Week 5 updateI've felt quite tired this week. I didn't get home from Tampere until 01.30 on Monday morning and I had to be in the office for a meeting at 08.30, so that was hard. Tuesday was also D-Day for one of my bigger clients to sign their accounts, so the first part of the week was a bit intense.
RussianI don't tend to do many listening activities while I'm away travelling, so as I've been at home this week I've tried to focus on listening as much as possible.
- At the start of the week I intended to watch another Varlamov episode about the former countries of the USSR, but instead I got sucked into watching one YouTube recommended to me about parts of Russia where people are living without gas, heating their homes with wood. The content was too difficult for me really and I struggled in particular to follow what was being said by some of the elderly people being interviewed. But essentially it was about the fact that Russia has a lot of gas, some of which it is selling abroad, while parts of its own population are living in freezing homes they can barely afford to heat. Heating a home with wood is not only massively inconvenient but also quite expensive, at least compared to the pensions that the interviewees were receiving. If I understood correctly, one old lady had had to go into debt to pay for wood. Even if I only understood a fraction of what was being said, I found it fascinating.
- Later in the week I did start watching a Varlamov USSR episode. This one was about Turkmenistan, which I guess is the former republic of the USSR I'm least likely to ever visit. On the one hand I found this episode really interesting, because I knew so little about Turkmenistan in advance. In fact, even after watching the episode I suspect that I might struggle to mark Turkmenistan correctly on a map on the first attempt. But on the other hand, it was a strange episode because Varlamov wasn't actually allowed to go to Turkmenistan to film it. It's a very closed country, especially to journalists I think, and if I understood correctly, I think he'd previously published something about Turkmenistan which the authorities there didn't like. So the episode was more focussed on interviewing people in other countries who were in exile from Turkmenistan. That was interesting in its own way but I would have loved to see more footage of the country itself.
- I watched one more episode of the telenovela Обручальное кольцо. This was episode 5 so I'm averaging about one episode per week. I know, not exactly binge-watching .
- As already mentioned, I watched the two Easy Russian videos which Caromarlyse linked me to (thank you!). I won't say anything else about the guy's accent.
- Somewhere in the middle of the week I watched a recent Russian with Max video about energy and what little things you can do to increase it when you're feeling tired or down.
- I finished work early on Friday and did some housework. While I was cleaning, I listened to the most recent Russian with Max podcast. It was about the birth of his new baby and also about Russian superstitions relating to small children.
- I had to walk into town on Saturday to get a photo to renew my passport. I listened to an older Russian with Max podcast which was discussing the question of whether people are becoming less intelligent than they were in the past (or - at least - less capable of thinking for themselves), as a result of the constant flow of information from the internet in general and phones in particular.
In non-listening related activities, I also did the following:
- Finished lesson 3 of stage 3 in the Red Kalinka video course. The theme of this one was the seaside and from a grammar point of view, prepositional plurals. I must admit that sometimes I lose the will to live with the videos but I am finding the course useful, in that each lesson introduces a handful of new verbs and runs through their conjugation. This is an area I need to focus on more so even if I don't exactly enjoy it, I think it's useful. I also think it's really good that the course is introducing the Russian names for different parts of grammar. So in the videos I watched this week, there were lots of instances of the teacher asking in Russian which case a particular noun was in and then giving the answer in Russian.
- I finished reading Конь и его мальчик (The Horse and His Boy) yesterday evening. It was only 106 pages, so not very long even by the standards of Narnia books. Words which I looked up over the course of the week included ущелье (gorge, ravine, canyon) and усыпальница (tomb).
- Read the first chapter of the following Narnia book, Принц Каспиан.
- I completed chapter 20 of the NPRC. I was working through this one last week when I was in Finland, but it was the verbs of motion chapter and there was just too much grammar to take in all at once. I still have a lot to learn about verbs of motion - and, being honest, I still don't feel like I truly understand a lot of the logic of it - but I think each time I revise the subject I remember a little bit more.
- I also finished revising chapter 21 of the NPRC. This one was about the use of свой and чтобы. Both of those are topics which I find much more straightforward than verbs of motion!
Croatian- Finished reading the novel Ispovjedna tajna by Drago Hedl. That's my first Croatian novel read this year - 351 pages. I enjoyed it but as crime novels go, I can't pretend it had any great plot twists. It was clear from the first third of the book or so what the outcome was going to be and who was responsible for the murder.
- I've watched six episodes of the telenovela Kumovi this week. I'm up to episode 157 out of 171 at the moment. I think the new season starts next week, so I'm not quite going to manage to get back up-to-date on time for that.
- I've revised a few more sections in my BCMS grammar book. This week I covered locative case endings and genitive plurals, neither of which are particularly difficult topics in Croatian. I didn't spend as much time as I intended to with this book this week to be honest.
- I've done a little bit more writing in Croatian although again, probably not as much as I'd hoped. I've written 3000 words so far this year.
GermanAbsolutely complete and total failure
I wanted to finish watching the Arctic Circle series I was watching and somehow I managed to get through an entire week without watching an entire episode.
EsperantoNothing significant to report here either. I had an Esperanto trustee meeting this week and did some accounts work, but that was all in English.
YTD totals - Russian: 42.9 hours, Croatian: 29.6 hours, German: 10.6 hours, Esperanto: 9.6 hours