I finished lesson 38 of
Russian without toil, then my brain was unable to cope with any more (it's
so annoying how much female hormones mess with cognition!).
At that point, I wasn't really remembering the new vocabulary, but I feel like I was internalizing the grammar/syntax side of things pretty well. In the extra exercises for practicing the cases, I couldn't really identify the cases by name, but I always understood the meaning of the sentence first time. I'm happy with that, as at this point I'm aiming for instinctive comprehension rather than linguistic analysis. Hopefully my brain is now busy consolidating all the new stuff I've learned, and will be raring to go when I next pick up Russian again!
I also watched the first episode of Кухня (with English subs) and 20 episodes of Маша и Медведь (with Russian subs), which is
totally adorable! I'm wondering if 'ой' is something that only kids say, or can adults use it too? I quite like it as an interjection. I also found the 520-odd episodes of
Sunset Beach that were
dubbed into Russian (and watched the first 7). This soap was
huge when it was broadcast in the UK, and I can remember pretty much all of the storylines. So, I have 360+ hours of 'so bad/bonkers it's awesome' TV to sink my teeth into!
Mid-June I suddenly had the urge to do some German. I haven't done any since last November, when I was using
German without toil and
German with Ease (I could have sworn I'd also reached Pimsleur German IV, but I don't appear to have made a note about that...). I've revised GwT to lesson 41, then carried on to lesson 61. I've sort of stopped it over the last week or so: the lessons in the middle of the book have several shorter texts rather than one long one, and although they're still enjoyable in terms of content, it's easier to 'get into' one longer text.
A couple of weeks ago I prepared a DE-EN parallel text of the first Discworld novel using
LF Aligner, which is an
amazing bit of kit (I've also grabbed some of Farkas Translations's
pre-prepared texts). I happened to have re-read this book earlier in the year, so the story is still fresh in my mind. I intended to do L-R with it, but after reading the
Best approach to learning more words thread, I was umm-ing and ahh-ing (not that I'm developing a pattern here, of course...
). I tried LWT, but it felt a bit labourious. So I've decided to go old school, and am mainly using my paper dictionary with the parallel text and audiobook (and the occasional internet look-up). It took 2h 15 min to do the first page.
I think that's down to the combination of descriptive language, long sentences, and Pratchett being difficult to translate. I dread to think how long it would have taken if I didn't already know the grammar! I've decided to use the graded readers I have at the same time, as they're a doddle in comparison and will improve my reading ability.
Despite the 'toil', I'm really enjoying this method. It's nice to be doing German again, and it always feels very familiar to me - like English, but with a shedload of words that I don't know. Similar to reading a technical document in English on a subject I'm unfamiliar with. And I'm catching myself thinking in German without consciously trying to.
I'm also watching
Kommissar Rex (I think Rex is almost as adorable as Маша
). I've discovered that having English subtitles appear 1.5-2 seconds early will miraculously turn most of the dialogue into comprehensible input! It's too fast for me to be able to internalize new vocabulary, but one season in, I'm starting to decipher the Wiener accent at least.
And after 7 months, I've finally covered the three languages in my log title!
(
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was on TV yesterday. I've come to the conclusion that if I can't even sit through the whole film, struggling through the books for language-learning purposes is probably not worth the time or effort. There's plenty of other literature out there that I'd rather read!)