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

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Teango
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby Teango » Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:15 pm

blaurebell wrote:The last couple of days I was playing with my new Russian camera, but of course that doesn't really count. I called her "Horizontka" by the way - I always name my photography gear, I'm weird like that.

Классная имя...I've lost count of the number of people who told me I was a little eccentric naming my old second-hand cars and guitars in the past, but now I feel vindicated and positively tempted to christen my dinky red Nikon D3300 too.
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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:40 pm

I think eccentric is good. But then, I'm a little eccentric myself, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me ;) My film scanner's name is an insider joke for Spanish speakers: The original product name is Pakon, so, naturally I called him Paco. When he doesn't behave he's "Francisco" though - Paco is short for Francisco among Spanish speakers and naturally the longer name is in the good tradition of using the full name of your kids when they misbehave. Reminds me of that moment when a friend wanted to find out whether a sausage really explodes if you put it in the microwave. Oh yes, it does! Her full name rang out only moments later when her mum heard the sausage explosion :lol:

If you give your Nikon a name you should probably skip the baptism. Horizontka accidentally got one when a huge wave caught us on the coast promenade :oops: It's winter storm season and normally I stay away from there at this time of the year, but well, panorama camera and coast is just such a good combination! I don't think a digital camera would have survived it.
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:41 pm

DaveBee wrote:I'm looking forward to reading the Hornblower books in french, and now I'm curious how all that 'boat crap' will be translated. :-)


Sounds like I should stay away from those :D
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Sun Feb 12, 2017 2:05 pm

Russian

: 15 / 100 Assimil Russian
: 28 / 79 Duolingo Russian
: 3 / 6 Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.2

Finished:
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.1

I just started the third week of Assimil today and I'm so glad about that! Finally I don't have to slow down my speaking anymore to shadow the audio. The first 14 lessons are really painfully slow and it's hard to even hear the intonation. Yay for progress! Also my Assimil course just explained my mum's behaviour to me! My mum has an infuriating habit of pushing food on everyone. She will ask at least twice, but most often 3 or 4 times if you want something, usually with different variations of "are you sure?" thrown in. Turns out that Russians often politely say no the first time something is offered and only accept on the second time. Since this is not the case for Germans, there isn't a formulaic "Really, I don't want it". Next time she offers me something for the 3rd time I'll tell her in Russian that I really don't want it. Maybe that will finally help ;)

Also, I have finished another graded reader. This one was still childish with moralistic stories about different animals, but not quite as boring as the A1 reader. The second A2 reader is like the other A2 one and at least I notice that it's good practice. By now I actually get the main points of the story already before looking up any unknown words, so that's definitely progress too. I still don't feel confident enough to embark on my novel, but I'm getting there. It takes me less time to read the texts too, so I might be able to start with the third A2 reader tomorrow. That one is supposedly about Russian traditions, so hopefully a little less childish.

French

I started listening to La guerre du feu which is read by a different person for a change and has lots of descriptive passages. It's definitely a little more difficult than my Jules Verne audiobooks from before, but I feel it's at the right level to improve my listening skills without being too much of a strain. Also, I'm close to finishing another season of Angel French dubs. It creates a good balance to reading classic 19th century stuff I suppose, since this one is simply and truly stupid with singing demons and non-sense like that. I'm definitely having fun, although there are of course lots of reasons to shake your head during this one. So silly :lol:
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Fri Feb 17, 2017 11:45 am

Russian

: 20 / 100 Assimil Le Russe
: 34 / 79 Duolingo Russian

Finished:
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.2

I'm now almost done with week 3 of Assimil and I have actually managed to reach the point where I gave up on Duolingo last time. I now remember why: They introduce dative, perfective verbs, instrumental and genitive plural in pretty quick succession and I was getting super frustrated with the other course I was using at the time too. :roll: Besides, last time I tried the Duolingo Russian course was still in Beta, so between all the verb prefixes, the case endings and the pretty narrow and inconsistent possible answers I just got completely lost. Since this time I'm quite enjoying the Assimil I don't really care if Duolingo is giving me a hard time. It'll start making sense eventually.

This week I didn't really have much time for reading at all. We have some pretty stunning spring weather in the middle of February and this miracle must obviously be used for photography. Also I'm pretty bored by these graded readers and will abandon them after the current one. Instead I got myself a French translation - Le Pion Blanc des Présages - as a companion to the Russian translation of Pawn of Prophecy and will read those in parallel whenever I run into any problems deciphering the Russian. The training wheels have to come off eventually!

French

I finished Season 2 of Angel French dubs and this keeps me entertained. Guerre du feu turned out to be a bit too hairy to listen to while working in the darkroom - I kept making mistakes and ruining paper because I had to listen so hard. Definitely not the right book for that sort of thing! It's quite a bit more complicated than the Jules Verne books from before, but it's definitely interesting. Just a bit annoying that I basically have to sit down and really concentrate on it to progress with it.
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Sat Feb 18, 2017 11:59 am

Last night I started on David Eddings Pawn of Prophecy in Russian French parallel reading. Boy was that difficult to figure out the Russian! It reminded me of Latin lessons in school with all the long sentences with oodles of cases :roll: Nevertheless I struggled through it and finished reading one page. Only took me an hour ... :oops: I looked at the French version only after I thought I had figured it out and I got pretty much everything sort of right. The translations don't match sentence for sentence or word for word, so the actual structures remain a little bit vague with very long sentences. That said, I think the prologue of the book might be a bit more difficult than the rest. The actual story is about a boy going on a long journey to finally become a hero, while the prologue speaks about the Gods and power, wizards and all sorts of uncommon stuff like that. It'll get easier with time.

I finished Assimil week 3 and although the audio is a little faster now, it's still too slow for me. I checked with the files and at least after 75 lessons it has decent speed. I'm looking forward to getting to that point then! On Duolingo I've now seen all the cases which means that for the rest of the tree I get to practice them. Probably the reason why it gets a little case mad in this part of the tree! I'm almost halfway through it now and powering along with at least one, sometimes two skills a day might be getting a bit much. I'm seeing new things now as well, so I will have to adjust my speed accordingly.

I realised that I need to listen more and found myself an audiobook for ночной дозор which I want to read after David Eddings. I don't understand it yet - the occasional word or sentence here and there -, but that doesn't matter much, since I'm just listening for the rhythms and stresses. I like the voice of the reader and just listen to 10 minutes of it while reading along with the text. That should get me used to the spoken language more quickly and probably help with the pronunciation in the long run as well.

Also, did I mention that I use Clozemaster now? It's not as annoying as flashcards and I get exposure to more natural sounding sentences. I've been keeping that one up for almost 2 weeks now and it seems to work for me.
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Tue Feb 21, 2017 12:50 pm

: 24 / 100 Assimil Le Russe
: 38 / 79 Duolingo Russian
: 2 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - Обретение чуда
: 1076 / 35000 LWT Known

Finished:
Russian Pronunciation Trainer
Russian World 1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.1
Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2.2

It's been 4 weeks since I came back to Russian. I've done about 25% of the Assimil passive wave and I'm halfway through the Duolingo tree, which is a couple skills further along than where I stopped last time round. Working on my pronunciation and shadowing has really helped - some of those sentences they picked in Assimil - Le Russe are a truly good workout. I'm still struggling with rolling Rs mid word, but it's improving a lot now. Still not quite there, but good progress! One high frequency word today was a real test of patience - it's so close to my own name that it was super hard not to fall into the wrong stress. And it totally explains why my mum has difficulties pronouncing my name sometimes. I always wondered why that was - now I know! It's great to be connecting with my mum like this and I look forward to sharing more with her. She keeps recommending movies and books that aren't translated into any language I know, so it will be great once I break that native material barrier.

Speaking of native material, I finally abandoned graded readers this last week and started the first David Eddings book in translation. I'm still at the stage of deciphering it like Latin, but it's getting a little quicker every day. Yesterday I only needed 45min for 200 words rather than an hour and I didn't get a headache either. Slow progress still, but I'm following the story just fine now. It's becoming less and less guesswork and I rarely need the French translation to check whether I'm on track. Early days, I'm not even through the prologue yet, but I feel like I'm making progress. Still a long way to go until I hit my goal of having added 35,000 word forms to the LWT database, but at least I'm already dealing with native content rather than dumbed down teaching texts.

Also, I understand about 70% of Russian teaching videos on Youtube. I think they're a little bit of a waste of time normally, so I don't really watch that kind of stuff. However, the other day I watched a mildly interesting interview with a Russian teacher in Kiev and I could follow it just fine. With the limited vocabulary of those videos I'm not really sure that's a real achievement though. While listening to ночной дозор I still understand nothing. A word here or there, sure, but understanding not even one whole sentence while listening for 10 minutes is a bit sad. I listen to it only for the rhythm of the language while reading along, so understanding isn't a priority, but I wish I would get more details than just the vaguest notion of what's going on. I also wish I had an audiobook for Обретение чуда, that would be a bit more sensible than listening to another book! I don't think it exists though sadly.

By the way, I stumbled over a link to emk's post on the old forum about The Cheating & Consolidating Method. It's exactly what I did with French too and this is what I'm trying to do with Russian as well. With Russian it's definitely a lot more difficult to get to the stage where one can start to decipher, because there are just so many things that seem bonkers when encountering them for the first time! I tried to do intensive reading during the last time I attempted Russian and I just couldn't figure out who was doing what to whom and why there were always at least 2 verbs with the same meaning and all that crazy stuff that we all love about Russian grammar. And the most baffling part: why on earth does the Kindle pop up dictionary give me the translation "to eat" when I'd expect "to be"?! Funny in retrospect, but super frustrating when all your other study is traditional grammar torture and anki. Worst part: Anki was truly and completely a waste of time, because that only stuck short term, by now it's all gone. I can basically remember that I've seen certain words before, but not what they mean. At least all that grammar torture last time round did some good though. I wouldn't expect to be deciphering anything but graded readers until I'd be finished with all of Assimil if I hadn't done all that grammar torture before. It definitely helps not to have to look up declination and conjugation tables for every single word as well! If I had to do that, it would really be Latin 8th grade all over.
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:24 pm

Yesterday I had a breakthrough and managed to read intensively for more than 3 hours without getting a headache! With that I logged more than 5 hours and now cracked 50h of studying Russian in total, half of which was formal study, the rest listening and reading. I think I might have reached that point when immersion can start properly, first with reading and later watching series. After all the time I spent with Russian yesterday it felt like I was getting a bit more out of the ночной дозор audiobook today as well. I'm super excited and I have now a whole list of books I want to get through - first the David Eddings saga I'm reading now, then война и мир, then ночной дозор properly and after that I'll probably read tons of Science Fiction. SciFi is how my dad started with Russian too, because it was easier to find Russian translations than German ones when he was a teenager. I particularly look forward to reading Lem in Russian - the quality of the German, Spanish and English translations I've read was very unpredictable and it should be much easier to translate into Russian.

So far my progress: I finished the prologue of обретение чуда and I'm starting with chapter one. It's really surprising how much I still remember of it although I read it more than 20 years ago! I feel like I'm on holiday in my childhood, hearing lots of Russian and reading David Eddings!
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: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
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blaurebell
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby blaurebell » Thu Feb 23, 2017 11:21 am

So, immersion! I spent 8 hours with Russian yesterday :shock: :o :shock:
This can totally happen when I don't go outside and have no rolls of film to develop. Since I was feeling a little rough - maybe getting a cold - I wanted to take it easy before Carnival starts. Need to be fit to take pictures then, so I better stay in the warmth until Saturday. Having a good book to go through always helps, although I have to say that looking up every second word and puzzling over some of the more wild sentences isn't exactly my definition of "fun". I'm making progress though and it shouldn't be long before I can read with less effort.

I'm more convinced than ever that I will murder the language atrociously while trying to speak it though. The pronunciation isn't a big problem, but jeez, there are just so many opportunities for making grammar mistakes! :roll:
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Teango
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Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian

Postby Teango » Thu Feb 23, 2017 2:12 pm

It certainly looks like you hit the turbo-booster switch...I'm still coughing up krill in the wake of your recent meteoric climb on the 6WC leaderboard. ;)
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