For today the homework was to read an article out of the book
Ваше Мнение on relationships btwn men and women. The article was entitled
Надо ли спасать мужчин? Lots of good vocabulary in the article, to include:
отращивать: grow, branch off
унижение: humiliation, indignity
дезориентированный: confusion
мельчать: become small, shrink in comparison with, become petty
презирать: to despise, scorn, disdain
ясли: manger*
лишить: to deprive
вдобавок: in addition to к чему
подкаблучник: hen-pecked (husband)
*I asked the teacher about this word because it didn't seem to fit, context-wise, in the article. She said that this is also the name for the "school" that kids who are too young for kindergarten go to. Multitran says
creche or
nursery.
So I was ready, and then we didn't even go over the article. That'll happen on Wednesday. Today she wanted to test my memory. She had about 20 words on the board from a couple weeks ago and our discussion about endangered languages. Thankfully I remembered what they all meant. Then she erased the board and handed me a notecard and told me to write down any vocab we went over since class started in September. Well crap, that's was harder. And in one minute I only came up with six. Despite having just looked at 20 on the white board. (Obviously, she was testing my productive vs. receptive. I was happy with this because I know she will now organize my lessons to help with the productive side.)
The rest of the lesson we dealt with indirect speech. I have a habit of using если in places where it shouldn't be used, so we worked on using ли. For example, this is (was?) a typical sentence from me:
Я не знаю если завтра будет тепло или нет.
When it should be:
Я не знаю, будет ли завтра тепло.
We went over in great detail many examples, running through all the perturbations that this question could produce:
Лара была в Ирландии с Романом?
Depending where you place the emphasis, indirect speech can be:
Он спросил, в Ирландии ли она была с Романом.
Он спросил, она ли была в Ирландии с Романом.
and so on...ad nauseam.