Ridiculously busy week preparing for and then attending the British Esperanto Conference. Just got home from the event and I'm looking forward to going to work tomorrow for a rest
Russian
- My brain is scrambled by a weekend of Esperanto so I can barely remember what I did in Russian at the start of this week. However, my spreadsheet tells me that on Monday I watched the final Varlamov episode in the series about the countries of the former USSR. It was called Почему распался СССР? and at the time I do remember thinking it was interesting, but I don't remember a whole lot about it now.
- I managed to watch an entire four episodes of the telenovela Обручальное кольцо this week, mainly because I was too tired and/or lacking in time to do anything more intellectual than watching TV in the evenings. The more episodes I watched the more I felt myself getting into it though, which was good. And I definitely feel like my comprehension is improving slightly.
- I've been persevering with Memrise and finished the Russian 2 course (out of the official Memrise Russian ones) over the weekend. Have moved on to Russian 3 now.
- On the train home this evening I listened to two recent Russian with Max podcasts. One was about Chat GPT and using it to help you learn Russian and it's probably a really interesting topic but I got a bit distracted from it in the middle because my next train was replaced by a bus and there was mass confusion at the station about which buses were going where. Once I got onto the bus I listened to the second podcast which was about music, especially rock music, and the impact that's had on his life. I really enjoyed that one and might even listen to it again at some point because there were some recommendations of Russian bands to listen to.
Croatian
According to my spreadsheet I spent 11 minutes clearing Memrise reviews in Croatian and that's all I've done this week. Oops
Esperanto
- In preparation for going to the conference I started reading La kurioza incidento de la hundo en la nokto during the week. I was planning to finish it before I went but I failed at that. Never mind. It feels like a pretty easy book to read in Esperanto. I enjoyed reading Anne of Green Gables but that felt harder, because there was quite a bit of obscure vocabulary (names of trees and flowers, for example) which I didn't know and had to look up. This book seems to stick to more routine vocabulary, which is good.
- I've spent most of the weekend running the libroservo (book service) at the conference and wow, it's been hard work. I've just been adding everything up and I think I sold 270 books over the course of the weekend Luckily I sold them all via card payments because I think giving change in Esperanto would have been the death of me. Numbers in Esperanto are extremely easy but I am rubbish at numbers and prices in any language, so every time I was telling someone how much they owed me I had to really concentrate to make sure I didn't say "dek du" (12) when I meant "dudek" (20) or something similar. I survived anyway, got lots of number practice and hopefully charged everyone the correct amounts
YTD totals - Russian: 134.0 hours, Croatian: 66.1 hours, German: 16.2 hours, Esperanto: 35.9 hours