Lilly's log - French, Russian, Spanish and Italian

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blaurebell
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Fri Jun 02, 2017 3:42 pm

Spanish

Phew, after today's stretch of FSI I was definitely noticing the strain. I now finished unit 4 and covered the dialogue of unit 5. So far it's all quite automatic for me, so I'm still getting through the tapes in realtime. The only exercise where I struggle is the translation exercise, because I actually never translate. Well, I guess after 55 units I'll probably get used to it.

Other than that I finished Las chicas del cable, which was mildly entertaining and not too terribly unbearable. I still had about 18h to go on my Iberian SC and couldn't be bothered to find movies, so I decided to look for another series after all. After trying around a bit, I finally I settled on Mar de plástico, which seems again mildly entertaining. Of course the acting isn't stellar, but decent enough to ignore. I already watched two episodes, so I think with this one I might be able to finish my Iberian SC quickly. And then of course there was also more En terapia. I'm definitely enjoying the third season. Not much more to go and then I have to think about what to watch next in Argentinian.

French

I read Le Scorpion tome 4 - definitely entertaining - and also continued with David Golder by Irène Némirovsky. Again, the Némirovsky book is wonderfully written and I'm enjoying it a lot. I also got a few more of her books in the mail the other day and I'm looking forward to reading them all. I actually recommended her books to my mum and she read some Russian translation that are apparently quite good. I haven't really continued with The Expanse because it's my bedtime reading and I seem to be simply too tired for anything more than a comic these days.
1 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Sat Jun 03, 2017 2:44 pm

Spanish

I managed another unit of FSI. 5 done, 50 to go. Doing about an hour each day seems doable right now, and at this rate it won't take too long to finish Volume 1. I'm really curious to see what it does to my Spanish to go through the whole course and whether I will start to struggle a bit more at some point. I think I will go through the first two Volumes, then continue with GdUdE B and then finish the rest of FSI.

I keep watching stuff too and my husband is starting to get a bit sick of En terapia. Good that we're almost finished with it! Another episode of Mar de plástico too. 14h of Iberian audio SC left. I'll be done soon and can then start with Mexican stuff.

French

I finished Irène Némirovsky's David Golder and found it just excellent! I'm looking forward to her other books now and will continue with a short one next, Ida. Last night I also finally continued with the French translation of The Expanse. 8005 pages read in French so far, not counting the 500+ pages that I've already read of The Expanse. At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if I manage to reach 10,000 pages by the end of July.

Russian

97% of my first book in Russian done. So close now! I hope that by tomorrow I'll be done with it!
5 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:47 am

Russian

I have finished my first book in Russian!!! Image

I can't quite believe it yet, but I finally managed! My main goal with Russian was to read and I have now reached a major milestone, finally! When I was little I often pulled Russian books from the shelves and looked at them. It fascinated me that the language of my mum came with these strange letters that I would only see in those books. I didn't try very hard to learn to read in Russian though, because my parents stopped speaking Russian with us right at the time when I learned to read. A shame, otherwise I wouldn't have had to go through all this effort to finally learn Russian beyond a mere subconscious understanding of the general topic of Russian conversations around me. In any case, major success, I can now read entire books!

My first book in Russian was Обретение чуда (also translated as Создатели чуда) by David Eddings, the first book of the Belgariad saga. The ebook version I found actually doesn't come with any reference as to how many pages the paperback edition originally had and I couldn't find any information about that one online. In the end I decided to calculate a reference length from the number of words contained and the French Harry Potter edition that I used for my French intensive reading challenge. This way I actually have comparable numbers for direct comparisons between learning French and Russian with LWT. So, it turns out that my first book in Russian had 244 pages. It contained 15,880 word forms in total of which I have now marked 7377 word forms as known. This means that my LWT database is now at 47,92%. My first book in French was 305 pages long and contained 9214 word forms of which I marked 6338 as known - 69%. From that alone you can gather that with Russian I have to enter many more word forms into the database which explains why my first book in Russian took me much longer than my first book in French - 115h vs 55h, basically double the time for less pages. With Russian I also have to listen to the pronunciation of each word, because word stress in Russian isn't obvious from the spelling, and this adds additional time too. To conclude: For French I needed 320h to read my first 5000 pages, so it will probably take me 650h or even more to read my first 5000 pages in Russian. 127h of reading in Russian done, 500h+ to go, so I can estimate that about 20% of my reading mission is done now.

After reaching the end of my first book I actually get the occasional page where I can understand half the page without looking up any words. A major achievement! That said, I also still get the occasional sentence where knowing the meaning of all the words doesn't add up to understanding the entire sentence, because Russian word order can be really mad. Also, there are still pages where vital words are missing, so I can't read extensively yet. I still have a lot of work in front of me to break through the comprehension barrier! However, I'm pretty happy with my progress and I think that by the end of the next book reading will actually start to be fun and I can start to binge-read. I now hope that I will reach that stage before my break in August.
10 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

Arnaud
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby Arnaud » Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:17 am

blaurebell wrote:Russian

I have finished my first book in Russian!!! Image
Congratulations Image
On Ozon, the paper book has 608 pages (but it doesn't mean anything, the russian market is full of books printed in all kind of formats. The english book has around 250 pages)
1 x

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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:26 am

Arnaud wrote:Congratulations
On Ozon, the paper book has 608 pages (but it doesn't mean anything, the russian market is full of books printed in all kind of formats. The english book has around 250 pages)


Yay, thanks!

Russian books can be so strange! Also, the printing of cyrillic fonts usually makes less words fit on a page, so I was actually expecting around 300 pages with that word count. The 608 pages actually come from a version that was published with the first 2 books in one volume, I've seen it around a few times.
0 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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neofight78
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby neofight78 » Sun Jun 04, 2017 12:40 pm

blaurebell wrote:I have finished my first book in Russian!!! Image


Good work! Reading your first Russian book is no mean feat! :D
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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Mon Jun 05, 2017 2:13 pm

neofight78 wrote:Good work! Reading your first Russian book is no mean feat! :D


Thanks! Indeed, it was quite a struggle :D
0 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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blaurebell
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Mon Jun 05, 2017 3:15 pm

Weekly Update

Actually I seem to be posting these weekly updates every two weeks, but who cares :D

Spanish

: 107 / 107 GdUdE A
: 8 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 12 / 116 GdUdE B
: 137 / 150 Iberian Audio SC
: 98 / 150 Argentinian Audio SC

After finishing GdUdE A and doing a few lessons of GdUdE B I decided to embark on FSI a bit earlier than I had originally planned. I felt a bit bored by GdUdE since some of the content from the A book were repeated in the B book. Embarking on FSI was a welcome change. I already finished 8 units which means that I'm halfway through the first volume. The idea is to finish the first 2 volumes until my photography technique course in Spanish on the 24th and I'm progressing nicely with it. After the first 2 volumes I will continue with GdUdE B before finishing the rest. What is my impression so far? Well, it's boring. When they throw 6 part variation drills at me (about 15 min doing the same thing over and over) I just want it to stop. However, some parts are also weirdly enjoyable. I guess I must be some sort of masochist :D

We also finished watching En terapia which means that I'm now about 2/3 done with my Argentinian SC. We began watching some Les Luthiers videos, but I actually don't want to count that as Argentinian because it's a lot of singing and comedy, which is more difficult than just watching a series. Over the years I've seen quite a bit of Les Luthiers and it's very advanced with lots of word play and weird local vocabulary, singing and all sorts of allusions. I'm really getting most of the jokes now, so there has definitely been quite some improvement since we saw them on stage a couple of years ago. Back then I was still swimming with half of the jokes. It's in part relatively high brow humour, so I bet doing some more reading will clear up the rest of the jokes too. For the Iberian SC I started Mar de plástico and I find it quite interesting, although of course a bit stereotypical and with somewhat flat acting - not too bad though in comparison. I'm very close to finishing the Iberian SC now and will continue with Mexican content afterwards. Spanish is definitely my main focus right now, because I have a veritable causal chains of stuff I can only do once I get certain things in my Spanish learning journey out of the way first.

Spanish hours: 32.92h

French

: 44 / 150 French native audio
: 8124 / 10000 French pages

I finished the history book I was reading for my PhD (boring, but important), a couple of volumes of Le Scorpion and David Golder by Irène Némirovsky. I'm really enjoying these Némirovsky books a lot, because they are very well written. After finishing another one today (Ida) I still have two left in the house before I need to get new ones. I can't complain at all when I "have to" read such wonderfully written books for my PhD. So much fun! I also passed the 8000 pages mark this last week. Good progress for sure! I haven't listened much because I've been focussing my energies on Spanish and Russian, but it's not really that important right now.

French hours: 12.12h

Russian

: 100 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - Обретение чуда
: 4 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - Владычица магии
: 7562 / 35000 LWT Known
: 244 / 5000 Russian pages

I finally managed to finish my first book in Russian and I have already started the second one. I'm now very curious to see how long the second book will take me and I will try to read at least one, ideally two hours a day. I also found a Russian shop in another neighbourhood while I was out taking pictures. In the good old tradition the opening times suggested that it should be open, but it was actually closed! That's a total classic. My mum likes to tell the story how she once had to register with the police when she was visiting relatives. The opening times of the office said 10am, but the guy actually showed up 4h later and my mum had to wait there! With the shop I didn't really know what to think anyway, because most of the products I saw in the window seemed Russian, but there were several announcements in Ukrainian in the window too, so I couldn't really tell whether it was a Russian or Ukrainian shop. In any case I was actually quite happy about this detail, because many Ukrainians speak Russian and I would probably be able to find someone to speak my mum's dialect with me if I put up a note there. Very cool! That said, I'm not ready to start speaking at all yet, so this is something to keep in mind for later. For now I focus on my first Russian SC and continue to hit my head against the comprehension barrier.

Russian hours: 8.59h

Total hours: 53.63h
1 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

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kunsttyv
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby kunsttyv » Mon Jun 05, 2017 5:44 pm

I'm still in awe of your achievements and work ethics blaurebell. I'll continue to stay cheering for you from the sideline. Good job with the Russian book!

By the way, I've decided to copy your French strategy when the time comes (probably next year or the year after, I just have to bring my Spanish to an advanced level first). I will probably have to ask you out about the details then, even though you already have given a thorough description here in this log and elsewhere.

Cheers!
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blaurebell
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
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Re: Lilly's log - French, Russian and Spanish

Postby blaurebell » Mon Jun 05, 2017 5:52 pm

kunsttyv wrote:I'm still in awe of your achievements and work ethics blaurebell. I'll continue to stay cheering for you from the sideline. Good job with the Russian book!

By the way, I've decided to copy your French strategy when the time comes (probably next year or the year after, I just have to bring my Spanish to an advanced level first). I will probably have to ask you out about the details then, even though you already have given a thorough description here in this log and elsewhere.


Thank you! Although work ethic ... I'm sure I only do 1-2h of actual work a day, the rest is just having fun with native material :D

I'm actually using the same method with Russian and it's much harder because there are fewer cognates, so progress seems to be so much slower. It still works though! Don't hesitate to ask me about the method when the time comes! That said, advanced isn't really necessary, B2 vocabulary should be enough to get the additional boost from Spanish cognates.
1 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German


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