WEEKLY UPDATE
Russian - lesson 52 of "Perfectionnement Russe". I started listening to some Russian podcasts, such as "
Что это было?", "
Не верю!" - both of them were quite easy to follow, though I guess that the level of comprehension will vary based on the topic and invited guests. The third podcast is called "
Литературный Нобель" - this one was rather hard, I will listen to a few episodes and then will decide if I should continue or maybe come back to it in a few months' time.
Hebrew - finished "40 leçons pour parler hébreu" so now will be working with "Hebrajski dla początkujących" - Hebrew for beginners but it's much more conversation-based so I learned a few new words even in the first lesson (there are only 11 lessons in fact), 456/623 words learned in Memrise
Romanian - watched a very interesting
interview with Moldova's president Maia Sandu and two things kind of "shocked" me. First is the journalist's accent - he speaks Romanian with Russian intonation and I struggled to understand fully one or two of his questions. I watch news reports from Moldova and it seems to me it's not uncommon for some Moldovans to speak Romanian this way. I had watched some of his videos before so his accent shouldn't really surprise me but Sandu speaks in such a clear manner that the guy's accent did stand out (I don't mean that in an offensive way, I think none of the accents is better than the other, I'm just observing the linguistic situation in Moldova).
Another fact that took me off-guard is that Sandu's salary is 780 eur and she buys her "presidential outfits" herself with her own money, also she still lives in her flat and pays her bills. I thought there must be some kind of "representation fund" for the country's president but it turns out there isn't any.
Reading - still reading "His Bloody Project", a very engaging book. Even though we know from the very beginning who the murderer is, the story is very compelling and I really liked that it's set in rural Scotland, in a village of Culduie that happens to really exist and is located near Isle of Skye (many, many years ago I worked on Isle of Skye during one summer - seems like it was in another life! - and could see the landscapes described in the book with my own eyes). I'm reading a paper book so I had to check some unknown words in my pocket dictionary, mainly related to rural Scotland -
ghillie, fleece, flaughter, peat. I'm pretty sure I knew what
peat means but somehow I forgot it.