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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:45 pm
by blaurebell
Current progress:
: 9 / 100 Assimil Russian
: 20 / 79 Duolingo Russian
: 2 / 6 Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2

Finished:
: 7 / 7 Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1

It's been almost 2 weeks since I took up Russian again and I've been working pretty consistently throughout. I've been redoing Duolingo from the top to revise grammar, practiced my pronunciation by shadowing the Assimil lessons and I also started reading simple texts a week ago. This last week I've pretty much gone through my usual list, Duolingo, Assimil and a Red Kalinka Story, repeat every day. I've done between 1.5 and 3h a day and the last two days I've decided to increase my reading time a little and read two stories a day. Since my first goal is to start reading native content instead of teaching texts, this is right now the focus. So far reading isn't fun yet. The texts are still a little boring and typing almost every word out for the LWT database is rather tedious. It will get better quickly though, or at least I hope so. I find those Red Kalinka readers actually a little expensive to be honest, but they are also really well made, with stress marked, translation, comprehension questions / exercises, as well as audio.

Assimil is still pretty basic 9 lessons in which is good and bad. It's not really helpful yet, but it doesn't really pose any problems either. Apart from a couple of words that still twist my tongue into a knot there isn't much to say about it so far. It starts with a different case than Russian World on Youtube and a different case again from Duolingo. Basically there doesn't seem to be a consensus which case is easiest or most important to learn. So, in the end I've actually lost track of how many cases I've encountered before. That's alright though, since I need them all for reading.

Duolingo became a little more difficult and today I actually had to repeat a lesson, which I didn't need to do with any of the other skills before. I'm still not close to the point where I stopped using Duolingo the last time round, so maybe it's just a fluke with that particular skill, who knows. In any case, I think I'm slowly getting up to speed again and I'll be making a real effort to get through my graded readers quickly. I already finished A1 and I don't seem to be running into many problems with the first A2 reader either. I'm a little impatient to get to real content, but looking at the first page of the book I want to read in Russian translation, I still have some revision and practice to do beforehand. Maybe another couple of weeks and I'll get there, hopefully.

Apart from that I've been playing around with several other resources. I've listened to a few glossika spaced repetition files and today I had a go at clozemaster. The latter seems rather interesting because the sentences from Tatoeba aren't quite as "clean" as most of the sentences I see in my other resources. It seems a little closer to real usage maybe. I will definitely play around with it for a few days and see whether it works for me.

And then of course I was also longingly looking at resources for intermediate and advanced Russian learners. There seem to be some really interesting books out there, advanced grammar workbooks and advanced courses based on history. I can't wait to reach that level and have a look at those, especially the history one looked very interesting!

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 6:09 am
by MamaPata
Those do sound interesting! What did you come across?

Seems like you're doing really well!

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:13 am
by Arnaud
What book do you want to read ? The suspense is unbearable :lol:

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 9:34 am
by blaurebell
MamaPata wrote:Those do sound interesting! What did you come across?


I came across "Advanced Russian through History" By Benjamin Rifkin and "Russian: From Intermediate to Advanced" by Olga E Kagan. Those two look both really interesting to me. :)

Shame that I'm still so far away from that kind of material! That said, I'm definitely on track with what I'm trying to do, which is of course good. I was a bit worried that I might have forgotten too much in the meantime, but it's really only the vocabulary that didn't stick - so much for Anki and its promises :roll: Luckily I don't need any vocabulary for intensive reading and the grammar is coming back easily.

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 10:00 am
by blaurebell
Arnaud wrote:What book do you want to read ? The suspense is unbearable :lol:


Haha :D I want to start with a translation of an American fantasy series I read in German as a kid, David Eddings Belgariad Saga. The story is more than carved into my mind and I want to reread it because it's a lot of fun. Probably subconsciously I consider it a waste of time in English though because it's so long and I still remember the story in a lot of detail. In my family we all read it voraciously until the paperbacks were falling apart. So, it's a regular page turner with 10+ books, definitely good material for the first Super Challenge. I normally start with Harry Potter, because that's like 4000+ pages, but since I just reread that in French I've had enough of it for a while.

After that I'll probably continue with Ночной дозор and finally get on with ... War and Peace. It's a kind of bet I have going with my Dad, who has the same look of disbelief in his eyes that he had when I told him that I'm going to pass my maths course with an A. He's a mathematician and he knew that I had neither the talent for it nor any interest normally. And just like he thought I wouldn't get my A, he probably thinks I won't make it through War and Peace. Since I proved him wrong with the maths, he should really know better by now ;)

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 8:36 pm
by Hundetier
blaurebell wrote:David Eddings Belgariad Saga. ... In my family we all read it voraciously until the paperbacks were falling apart. So, it's a regular page turner with 10+ books, ...

Oh, Garion and Polgara, some of my heroes as child. I still own the books ... :mrgreen:

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 8:53 pm
by blaurebell
Hundetier wrote:Oh, Garion and Polgara, some of my heroes as child. I still own the books ... :mrgreen:


My Dad still has his books too :)

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 1:14 am
by Systematiker
Y'all are making me nostalgic, I might have to go re-read them...

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 9:03 am
by blaurebell
Systematiker wrote:Y'all are making me nostalgic, I might have to go re-read them...


From experience I can tell you that the German translation is rather nice :lol: Nice enough for the paperbacks to fall apart, and fights with my brother about who gets to read the next one first! Of course as the little one I lost that fight and had to make sure to keep the pages in order that had fallen out ... :roll:

Anyone of you guys read Elenium? I rather enjoyed that one too.

Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:10 am
by blaurebell
When I'm not learning languages, I'm actually a photographer. I still use good old fashioned film so, when I travel I might be searching for labs or places to buy film and sometimes that can get a little tricky. In Argentina it came to perusing online forums and PDF files of some obscure websites that are probably 15 years old, until I finally found out which film would be the cheapest to get and which developers are available in the country. In the case of Argentina it was actually cheaper to take 50 rolls of film back and forth from Europe to Argentina than to buy and develop film locally. Yay for my Spanish photography vocabulary there!

So, film and photography related vocabulary is usually the first to fall into my lap somehow. Now that I'm learning Russian again, the old Soviet camera bug made a resurgence and I ordered this baby, right from the source:

horizo14.jpg


Today it finally arrived after being held hostage by customs for a couple of weeks. It came complete with почта россии tape, a gazillion кремьл stamps and a manual completely in Russian. Boy am I happy with this quirky cookie! It such a weird camera. Because it's panoramic, the lens moves, so for once there actually is a reason for the funky shutter noise unlike with my other Soviet cameras. This is my 4th Russian / Soviet camera. I have two зоркий cameras - a 3C from 1956 with a Russian logo and a 4K for export from the 70s which just has Zorki 4K written on it in a rather ugly font. Both cameras have the typical Soviet quirkiness about them. They don't work particularly well with western film, sometimes tearing it to shreds, and the shutters are super easy to break and tend to seize up in winter - strange considering Russia's climate. They are built like a tank and a good heavy weapon though, perfect for bad neighbourhoods. I used to take mine out in my horrific Berlin neighbourhood that was always in the news.

The third camera appeared one day out of nowhere. It was my mum's old Любитель, a medium format camera. When my mum left Ukraine many many years ago it had disappeared somewhere and it was long believed to have been given away to some friend or other by her brother. A couple of years ago my parents visited my uncle and my relatives had apparently done some digging. They found it in a box and since they know I love this sort of thing, they sent it over for me. It's actually a decent enough camera, not at all only for amateurs like the name suggests! The only problem with this particular camera is that it's rather broken. One of the strap lugs has broken off and the lens is just so full of fungus, it's ridiculous! I've seen a lot of old lenses with fungus, but this one is a veritable farm. One of these days I'll take it apart and clean it all out, but it probably won't ever reach its potential again. Still, it's definitely worth the effort, because it's part of one of those proud tradition of women in my family. My grandma used to develop my mum's film in the kitchen sink!

My strange new горизонт 202 is one of these plasticky newer cameras that probably won't keep 50 years like my Zorkis and my inherited Lubitel. However, I'll treat it carefully and expect it to keep at least 10 years though. Longer than any digital camera would make it before being tossed out! Now, you might be wondering: Did I read the manual in Russian? No, I got lost on the first sentence already. In the end I downloaded a translation somewhere and read it in French! I do hope to be reading about my Soviet cameras in Russian one day though!