Re: Radioclare's 2022 log (Russian, Croatian)
Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2022 10:00 pm
14 January
Friday. I felt quite tired by the end of today, so I've had a night off from grammar.
Russian
I read two chapters of 'Убийство Роджера Экройда', which took me the best part of an hour. I'm 75% of the way through the book now, which feels like progress. With a book of this level, reading in Russian is getting closer to being enjoyable (rather than painful!) but I think all the other books in my to-read pile are likely to be significantly harder than this
Then I watched the latest Антон Птушкин documentary, which is about the Lofoten Islands and Svalbard. The Lofoten Islands look stunning and I feel like it's almost worth watching the video even if you don't speak Russian just to see the drone footage in particular. The segment on Svalbard was absolutely fascinating, including some footage of polar bears. You're not allowed to go outside the limits of Longyearbyen without some sort of firearm because of the danger posed by the polar bears and it was quite surreal to see scenes of people walking around in their daily lives carrying huge guns. The supermarket has special lockers to leave your weapons in while shopping I also learned that there are no cats allowed on Svalbard (to protect the birdlife) and that you're not allowed to be buried there (because corpses don't decompose in the frozen soil). But probably the most interesting bit was about Pyramiden, an abandoned Soviet settlement on the island which was originally built for coal mining. It was completely abandoned in the 90's, but the cold climate and lack of bacteria means that nothing has really decayed or become overgrown, so it's like a really well preserved Soviet ghost town.
As you can tell, I really enjoyed the video I watched it without subtitles, because I've watched a lot of Антон Птушкин videos now and got quite used to his voice and narration. At the moment there aren't proper subtitles, only the auto-generated ones, but I might watch it again at some point with those because there were definitely some bits that I missed.
Croatian
Nothing really to note except that the top theme of today's 'Dnevnik' was the initial results from the latest Croatian census. These show that the population has reduced quite significantly, from around 4.3m in 2011 to 3.9m in 2021. The news pointed out that this the equivalent of losing the entire population of Split and Rijeka in 10 years, which makes it sound quite dramatic. The decline is a combination of a low birth rate and significant emigration over recent years. I found it interesting anyway because I was reading the section on demography in the 'Hrvatska na prvi pogled' textbook just this week, but obviously that was all based on the 2011 census numbers.
Total - Russian: 133 mins, Croatian: 68 mins
Friday. I felt quite tired by the end of today, so I've had a night off from grammar.
Russian
I read two chapters of 'Убийство Роджера Экройда', which took me the best part of an hour. I'm 75% of the way through the book now, which feels like progress. With a book of this level, reading in Russian is getting closer to being enjoyable (rather than painful!) but I think all the other books in my to-read pile are likely to be significantly harder than this
Then I watched the latest Антон Птушкин documentary, which is about the Lofoten Islands and Svalbard. The Lofoten Islands look stunning and I feel like it's almost worth watching the video even if you don't speak Russian just to see the drone footage in particular. The segment on Svalbard was absolutely fascinating, including some footage of polar bears. You're not allowed to go outside the limits of Longyearbyen without some sort of firearm because of the danger posed by the polar bears and it was quite surreal to see scenes of people walking around in their daily lives carrying huge guns. The supermarket has special lockers to leave your weapons in while shopping I also learned that there are no cats allowed on Svalbard (to protect the birdlife) and that you're not allowed to be buried there (because corpses don't decompose in the frozen soil). But probably the most interesting bit was about Pyramiden, an abandoned Soviet settlement on the island which was originally built for coal mining. It was completely abandoned in the 90's, but the cold climate and lack of bacteria means that nothing has really decayed or become overgrown, so it's like a really well preserved Soviet ghost town.
As you can tell, I really enjoyed the video I watched it without subtitles, because I've watched a lot of Антон Птушкин videos now and got quite used to his voice and narration. At the moment there aren't proper subtitles, only the auto-generated ones, but I might watch it again at some point with those because there were definitely some bits that I missed.
Croatian
Nothing really to note except that the top theme of today's 'Dnevnik' was the initial results from the latest Croatian census. These show that the population has reduced quite significantly, from around 4.3m in 2011 to 3.9m in 2021. The news pointed out that this the equivalent of losing the entire population of Split and Rijeka in 10 years, which makes it sound quite dramatic. The decline is a combination of a low birth rate and significant emigration over recent years. I found it interesting anyway because I was reading the section on demography in the 'Hrvatska na prvi pogled' textbook just this week, but obviously that was all based on the 2011 census numbers.
Total - Russian: 133 mins, Croatian: 68 mins