Мы" много читал. я научитался писать, как замятин. (я шучу).

[geoffw]

Извини...что за чёрт?

я "Мы" много читал. я научитался писать, как замятин. (я шучу).

I assume that means that "Мы" is a very strange book.

[Xmmm]

I saw "White Sun of the Desert" (Белое солнце пустыни). This sort of film is known as an "Eastern", apparently. I thought it was pretty good.

beloe_solntse.jpg

I've also started doing L-R on Записки из подполья.

I picked that book first because it's the only full length russian audiobook I've been able to find so far. I'm handcrafting a paragraph by paragraph parallel text.

I'm finding it hard to stay motivated with Duolingo. It is currently the only way I get practice with case endings, but I'm tired of writing "Where is my duck?" and "Do flies eat bread?" etc. Maybe I should drop Duo and just work through the Penguin Russian course for the grammar (haven't decided).



: 65 / 100 Assimil Passive
: 16 / 100 Assimil Active
: 692 / 5000 High Frequency Words (5000)
: 26 / 104 Glossika GSR 1
: 28 / 79 Duolingo
: 178 / 250 Hours 2015
: 292 / 10000 10000 pages
: 630 / 10000 10000 minutes

[geoffw]

I picked that book first because it's the only full length russian audiobook I've been able to find so far.

They are certainly there to be found. Are you limiting yourself to things that you can get for free, or are you just not sure what to look for? I have several iPhone apps where you can buy and download аудиокниги, and there are numerous websites, as well. I've personally used litres.ru to get eBooks before (you can use paypal), and they also have a selection of audiobooks.

The cost for most items ranges from $1-$6 US.

[Arnaud]

deleted

[Xmmm]

geoffw:
They are certainly there to be found. Are you limiting yourself to things that you can get for free, or are you just not sure what to look for?

I'm certainly willing to pay, but I'm looking for L+R. If I buy a Pelevin audiobook, I need to buy an English copy, and then hold that while I read the Russian text online. And no guarantee how close the English translation is. Given what they do to the titles of his books, I think that's a valid concern. If I stick to Notes from Underground on the other hand, Russian text is at az.lib.ru and English text at Project Gutenberg, so it's a matter of copy and paste from there. And I can see it's a conservative translation ... one sentence in Russian is one sentence in English and the paragraphs mostly line up.

arnaud:

Type аудиокнига + title of your book in russian in Google or VK and it's done.
There are a few texts already "paralleled" on aglonareader and farkastranslations (google that)

That sounds great! Thanks!