Sol's New Russian & Korean Log

[aaleks]

So listening to the Russian past tense always sounds like someone's retelling something they're not sure about. I wonder if Russian has a similar tense/mood.

Retelling a story we can say:
Он говорил, что...
or Он говорит, что...
Maybe the second example is close to what you are asking about. But I'm not sure.

[Chung]

Wow, Tandem is great. Yesterday I found myself juggling multiple languages at once as I was talking to Russians and Koreans, occasionally switching to English and talking to my cousin in Bulgarian. Russian conversation isn't as hard as I'd have thought, texting anyway. I understand almost anything.

The Russian past tense confuses me because it looks like the Bulgarian inferential mood.

говорил (RU): he spoke
говорил (BG): he spoke (but you didn't witness it yourself or aren't certain about it)

So listening to the Russian past tense always sounds like someone's retelling something they're not sure about. I wonder if Russian has a similar tense/mood.

From what I remember of Russian, one doesn't express his/her uncertainty or mere retelling of something second-hand through a distinct set of conjugations (i.e. renarrative or inferential mood). If I have it right in Russian, you could make your uncertainty explicit with an adverb (e.g. this example with вроде) or just phrase things in a way that suggests enough of your uncertainty (skepticism even?) to the interlocutor(s) (e.g. Я не уверен, сможем ли мы это сделать - note the use of the particle ли and that сможем is the present/future indicative 1st person plural form of смочь - no renarrative or even imperative/subjunctive which at a real s t r e t c h is kinda-sorta like renarrative in describing an action that isn't real (observed?) in the speaker's POV).

Marking evidentiality in a way like Bulgarian just isn't that common among us on the forum (think of English: We hedge our bets with adverbs like "supposedly" or "reportedly", phrases like "it seems that..." or "...so he says" or a modal verb like "may" rather than doing unusual things to the verb). Even reported speech (i.e. recounting someone else's output/utterance) isn't marked by special conjugations (e.g. "I heard that she's retired". On its own I'm not suggesting skepticism or agreement).

As for myself, I've seen something like this only in Estonian, and even then I just read about it and never explored it in depth as it's beyond the ken of a beginner. In any case, what little you described for Bulgarian reminds me of only a little bit of Estonian's oblique (~ inferential) mood. Wikipedia has a brief list of languages which mark evidentiality. Bulgarian is listed as having four evidential terms: witness (non-subjective, non-renarrative), inferential (subjective, non-renarrative), renarrative (non-subjective, renarrative), dubitative (subjective, renarrative).

[Sol]

Wow, Tandem is great. Yesterday I found myself juggling multiple languages at once as I was talking to Russians and Koreans, occasionally switching to English and talking to my cousin in Bulgarian. Russian conversation isn't as hard as I'd have thought, texting anyway. I understand almost anything.

The Russian past tense confuses me because it looks like the Bulgarian inferential mood.

говорил (RU): he spoke
говорил (BG): he spoke (but you didn't witness it yourself or aren't certain about it)

So listening to the Russian past tense always sounds like someone's retelling something they're not sure about. I wonder if Russian has a similar tense/mood.

From what I remember of Russian, one doesn't express his/her uncertainty or mere retelling of something second-hand through a distinct set of conjugations (i.e. renarrative or inferential mood). If I have it right in Russian, you could make your uncertainty explicit with an adverb (e.g. this example with вроде) or just phrase things in a way that suggests enough of your uncertainty (skepticism even?) to the interlocutor(s) (e.g. Я не уверен, сможем ли мы это сделать - note the use of the particle ли and that сможем is the present/future indicative 1st person plural form of смочь - no renarrative or even imperative/subjunctive which at a real s t r e t c h is kinda-sorta like renarrative in describing an action that isn't real (observed?) in the speaker's POV).

Marking evidentiality in a way like Bulgarian just isn't that common among us on the forum (think of English: We hedge our bets with adverbs like "supposedly" or "reportedly", phrases like "it seems that..." or "...so he says" or a modal verb like "may" rather than doing unusual things to the verb). Even reported speech (i.e. recounting someone else's output/utterance) isn't marked by special conjugations (e.g. "I heard that she's retired". On its own I'm not suggesting skepticism or agreement).

As for myself, I've seen something like this only in Estonian, and even then I just read about it and never explored it in depth as it's beyond the ken of a beginner. In any case, what little you described for Bulgarian reminds me of only a little bit of Estonian's oblique (~ inferential) mood. Wikipedia has a brief list of languages which mark evidentiality. Bulgarian is listed as having four evidential terms: witness (non-subjective, non-renarrative), inferential (subjective, non-renarrative), renarrative (non-subjective, renarrative), dubitative (subjective, renarrative).

We have that in Bulgarian too (and probably in every language):

Я не уверен, сможем ли мы это сделать (RU) = Аз не съм сигурен че можем да го направим (BG)

Though the inferential wouldn't be used in the present tense usually from what I've heard (I haven't studied BG grammar at all so I could be wrong, I'm just going off how I speak the language with my family).

This just reminds me how many tenses/moods and verb modifications exist in Bulgarian, which is what makes it really difficult despite there being no case system. Sometimes natives get confused explaining differences in the subtleties, how would a foreigner learn all that!

[Sol]

The ~는 것 principle is like the key to the Korean lock. It lets you write so many more sentences and is so essential, but I see why it was introduced so late into the lessons. It'd be so easy to get confused if you'd just learned it before or along with all the other hundreds of rules for ~은/는, ~을/를 etc.

However I'm starting to feel a bit discouraged. I still can't have basic conversations without consulting my notes and spending ages Google searching. It just makes me wonder whether I'll ever really get this language. Either way it's fun to study so I'll never give it up.

AH btw here's a good explanation of some tenses including ~던 and the differences.



Also, I was reminded today of a Bulgarian conspiracy website that my cousin read articles from years ago. By conspiracy I don't mean woo-woo simple tinfoil-hat stuff. This guy goes DEEP into stuff like astral projection, health, space, and yes things like 9/11. But it is extremely in depth; his articles are incredibly long and detailed. It's just entertaining to read and has lots of new and often complicated vocab that you won't meet regularly but will definitely flesh out your knowledge with. It's called Parallel Reality BG. I know not many people study Bulgarian but for those that do, enjoy the strangeness of this site!

[qeadz]

You are very correct there! Once you get the whole 는 것 'clause describing a noun' thing down, you'll find that many many grammatical principles use this.

Don't sweat not being able to write or speak correctly. It is really discouraging! I know this all too well from my own path in Korean. But just remember that it is the same for the majority of learners of the language! Many folk give up at the 4 - 6 month mark. I think this is a testament to the difficulty of the language.

I've done a *lot* of looking online - Reddit, Youtube, language forums and I'll tell you this: Every person who demonstrably is able to write or speak Korean well, having learned it from scratch as an adult, put in a massive amount of effort.

If you've read my log, you'll easily see that I was discouraged at multiple points. Once almost to the point of throwing in the towel. It really does feel like climbing Everest!

[Sol]

You are very correct there! Once you get the whole 는 것 'clause describing a noun' thing down, you'll find that many many grammatical principles use this.

Don't sweat not being able to write or speak correctly. It is really discouraging! I know this all too well from my own path in Korean. But just remember that it is the same for the majority of learners of the language! Many folk give up at the 4 - 6 month mark. I think this is a testament to the difficulty of the language.

I've done a *lot* of looking online - Reddit, Youtube, language forums and I'll tell you this: Every person who demonstrably is able to write or speak Korean well, having learned it from scratch as an adult, put in a massive amount of effort.

If you've read my log, you'll easily see that I was discouraged at multiple points. Once almost to the point of throwing in the towel. It really does feel like climbing Everest!

If this were a language I didn't have a real passion for I'd have given up by now, but I love it so much that it would be crazy to give up. I studied Spanish which is 100x easier and quicker to learn, and once I no longer had a reason to learn it (i.e school) I dropped it. This is why language wanderlust is so dangerous -- you seem enamoured by a language for a few weeks until it gets hard and your interest drops, you move on to the next language and so on and so on...

[qeadz]

... you seem enamoured by a language for a few weeks until it gets hard and your interest drops, you move on to the next language and so on and so on...

This may seem rather funny but a number of years ago during my first failed attempts to learn Korean, one of the stopping points for me was verb conjugation!

I was all good with 는 and 를 and basic sentence structure. Then I hit the lessons on verb conjugation and all the rules associated. It's not really a big obstacle at all, but it is the first obstacle (IMHO) one encounters which feels like its going to be a lot of effort.

Looking back now, its almost laughable that THAT caused me to shelve Korean for many months!

[Sol]

... you seem enamoured by a language for a few weeks until it gets hard and your interest drops, you move on to the next language and so on and so on...

This may seem rather funny but a number of years ago during my first failed attempts to learn Korean, one of the stopping points for me was verb conjugation!

I was all good with 는 and 를 and basic sentence structure. Then I hit the lessons on verb conjugation and all the rules associated. It's not really a big obstacle at all, but it is the first obstacle (IMHO) one encounters which feels like its going to be a lot of effort.

Looking back now, its almost laughable that THAT caused me to shelve Korean for many months!

I completely understand, I went through the same thing! I felt like the irregular verb conjugations were so confusing and just felt like I was drowning. I think it had something to do with still not being 100% comfortable with the Korean alphabet which led me to think it was more difficult than it actually is.

Thank heavens the verb conjugation is actually very simple, it's the endless amount of particles and structures you have to learn that makes it difficult. Imagine if cases and Spanish's subjunctive hell were thrown in the mix!

[Sol]

To cure my undying need to explore different languages (every week I become obsessed with a new language), I've turned a new notebook into my "wanderlust notebook". Every time I feel the urge to stray from my main languages, I'll spend half an hour on a new language. Usually that will be enough for me. Maybe by the time I've perfected my current languages I'll have a full notebook and can decide which language to study next based on how well I did/how much I enjoyed a certain language.

Also just discovered this nice resource with Russian texts with audio and English translation. Here I wrote some out and highlighted words I don't know. How does my Russian handwriting look?




So not bad, I can still get the gist without looking at a dictionary. My main issue is learning how to recall those words rather than passively understand them using my Bulgarian knowledge.

It'd be nice if I could find a larger selection. I should have bought more Russian books when I still worked near that foreign language bookstore, now I don't want to near it due to memories from my HeLLiSh EXPEriENCe old job.

EDIT: Guys guys, look at this hugeee collection of Russian books (free)!!

[jeff_lindqvist]

Also just discovered this nice resource with Russian texts with audio and English translation.
[...]
EDIT: Guys guys, look at this hugeee collection of Russian books (free)!!

Thanks a lot for these resources!