There are worse things I could do... (FR, RU, ES)

[neofight78]

Anyway, that was long and boring, I'll stop now! Let me know if you have any suggestions, based on this stuff! (Or if you have questions about them).

Not at all! A great selection of links

[MamaPata]

I don't really have much to report this week - focus remains essays, etc, as it will for a while. I also haven't watched anything this week, so I thought I'd have a quick talk about LWT.

I started using LWT in about December I think, though I definitely had it a bit before then. I've read through about 30 articles, a lot of which I split up into smaller texts. I really like it, it feels very useful and it makes me actually focus, rather than thinking - oh I know vaguely what that means. (Which always comes back to bite me). It does take a lot more time than reading extensively and I think both help to develop different skills. I'm now getting to the point where reading an article, even though I will add a decent number of known words, doesn't help the percentage of unknown words for other texts I have saved go down. It was a lot more motivating in the beginning, when you read a few paragraphs and the numbers drop significantly. Currently, for the texts I have saved to read, the percentage of unknown words is between 20-45. However, like I say, I do split texts up so they're easier to get through, which obviously has an impact. I don't bother writing in definitions for words I know, because I know I'd just lose interest, though I can see why other people do.

In total, I've added 16378 Russian words, of which I know 14107 (about 86%). I have 1404 that I am (meant to be) learning.

Obviously this (sadly) doesn't mean I know that many words. There are noun declensions, participles, conjugations, etc. I do ignore a lot of words - names especially. But also, I get a lot of stuff in English or other languages (particularly in the article about English that I shared in the Russian group). A few get through if there are errors trying to ignore them, but I try to cut them out.

I also don't really use their flashcard system - anything I want to learn, I add to my memrise course. I add most stuff, but if words are particularly unusual or too similar to words I'm trying to learn, I don't bother. That means I don't really note whether I'm learning the words, unless they come up in other texts. Most that have come up elsewhere, I haven't yet learnt so I'm hoping that improves in the future. (This isn't memrise's fault, I'm prioritising learning vocabulary from class, so I haven't actually been tested on a lot of the LWT vocab).

How is LWT working for other people? Are there ways I could be using it better? Does anyone have suggestions on sites where I can find articles? Most of mine are from BBC Russian, Медуза and Arzamas.

Also! Help please! Does anyone know of Russian-language youtubers who talk about cinema? I've seen that BadComedian is very popular but his videos are like an hour long. I find 10 minutes a bit long so an hour is never going to happen!

I'm also looking for suggestions of US series that have decent dubbing into Russian - I don't enjoy Russian series, and I hate hearing the English in dubs. Anyone got any ideas?

[eido]

If you know 14,000 words or so and are only at a B1, that seems wrong. Then again I probably don't know that much about the levels. This makes me nervous. I might know maybe 5,000 words (I honestly don't know, I'm going off the Leipzig test) and can read news articles with the help of a dictionary (maybe a medium amount of help) I'm putting myself at B1. Oof. All I can say is give yourself some credit, bro.

[MamaPata]

If you know 14,000 words or so and are only at a B1, that seems wrong. Then again I probably don't know that much about the levels. This makes me nervous. I might know maybe 5,000 words (I honestly don't know, I'm going off the Leipzig test) and can read news articles with the help of a dictionary (maybe a medium amount of help) I'm putting myself at B1. Oof. All I can say is give yourself some credit, bro.

(Sorry, slow response). I think it's very hard to estimate the levels - I did a French exam recently and was blown away by my result. When I read the descriptions of what's expected for each level, I definitely felt way off what was needed for B2. So, yes, I could be underestimating myself. But I also think that after the A levels, each level covers a lot of ground. So multiple people can be at B1 but at totally different points on that spectrum.

It's also worth noting that LWT doesn't differentiate based on gender/case/conjugation. So for Russian, each noun has 6 cases (sing and pl). Some of these are the same but it still means quite a few options for one noun. Same with verb conjugations, etc. So a lot of the words that LWT counts separately are actually one word, if that makes sense? It's useful for me as an indicator of progress, but it's not something that can be viewed as an objective measure.

But thanks - I suspect I do underestimate myself a bit, for safety's sake, and it's always good to have a reminder that things are better than I think!

[MamaPata]

I don't really have much to report. I tend to read novels, etc in readlang because I'm more interested in the story and getting the exposure. But because I'm trying to work with LWT for more intensive study, I'm mostly just reading articles, which isn't particularly exciting to report. I also haven't had a chance to watch many films because of essays, etc.

Anyway, Russian continues. I'm really trying to push vocabulary acquisition (and also, again, essays so limited time for Russian) so I'm doing quite a bit of memrise. This is feeling useful, but I will definitely need to balance it out. (Though quite when I will manage to do that is a mystery). I had a bit of a read of Blaurebell's log because I knew she'd talked a lot about LWT. It was useful to note how she uses it and her estimations for the words she'd need to know in order to read freely. If anyone else has similar thoughts, or wants to chat about their experience of LWT, I am always interested in ideas for how to use it better.

I've managed a decent amount of LWT and got through a few articles. I'm slightly sorry that LWT doesn't let you learn phrases - often I don't need a word on its own but I didn't know it in that context. I add it to memrise in the combination, but I wish I could also join stuff on LWT.It's always interesting to note the difference in percentage of unknown words. Bizarrely, despite the fact that I read quite a lot of them, articles about cinema always come out much higher in terms of unknown words - sometimes up to 50%. Some of this is about the number of names - I'm unlikely to have seen them before unless it's a specific director I'm researching.

What I would quite like is to be able to see the percentage of words I'm learning in a text, after I've read it. It is nice to see the percentages go down in general, but it's not that helpful when actually there are a lot of words I do know in a text or names. Is there a way of seeing the percentage of words being learnt for a specific text? (short of literally counting and working it out myself. There aren't that many, but that's still too much hassle )

[MamaPata]

I don't really have much to report. I now have just under two months until all my exams are done and I am free. Terrifying. As a result, the next two months are likely to be pretty underwhelming and boring. Because of the format of my exams, I'm pushing vocabulary acquisition/practice and reading. I will also be starting italki lessons again. Ideally, I'd like to do more writing practice but this may not be possible given other priorities. (The output challenge has basically died on my end. I probably should have anticipated that).

I'm quite interested by Axon's challenge with Reading Russian News. It's not dissimilar to what I'm doing a lot of at the moment (though I don't read that many actual news articles as they tend to be too short for me to want to bother sticking them into LWT). I'll be very interested to see his progress throughout the month.

I'm getting a bit irritated with Memrise and am debating moving to another flashcard option at some point. I really like the gamifiedness of Memrise (and the element of competition ) but it has its downsides. I have been using it for a long time and the reviews simply pile up like mad. I know this is a problem with all flashcard apps/websites, but I believe Memrise doesn't have a review option longer than 180 days which is why I think a lot of stuff comes up so many times. Ideally I'd also quite like to be able to make it ignore typos as sometimes I knew the word and spelling but just ****ed up. But I have made several decks in memrise, organised by the text or lesson I learned the words in and I like that way of organising things (levels in courses). I'm probably not going to change anything before June as it's too much time to waste, but we'll see then

[MamaPata]

This week has been a bit stronger for Russian as I have been reading a lot, in order to procrastinate on all the things I really need to be doing. I read a bunch of articles and found some new sites to get articles from (mostly mine are from the same three places, so I felt I should mix things up a bit). At some point, I'll make a post about sites I use in case it's of interest to anyone. That said, I think I ought to focus more on news so I am looking for news sites which have longer articles. I don't want long reads but I can't be bothered to add 2 paragraph articles to LWT. Currently I get most of my news from Медуза and BBC Russian Service. I'm looking for similar, left of centre sites, if anyone has any suggestions.

I also finished two books I was reading in translation. One was a teen fantasy novel, which has a lot of specific vocab. The other was a crummy self-help book. I would really recommend self-help books to learners who are on the B1 sort of threshold and find actual novels out of reach. They tend to be very simply written and the vocabulary repeats throughout, so you learn a few synonyms and really make sure a lot of stuff is entrenched in your memory. The downside is that it takes way too long to read them. I was a bit fed up by the time I made it to the end of this one - in English I wouldn't spend more than a few hours at most reading this kind of stuff. It's a lot more tiresome when it takes you so much longer. But overall, that was manageable and it just made me pick up my pace for the second half of the book. (I don't really know how long it took me overall sorry, I only count my overall Russian time and even that is approximate)

I watched two films this week: Donskoi's Радуга and Todorovskii's Ретро втроём.

Радуга was made during the war about the war, so it's very binary in its depiction of everything (especially the Germans) for obvious reasons. I enjoyed it, I found the Russian okay to follow (though as always, there are certain bits I don't get). It's not a fantastic film, but it's good and it's very interesting from a historical/social point of view. I found that it was very touching, especially the scenes with the kids.

Ретро втроем is much weirder. It's a remake of/based on the Soviet silent film 'Bed and Sofa', which is well worth watching. I really like one of Todorovskii's other films Страна глухих (Land of the Deaf) and would recommend it, regardless of whether you're studying Russian. It's the story of two women (one deaf, one hearing) who become friends, set in post-Soviet Russia and I think it's really very good. This, in comparison, was a disappointment. It's so weird that it is very funny, but it's also just a bit odd and it doesn't work as well as Land of the Deaf. The characters are just not as likeable and I found it hard to connect with them, whereas Land of the Deaf sucks you in. Again, I managed to follow most of the Russian, but there were some bits I just didn't get, especially from secondary characters. I did probably quite enjoy it and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, but it's definitely not a very good film. (There are some highly entertaining scenes though). It also features the weirdest 'Teach Yourself English' tape I've ever come across.

[MamaPata]

Радуга was made during the war about the war, so it's very binary in its depiction of everything (especially the Germans) for obvious reasons. I enjoyed it, I found the Russian okay to follow (though as always, there are certain bits I don't get). It's not a fantastic film, but it's good and it's very interesting from a historical/social point of view. I found that it was very touching, especially the scenes with the kids.

Ретро втроем is much weirder. It's a remake of/based on the Soviet silent film 'Bed and Sofa', which is well worth watching. I really like one of Todorovskii's other films Страна глухих (Land of the Deaf) and would recommend it, regardless of whether you're studying Russian. It's the story of two women (one deaf, one hearing) who become friends, set in post-Soviet Russia and I think it's really very good. This, in comparison, was a disappointment. It's so weird that it is very funny, but it's also just a bit odd and it doesn't work as well as Land of the Deaf. The characters are just not as likeable and I found it hard to connect with them, whereas Land of the Deaf sucks you in. Again, I managed to follow most of the Russian, but there were some bits I just didn't get, especially from secondary characters. I did probably quite enjoy it and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, but it's definitely not a very good film. (There are some highly entertaining scenes though). It also features the weirdest 'Teach Yourself English' tape I've ever come across.

I lie. I've gotten my Todorovskii's confused. Land of the Deaf was Valerii Todorovskii and this was Petr Todorovskii (his father I think). Both are good directors though, and I have seen another of his films Интердевочка. Ретро в троём is not his best work!

[MamaPata]

Life continues! Things have taken a bit of a turn for the positive and I'm not doing too badly with all the things I need to be doing. Only 46 days until it's all over! (Not that I'm counting of course...)

I've been focusing on other stuff this week (as I will be for the rest of April) but I managed to get a decent amount of Russian in. I've finished the fantasy novel (translation) I was reading. These have been really useful for me and they're probably something I would use for other languages in the future. I read them to death as a kid, so I know the stories well and they're simply written but move fast enough to hold your interest. I have one more of these books and then I have read all the Russian translations, so I have that and some other translated books. I do also have some Russian books but I don't know if I'm there (and I'm trying to keep stress down). As a result, I'm still on track for my yearly reading goal (52 books) which I'm quite pleased with, given academic pressures. I've also lined up quite a few other reading options because I wasn't convinced by the ones I had, and now Readlang is telling me my list looks imposing!

I also feel like I've made a little spurt of progress with my Russian - I noticed when reading this one that it was so much easier than the first two. I am beginning to feel like I genuinely can read for pleasure, though obviously it does depend on the text. The number of unknown words on LWT is dropping, and my conversations feel much more smooth and varied. At some point in the summer, I will probably try another Dialang test and see if this is all in my head. Earlier in the year, I hadn't been sure if I would manage to keep going with Russian after my degree ends, because I've been feeling quite negative about it. But now I feel much better about it so that's pretty great.

Interestingly, recently I've had a lot more unknown phrases on LWT rather than single words. (I had not realised you could add phrases and I am even more impressed by LWT). I don't quite know why this has happened, but I think there are possibly a few factors. 1. Some of the texts I've been reading happen to use more phrases. 2. Because I now know a majority of words in LWT texts, I'm not looking so much word-by-word. 3. My Russian is getting better?

Anyway, whatever the reason, I've been enjoying it. I'm using academic.ru which is really good for this kind of thing. My main dictionary is wiktionary because I like to be able to check imperfective/perfective verbs, conjugations, etc. But academic is the best for phrases. So here is a list of some of the ones that have come up recently:

на чем свет стоит - with great intensity (gen used for telling people off)
назвался груздем - полезай в кузов - used to make people do the things they've started/said they will do. Academic is giving me some hilarious English translations that I've never heard (I particularly like 'If you call yourself a mushroom, into the basket you go' which I am determined to start using all the time. I can't really think of an English equivalent that matches exactly).
днем с огнем - something a bit like 'one in a million' or 'not for love nor money'. The text I was reading was using it more like 'not for love nor money', but essentially it seems to be suggesting that it's something very hard to find
и в помине нет - no trace of
халатное отношение - negligence. MoscowTimes has a really interesting articleabout where this and associated phrases came from.
снимать/снять сливки - to reap the benefits from something (literally to skim the cream off the milk. I feel like English has a similar thing because this feel very familiar)
смотреть косо - to look askance at someone, look down your nose
окидывать/окинуть взглядом - to run one's eyes over something. This has amusingly since come up in the book I was reading.
отдавать/отдать честь - to salute (I'd come across взять под козырек before, but not this one. Does anyone know if there's a difference?)

All very entertaining! If anyone has any further information/corrections about these, let me know.

[Elenia]

(I had not realised you could add phrases and I am even more impressed by LWT)

How? How? Teach us, o great one!