Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Jan 19, 2021 10:43 pm

19 January
Tuesday. I don't like Tuesday. It always feel like a day of the week which has nothing going for it.

Russian
I watched an episode of Татьянин день on the treadmill. Now that she's pregnant, Татьяна 1 doesn't want to go to Norilsk any more (once she gets out of prison). For reasons my Russian isn't good enough to understand, everyone else desperately wants her to go to Norilsk anyway. I would like her to go to Norilsk too but I suspect this series doesn't have the budget to film there, so she will probably be staying in Moscow for the foreseeable :lol:

Otherwise I just did a bit of study with Schaum's, revising usage of the short comparative and then doing an exercise to practise.

Total - Russian: 65 mins, Croatian: 18 mins
5 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed Jan 20, 2021 10:45 pm

20 January
Wednesdays are better than Tuesdays. And today was a particularly good Wednesday because it was payday :)

Russian
I couldn't face comparatives this evening so I started reading another Agatha Christie in Russian. This one is "Зло под солнцем" (Evil under the sun). I've only read 31 pages so far. I feel like I must have read this book much more recently than "4.50 from Paddington" because I recognise some of the names of the characters and I think I know which character gets murdered, although I can't remember anything else about the plot. Or possibly I've seen it on TV at some point :? I think it's going to be a good one anyway :)

Total - Russian: 39 mins, Croatian: 61 mins
5 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Jan 21, 2021 10:21 pm

21 January
Thursday. The week is progressing :) I had one of those days when I could have done lots of work if people hadn't kept phoning me.

Russian
I read the second chapter of "Зло под солнцем". The chapters in this one seem pretty long and so I'm already 52 pages into the story. This means that my reading stats for my Russian SC have temporarily surpassed those for my Croatian SC :shock: I'll have to read a Croatian book next!

I continued with the section on comparatives in Schaum's. This bit was about when you use чем with a comparative and when you use the genitive instead. It was followed by an exercise in which I didn't do terribly well, despite feeling like this was something which I more or less understood.

I then watched an episode of Татьянин день on the treadmill.

Total - Russian: 103 mins
4 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Fri Jan 22, 2021 11:54 pm

22 January
My boyfriend and I were celebrating our 14-year anniversary today. The anniversary was actually yesterday, but Friday seemed like a better day to celebrate :)

Russian
Celebrating involved quite a lot of food and wine, so I should probably have done my Russian in advance. I did my treadmill exercise in advance so the clever thing to do would have been to watch Russian while doing that, but I didn't. I watched Croatian instead because I've kinda made a rule for my self that I alternate days between watching Russian and Croatian. Today was a Croatian day and I didn't want to break the routine, because if I allow myself to choose what I want to watch on any given day I will choose Croatian :lol:

Anyway, that was a long way of saying I read a chapter of "Зло под солнцем" instead. I'm 73 pages in now and still no murder.

Total - Russian: 47 mins, Croatian: 45 mins
7 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 23, 2021 10:57 pm

23 January
I felt tired today, which may have had something to do with last night's wine. I didn't feel hungover, just like I could have had a nap at any given moment :lol:

Russian
Once I'd finished the housework I sat down and read a chapter of Agatha Christie. Later in the day, once I'd had more coffee and felt a bit more energetic, I continued with the adjectives chapter in Schaum's Grammar. The bits I studied today were mainly about the superlative and it seems like most of the rest of the chapter is about adverbs. I feel like there's a limit to how difficult adverbs can be, even in Russian, so I'm hopeful that I can finish this chapter by the end of the month, which would mean I was more or less on track to finish the textbook by the end of March.

Today was also my weekly attempt at writing in Russian. I only managed about 250 words today and Toggl tells me that it took 52 minutes :( I already got one correction back on Lang-8 and actually there were fewer errors than I expected. I was very careful with commas today :lol: It's nice to have seemingly not made lots of mistakes, but on the other hand it feels a bit fake. I mean, if I'd written something in Russian off the top of my head and only made a handful of mistakes, that would be impressive. But when I look at what I've written I know how many times I had to look words up and how many times I had to google a phrase to see whether this was the right way to say something and I kind of feel like a trained monkey could have used Google Translate to generate a text equivalent to mine, without undergoing several years of pain studying Russian grammar first :lol:

I suppose this is just a phase you just have to go through when you start trying to write in a language. My main problem is probably just that I don't like learning languages :oops:

Anyway. This evening I needed to go on the treadmill to make up some steps but I still didn't feel very energetic and I definitely didn't feel like I could face 45 minutes of Татьяна 1 and 2. So instead I watched a travel documentary by Антон Птушкин, which was shorter at only 36 minutes. It was called 'Как поймать северное сияние' and it was all about a trip to northern Sweden. I found it really interesting because he went to Kiruna and Abisko, both places which I visited between Christmas 2019 and New Year 2020. I even recognised the hostel he stayed in while he was in Abisko, because it was just round the corner from the one I stayed in :) The most fascinating part of the video was on his final night in Abisko when he finally saw the northern lights. He's obviously got a very expensive camera and does some amazing photography, so he first of all he showed some really impressive shots of the northern lights he'd taken with that. They basically looked like every potentially photoshopped picture of the northern lights you've ever seen on a tourist brochure. And then he showed what it actually looked like to the naked eye, without the fancy camera; basically just a bit of a blurry cloud on the horizon. It made me realise that I've possibly seen weak northern lights several times and mistaken them for clouds :lol:

Croatian
I started reading a novel called 'Cvijeće na vjetru' (Flowers in the wind) by Pavao Pavličić. It's a crime novel, featuring an amateur detective who works as a newspaper editor. His grandson gives him a pair of binoculars for his birthday, which he takes out onto the balcony of his flat in Zagreb to test out. Looking through the window of a flat a few streets away, he catches sight of what looks like the body of a murdered woman... I'm about 90 pages in so far and really enjoying it :)

Total - Russian: 142 mins, Croatian: 133 mins
6 x

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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Caromarlyse » Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:10 am

Radioclare wrote:It's nice to have seemingly not made lots of mistakes, but on the other hand it feels a bit fake. I mean, if I'd written something in Russian off the top of my head and only made a handful of mistakes, that would be impressive. But when I look at what I've written I know how many times I had to look words up and how many times I had to google a phrase to see whether this was the right way to say something and I kind of feel like a trained monkey could have used Google Translate to generate a text equivalent to mine, without undergoing several years of pain studying Russian grammar first :lol:


I feel the same about writing in Russian - it doesn't feel real, or as though I get much from it. I don't know whether locking myself away somewhere with just a pen and paper, and maybe some paper notes with vocab on the topic, would make it a more useful exercise.
1 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 24, 2021 7:43 pm

Caromarlyse wrote:I feel the same about writing in Russian - it doesn't feel real, or as though I get much from it. I don't know whether locking myself away somewhere with just a pen and paper, and maybe some paper notes with vocab on the topic, would make it a more useful exercise.

Glad it's not just me! I might give writing offline a go next week and see whether it feels any better :)

24 January
There was a surprising amount of snow today.

Russian
I started the section on adverbs in Schaum's today and as predicted, it wasn't too bad. I completed a long exercise which involved inserting the correct adverb in a sentence and learned a handful of new adverbs. I also read another chapter of 'Зло под солнцем'. The murder has happened now, so it's a bit more exciting :)

Croatian
I spent 45 minutes writing in Croatian this afternoon and that was enough to produce 1000 words. I decided to try and explain the plot of the series I'm currently watching and I figured that would be pretty straightforward to do. But after 1000 words I've pretty much only explained the background that was covered in the first 3 - 4 episodes :lol: So I guess I won't be short of a topic to write about next week. Writing in Croatian is obviously a lot easier for me than writing in Russian and I did this 1000 words without looking anything up. The words seemed to flow today, I think probably because I had already spent over an hour reading in Croatian before I started. I'm 153 pages into 'Cvijeće na vjetru' now and really enjoying it :)

Total - Russian: 71 mins, Croatian: 181 mins
5 x

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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby AroAro » Mon Jan 25, 2021 9:15 am

Radioclare wrote:23 January
My main problem is probably just that I don't like learning languages :oops:


Oh my, reading this almost broke my heart ;) lame jokes aside, and I don't want to be too curious, but does it mean you don't like studying grammar? Or do you learn languages only for utilitarian purposes (like travel or reading)?
1 x
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Jan 25, 2021 8:04 pm

AroAro wrote:Oh my, reading this almost broke my heart ;) lame jokes aside, and I don't want to be too curious, but does it mean you don't like studying grammar? Or do you learn languages only for utilitarian purposes (like travel or reading)?

I know this is a forum for people who like learning languages, but I really don't like learning languages :oops: Specifically, I guess I mean that I don't like the beginner stage of learning a language. I don't like learning vocabulary. I don't like studying grammar. I don't like wanting to say something and not being able to formulate it without looking up three words. I don't like listening to hours and hours of only vaguely comprehensible content in the hope that one day I'll understand it. I don't like feeling like I have the reading speed of a small child :lol: My worst nightmare would be to dabble in lots of beginner languages (which I know is the opposite to many people here!).

What I do like is having learned a language :) So I like being able to read and listen to content which is genuinely interesting. I like it when I get to the stage that I'm reading/hearing something and just enjoying the story, not struggling to understand or even thinking about what language it's in. And I like being able to use languages when I travel.

So I suppose I like the result of learning a language, but not the actual process of doing it! That's why I find the 365 challenge really useful, because if I waited until I felt like studying Russian grammar to study Russian grammar then I would never study any Russian at all. The fact that I have a "rule" which means I have to do 30 minutes of Russian every day means that I'm actually making progress and (hopefully!) getting closer to the part of knowing a language that I enjoy :)
12 x

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Jan 25, 2021 10:43 pm

25 January
The emails weren't too bad this weekend, I logged in this morning and only found 11. I was annoyed though because there was supposed to be a training course at 08.30 and I got up slightly early to be on time for it and then I found it was cancelled.

Russian
I read another chapter of 'Зло под солнцем' and I think maybe I'm getting slightly faster at reading in Russian because I seemed to get through 30 pages in around 40 minutes. I do have a very high tolerance for not understanding words when I read, so that was without stopping to look anything up. I've just got to the stage of the story where Poirot and the police have started to interview all the characters about what they were doing at the time of the murder. I'm finding all these Agatha Christies quite useful for practising telling the time, because there's inevitably a lot of questions about who was doing what when and you have to try and figure out who had opportunity to commit the murder in the 15 minutes or so when it could have happened. I'm not very good at telling the time in Russian, so it's useful to be forced to think about whether a character was doing something at half past 11 or half past 12 etc.

Then I watched an episode of Татьянин день while on the treadmill. This was obligatory because it turns out that today (25 Jan) is actually Татьянин день :lol: The episode itself wasn't very exciting. It seems like Татьяна 1 is on the verge of being released from prison, but she made the mistake of telling Татьяна 2 that when she gets out she isn't going to go to Norilsk, she's going to stay in Moscow and she's going to tell the hero, Сергей, that she's pregnant with his child. Татьяна 2 is obsessed with Сергей and Сергей has started sleeping with her again now that Татьяна 1 is no longer on the scene, so it seems clear that Татьяна 2 is going to do something to make sure that Татьяна 1 stays safely in jail or, at the very least, goes to Norilsk and never comes back.

Total - Russian: 81 mins, Croatian: 15 mins
4 x


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