This is my official introduction, so hello and I look forward to meeting you all! I loved HTLAL a lot but my old account from 2008 hasn't been reactivated and having stumbled across this forum by chance I've realised why!
So I wanted to write a fun or funny name for my blog, but then I realised that I was just encouraging myself to be as ever disorganised in my life. A nice clean and clear title might help bring some порядок to my otherwise rather hectic life.
This blog is going to be concise and succinct, and serve as a guide for clarity and a catalyst for motivation in my language learning.
I've traditionally thrived at learning languages in the country themselves. I always used to pride myself on my ability to pick up a convincing accent and speaking with fluency in both French and Russian (albeit with obvious grammar mistakes, particularly in the latter), both of which I have a degree in. I can't honestly remember a single proper homework I did whilst I was at University, yet I was always that guy who went to class and got it all right to the annoyance of my class mates. Times are now changing however and I am not about to just spend a year in France or Russia, or any other language's country I decide to tackle and so my preferred type of learning, i.e that of just being immersed and mirroring what I hear isn't going to work. I'm going to have to take a more pragmatic approach.
Here I am going to attempt to log my progress in Russian, particularly with regards to vocab building, and hopefully see if I can't just reach my goal of advanced fluency by the end of it.
I'm going to be using my own butchered version of the Gold List for vocab, and some annotated Scriptorium. Aiming to do at least one of each every day. Additionally, I am slowly making my way through a battered old version of one of Isaac Azimov's longer short stories called "Ловушка для простаков". For this reason you may see some very bizarre words on my Gold list.
You may find some seemingly basic words on there. I encourage this as often people think they know a word but really its in their passive memory and not their active memory. This is a concerted effort to improve my use of a wider range of vocabulary.
Hopefully just some general любопытство will get people following my journey. I always like to see what people are actually writing, their own hand writing, and feeling their blood sweat and tears

P.S you may wonder what on earth the red pen is for as the content makes no sense. its just a memory jolt for me and explains in a mixture of Russian and English short hand the point of the entry.
Resources
http://russiangram.com/ - amazing tool for working out stress marks in full sentences
multitran.ru - best dictionary out there
DISCLAIMER I CANNOT WRITE FOR [insert suggested metaphor here]. I am aware of my handwriting!!


Book

Day 1

Day 2


Day3

