Serpent wrote:Yes, уборная is a toilet, I have no idea where they got "half bath" from It's related to уборка and (головной) убор, so perhaps it was originally something like a walk-in closet/wardrobe room? (Btw, клозет is another old-fashioned word for this) Just like zahod, it's hardly ever used in real life unless you're being ironic or something. I remember someone using it at a café when telling me that I had to buy something to use the уборная. Another synonym is сортир, that's something ppl laugh at when learning French This one is relatively more common, though still not as common as туалет
Thanks for the clarification Someone else contacted me to explain that "half bath" is an American expression; it just means a bathroom that only has a toilet and a sink in it. So if you had a house with a full bathroom upstairs and a separate toilet/sink downstairs, I think you could describe it as having one and a half bathrooms.
The Schaum's textbook is published in the US so occasionally there are things like this in the English that confuse me
15 February The weather has suddenly got warmer - yay! When I went out for a walk at lunchtime I was almost too hot in all my various fleeces and I'm no longer shivering inside. This makes me happy
Russian What also makes me happy is that I finished the chapter on numbers in Schaum's this evening I was dreading tackling the topic of telling the time again, but actually when I got to it I found that the bit I had left was about the 24-hour clock and telling the time with the 24-hour clock is actually nice and easy
Then I debated with myself whether I should indulge in another Twilight novel or whether I should behave like a grown-up and read a proper book instead. I'm now one chapter into 'Рассвет' (Breaking Dawn) I'm surprised because Goodreads says the Russian version of this has 635 pages compared to 630 pages in the previous book 'Eclipse', whereas I expected 'Breaking Dawn' to be significantly longer. Wasn't this one so long that they had to split the story over two films? It feels like this one has more plot anyway!
16 February Pancake day! My boyfriend made me pancakes for breakfast and it's difficult to have a bad Tuesday after that
Russian I started chapter 7 in Schaum's Grammar today, which is all about verbs. The first few pages were a nice easy introduction, just dealing with the concept of tenses, moods etc. Then there was a refresher of how to conjugate first and second conjugation verbs. So far, so good. I feel like verbs are one of my weaker points in Russian grammar though, as if I've overlooked them a bit by concentrating so much on getting noun and adjective endings right, so hoping that I'm going to get a lot from this chapter.
I read the second chapter of 'Рассвет', which is the build-up to Bella and Edward's wedding. The chapters in this book seem a bit shorter than the last one so it only took me 30 minutes to get through it and that was with being partially distracted by trying to charge a device that didn't want to charge.
Finally I watched an episode of 'Татьянин день' on the treadmill, but it wasn't very exciting. Татьяна 1 confronted Татьяна 2 about the fact that she married her ex-fiancé and father of her child without mentioning it when she's supposed to be her best friend. Татьяна 2 said "sorry", and Татьяна 1 said "ok never mind, let's not mention it again". So that was a bit of an anti-climax and now I'm a bit confused about what the next 100+ episodes are going to be about, because it feels like the main conflict of the series just got resolved
17 February I had a very productive day at work, but then I didn't feel very motivated either to do languages or exercise this evening. It seems like I'm incapable of having a productive day in both parts of my life at the same time
Russian The Schaum's textbook blew my mind this evening with it's explanation of how to deduce the correct conjugation of a verb. There were all kinds of formulas about what the outcome should be if a vowel is next to a consonant compared to a consonant being next to another consonant in the stem of a verb... it all went whooshing straight over my head.
Never mind. I read a chapter of 'Breaking Dawn' to cheer myself up. This was a short chapter, describing the wedding. I looked up the word "подвязка", which means "garter". Probably not an item of vocabulary worth memorising!
18 February I got an invitation to book my first Covid jab today and managed to get an appointment for next week. Never thought I would be so happy at the prospect of having an injection
Russian I decided to ignore all the strange verb formulas in Schaum's and just try the first exercise instead. I got full marks on it, despite not having understood what came before, so I'm just going to carry on and not stress out over explanations that make no sense to me.
I read another chapter of 'Рассвет', which took me to the 10% stage of the book, and then watched an episode of 'Татьянин день' while on the treadmill. Nothing much happened in this episode, but it was the fifth birthday of Татьяна 1's daughter. The 5 year old is the only character who speaks Russian at a level I can understand
19 January Someone at work really annoyed me this afternoon. I hate it when people have unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved and then blame other people when things don't turn out how they expect. Never mind, at least it's the weekend now!
Russian I felt like having a day off from grammar tonight, but in the end I managed to do 15 minutes. 15 minutes seems to be a magic number for grammar as far as I'm concerned; if I tell myself I need to do 30 minutes it feels so off-putting that there's a risk I won't do it at all, but 15 minutes doesn't feel daunting.
I also read another chapter of the Twilight novel. Words I looked up today included "порог" (threshold, in the context of carrying a bride across the threshold) and "ушиб", which in this chapter seemed to be used more or less interchangeably with "синяк" when referring to bruises. "синяк" is the word I've learned for bruise before, so I'm not completely sure what the difference is between "синяк" and "ушиб".
Radioclare wrote:Words I looked up today included "порог" (threshold, in the context of carrying a bride across the threshold) and "ушиб", which in this chapter seemed to be used more or less interchangeably with "синяк" when referring to bruises. "синяк" is the word I've learned for bruise before, so I'm not completely sure what the difference is between "синяк" and "ушиб".
My understanding is that "синяк" corresponds to "bruise" in the sense of the mark that appears on the skin as a result of a type of physical trauma, whereas "ушиб" corresponds to "contusion", i.e. the type of trauma in question (there is also the word контузия, but it's a bit of a false friend because in Russian common usage it's more often used in a similar way to the English "shell shock").
Radioclare wrote:19 January I also read another chapter of the Twilight novel. Words I looked up today included "порог" (threshold, in the context of carrying a bride across the threshold)...
Порог is a very important word in Russian culture. Never, ever, shake hands across a порог. Like, never. Russians come to your house, get them inside before you shake hands!
Thanks both That makes sense about синяк vs ушиб, but what happens if I shake hands with a Russian across a порог? Does this result in eternal bad luck?!
20 February I had a trustee meeting today, which in normal times would have required travelling and swallowed up an entire day, but which was now just on Zoom. In some ways Zoom is very efficient, and in other ways it's nice to actually see people and go to the pub after a meeting.
Russian I continued with Schaum's today and did an exercise on conjugating verbs with a stem -ей. I watched another episode of Татьянин день, in which nothing very exciting happened, and also a Russian Progress video about common mistakes foreigners make in Russian. I feel like I have definitely made some improvement because I realised while watching the latter than I had no urge to turn the subtitles on, whereas when I first started watching Russian Progress I think I was about 50:50 as to whether I used the subtitles or not. I also tried writing in Russian again, which perhaps felt a little bit less painful than it has in previous weeks.
The funniest thing about today though is that I read two chapters of 'Рассвет', which mainly deal with the honeymoon of Bella and Edward. At one point the characters were described as swimming in the sea "с морскими свинками". In my head I imagined that this would be describing something like swimming with dolphins, but I wasn't 100% sure so I decided to look it up. I googled and came up with a hit for морская свинка. Guinea pigs?! They were swimming in the sea... with guinea pigs?
This is the most confused I've been with Twilight since the time I thought Bella turned a corner and ended up in a puffin (тупик) Can guinea pigs swim? I mean, I've never had a guinea pig but they don't really look to me like they'd be great in the water I found myself reading a Wikipedia article on guinea pigs and realising that they are native to South America and Edward and Bella are on honeymoon in South America, so maybe...!
Then I remembered that this isn't the first time I've read this book and surely I would have remembered if it was full of swimming guinea pigs. Admittedly, I've never read the book in English, but I definitely read it in Croatian during my very first Super Challenge in 2014. A quick search of my hard drive revealed that I still have the illicit pdf of the Croatian text which I read back then, so I looked up the corresponding chapter. Excellent. In Croatian, Edward and Bella swam "s pliskavicama". To be honest, this didn't shed much light on the situation either and I may even have had an extra second of confusion when I thought they were swimming with a pljeskavica rather than a pliskavica. But I looked up a "pliskavica" on Wikipedia and determined that it was a porpoise, which makes loads more sense. I mean to be honest, I was a bit vague about what a porpoise looked like, but it definitely sounds like a more plausible thing to swim with off the coast of a tropical island than a guinea pig Wikipedia helped me clear up the remaining confusion in Russian, revealing that the Russian term for a porpoise is "морская свинья" as opposed to the Russian term for a guinea pig, which is "морская свинка".
Honestly, sometimes I think it's a lot simpler just to read without looking anything up
Croatian I didn't do anything in Croatian today, but I was sad to read about the death of the Serbian singer, Đorđe Balašević. I haven't listened to loads of his music, but one of his songs sometimes plays on repeat in my head during bad days at work. "Dajte mi vino, jer nemam drugih želja..." (Give me wine, I don't have any other desires...).
Radioclare wrote:Wikipedia helped me clear up the remaining confusion in Russian, revealing that the Russian term for a porpoise is "морская свинья" as opposed to the Russian term for a guinea pig, which is "морская свинка".
You know, reading this back, I'm actually still confused If they were swimming with porpoises, shouldn't it have been "с морскими свиньями" rather than "с морскими свинками"?
I've just checked the book again and the full passage is:
Мы плавали с морскими свинками, которые резвились среди теплых волн неподалеку. По крайней мере, с ними плавала я; как только в воде появлялся Эдвард, морские свинки немедленно исчезали, как будто бы завидев акулу.
It's related to уборка and (головной) убор, so perhaps it was originally something like a walk-in closet/wardrobe room? (Btw, клозет is another old-fashioned word for this)
This one is relatively more common, though still not as common as туалет
Someone else contacted me to explain that "half bath" is an American expression; it just means a bathroom that only has a toilet and a sink in it. So if you had a house with a full bathroom upstairs and a separate toilet/sink downstairs, I think you could describe it as having one and a half bathrooms.
It feels like this one has more plot anyway!
If they were swimming with porpoises, shouldn't it have been "с морскими свиньями" rather than "с морскими свинками"?