Xmmm's Log ...

[Xmmm]

Italian

I'm listening to La tregua and trying to finish reading Cristo si è fermato a Eboli this long weekend.

I bought Essential Italian Grammar by Olga Ragusa. I guess I'll read through that three or four times and finish my Practice Makes Perfect workbook and then declare myself an expert on Italian grammar, lol. At least in the future when people tell me I'm misusing the passato remoto, I'll know what they mean.

Tutoring continues. We ran out of day-to-day conversational material, so the tutor is coming armed with a prompt now, which is fine.

Russian

Хождение по мукам -- This ended up being a great show. There was a bit of slump in the middle but it finished strong.

My new kindle came and I can confirm the Russian-English dictionary is not great, but is much more convenient than typing in Cyrillic on my phone with my thumb. The resolution is also a lot better which is great for my tired eyes.

I remember reading somewhere that non-fiction is easier than fiction, and first person fiction is easier than third person fiction. This has certainly been my experience.

The Empire Must Die is a great book to start off with, because it's 970 pages divided into 2 or 3 page vignettes. Some of them I don't understand very well, others I have very good comprehension even without looking up words. My favorite "character" so far has been Iliodor, the mad "lapsed hieromonk" who got out in time and ended up as a janitor in New York City. He's my favorite because he went around calling Tolstoy the Antichrist.

I've also downloaded all of The Gulag Archipelago. I spot checked the first chapter. It's clearly more difficult than the book I'm reading now, and my reading will have to be more semi-intensive than just extensive, but -- it's not as difficult as Russian fiction. No "glistening leaves", etc.

Turkish

Turkish is a language, similar to Russian, where the Duolingo course just doesn't do enough for you. I could do the Duolingo Italian course and go straight into native content (with some difficulties but all the same). That's not possible with Turkish.

I'm still floundering around at how to proceed. I want to just watch 1000 hours of Turkish TV. I've watched maybe 100 hours so far and have picked up set phrases and "homicide bureau", "suspect", "police station", etc. But I don't feel like I have a big enough nucleus of known words to really get the ball rolling with extensive listening to a show for adults.

So, I think I'm going to plow through the FSI course. I'm on lesson 10 of 59 at the moment. I'll work through the lessons, then replay them a few times in the car. Maybe finish it by December, and then start watching TV for real (although I will still watch some even with low comprehension as I find Behzat Ç. addictive). Behzat Ç., 46 Yok Olan, Ezel, Vatanim Sensin -- I have like 5 years of TV viewing lined up if I could just understand half of what they were saying ...

[StringerBell]

Hey, I just noticed that you posted on the desert island thread that you've never been able to find podcasts in your TLs that you like. Have you by any chance tried the Italian serial "Veleno"? It's free to download through iTunes. If I remember correctly, there are 7 episodes, each ~1/2 hour long, and if you go to the website, there are transcripts for each episode (though I doubt you'd need them at this point). Maybe you already listened to it and it wasn't your thing, but if not, I highly recommend it. After that podcast series I haven't yet found anything even remotely as good.

[Xmmm]

Italian

La tregua. I don't know, this was probably a good book. Listening to it presented me with various difficulties, though. It's really a travelogue -- kind of an accidental set of adventures while Levi is a guest/prisoner of the Soviet Army after World War 2. As such, there's no plot and not a ton of action. Just listening to it, the events drifted in and out of focus. Levi, who could speak German, is warned not to speak any German as it could lead to getting killed in various liberated areas. People tend not to believe that blonds can be Italian, or that Italians can be Jews. There's a red faced guy with eyes like an owl who keeps popping up and seems to have some significance but I can't tell what it was. There's a fair amount of German and Russian, spoken with an Italian accent, which really messed with my brain. Basically, my comprehension was lower on this book than it's been on others. I don't know if I was bored, or distracted or the language was more difficult. Have to listen to it again in a few months. Comprehension was no higher than 60%. But partly it was a problem of paying attention.

I'm pretty burnt out on literature, so for my next read I picked up the 900 page Mani pulite, a journalistic information dump about "Tangentopoli", which was some big corruption scandal in Italy in the 1990s. On the one hand, the language itself is not too difficult (non-fiction vs fiction). On the other hand, I'm stumped by a few things since I know nothing about Italian politics or the Italian legal system. Apparently, there are tangenti which is kind of the overall category of bribes, but then they get broken down into categories like the bustarella, the mazzetta (my dictionary translates it as 'hammer' but it seems to be a mandatory 10% bribe on the value of a contract that you pay when you win it), and so on. The book gets into Falcone and Borsellino, and I already saw Borsellino, the 57 Days so I have some vague familiarity with the subject, but there's a lot of nuance. I guess that's what the 900 pages are for. There's also a blizzard of acronyms for Italian political parties and government agencies. Comprehension is down to 70% as I learn tons of jargon.

Russian

Казнить нельзя помиловать -- This show is not as good as Ленинград 46, but it's still pretty good overall. I think Дмитрий Паламарчук is kind of one-dimensional and forgettable, but Мария Кожевникова is capable of displaying a wide range of emotions, which is good since she plays a normal woman who just wants a quiet normal life and to forget the war, but through circumstances is drawn into a life as a Death Wish style vigilante. The flashbacks to World War 2 are unconvincing -- everybody is crawling through swamps in uniforms that look they just came from the dry cleaners. But the main story in gangland Leningrad is good. I'm wondering if some of the sets were recycled from Leningrad 46 as the colonel's office and the farmer's market look awfully familiar. Comprehension is trending above 50%.

I also downloaded and read the Red Kalinka version of Anna Karenina. I find these Red Kalinka graded readers interesting because they have audio. I can read the book on the weekend and then listen to it again in the car. Next week I'll try to do A Hero of Our Time in B1-B2 format.

81% finished with The Empire Must Die. My reading has really noticeably improved as I've gone through this book. There was a whole section psycho-analyzing Lenin -- how he was a loser and outcast in Russian society, and a loser and outcast in Switzerland, and how the common psychological self-defense there is to convince yourself that you're misunderstood, that you have a great mission, and that you're making an enormous personal sacrifice for the good of humanity, etc. And that Lenin was a self-hypnotizer par excellence. I read three or four pages of that and just flew through it without looking up a word. It was great. I'm really looking forward to finishing and calling this the first book I really read (not deciphered, not parallel read, etc.) in Russian. Comprehension is about 70%.

Turkish

FSI unit 14 .... bleh ...

[StringerBell]

Just found a new Italian podcast series that seems promising. Have you heard of Dylan Dog? Not sure if it's your thing, but it was wildly popular in Italy in the '80s/'90s as a comic. Dylan Dog is a Noir/Antihero who investigates supernatural stuff. There are like 60 podcast episodes for free through iTunes. I listened to the first one, and it was pretty good - different people read lines as the characters and they use sound effects; kind of reminds me of those old 1940s radio series (no, I'm not that old, but my dad used to play them when I was a kid).

[Xmmm]

Italian

I'm getting frustrated with my crappy spoken Italian. I have some grammar weaknesses but have been slowly improving there. The problem is mostly lack of active vocabulary and the tendency to break everything down into simple declarative sentences to reduce the chance of failure. Maybe an hour a week isn't enough? But it's all I can do, especially as I need to go find a Russian tutor next month ...

Started Season 2 of Pugno di ferro. I would not say the quality of fighting has improved. I would say that the average quality of the fighting has improved. They've gotten rid of the clownishly bad stuff and kept the mediocre stuff. I miss Harold though.

Russian

I finished Империя Должен Умереть. Ура! I hereby promote myself to self-assessed B2 in reading.

Архипелаг ГУЛАГ is going to be more difficult, but it's not that bad. I'm about 50 pages into it with another 2000 or so to go.

Turkish

My FSI dreams are fading. It's just so boring!

So I'm back to watching Behzat Ç. I'm going to try to figure out a way to study that. Netflix has Turkish subtitles that are closed captioning quality, so I've got those turned on, and I pause the show periodically and look up a few words:

dangalak -- halfwit
izlemek -- to spy on
kavga -- fight
katil -- killer
jilet -- razor blade
tehdit etmek -- to threaten

plus several words that get bleeped so I won't repeat them here.

[Expugnator]

Russian

I finished Империя Должен Умереть. Ура! I hereby promote myself to self-assessed B2 in reading

That's more than I got in 7 years! There's no point in having Failure at the title anymore! Maybe we should switch or log's descriptions?!

[Xmmm]

Russian

I finished Империя Должен Умереть. Ура! I hereby promote myself to self-assessed B2 in reading

That's more than I got in 7 years! There's no point in having Failure at the title anymore! Maybe we should switch or log's descriptions?!

I can't take the pressure of having to fail every week, so I agree to the name change.

In your 7 years of Russian, though, you put in -- what? 300 hours? And you have something like B1 (modestly estimated) receptive skills?

In my 3 years of Russian, I've put in 1700 hours and my report card is like:

Reading: B2
Listening: B1+
Speaking: A2
Writing: A2-

So I guesstimate it will take 4000 hours to reach C1 receptive and B2 productive ... and there just has to be a better way (that doesn't involve flashcards and grammar, lol) ...

By way of comparison my 1000 hours of Italian has resulted in:

Reading: B2+
Listening: B2
Speaking: B1+
Writing: B1-

So clearly I should have stayed in the Cat 1 pool ...

[StringerBell]

In my 3 years of Russian, I've put in 1700 hours and my report card is like:

Reading: B2
Listening: B1+
Speaking: A2
Writing: A2

I'm interested to know a time break down for those same categories. Can you estimate how many of those 1700 hours were spent reading, listening, speaking, and writing?

I'm asking because when I get frustrated that I've not made big improvements in a certain area, I usually realize it's because I didn't spend much time practicing that specific skill. I'd be willing to bet you've spend far more time reading and listening than speaking and writing.

[Xmmm]

In my 3 years of Russian, I've put in 1700 hours and my report card is like:

Reading: B2
Listening: B1+
Speaking: A2
Writing: A2

I'm interested to know a time break down for those same categories. Can you estimate how many of those 1700 hours were spent reading, listening, speaking, and writing?

I'm asking because when I get frustrated that I've not made big improvements in a certain area, I usually realize it's because I didn't spend much time practicing that specific skill. I'd be willing to bet you've spend far more time reading and listening than speaking and writing.

Grammar:100 Reading:790 Listening:750 Speaking:50 Writing:10

I'm satisfied with my grammar, speaking, and writing given how much time I've devoted to them. It's mostly the listening that frustrates me. I can understand 70% or more of native Italian TV dramas, versus 50% of native Russian TV dramas. Although, truth be told, the breakdown of my 1000 Italian hours would be:

Grammar:50 reading:250 listening:665 Speaking:30 Writing:5

So in relative terms, I've done far more listening in Italian than Russian ... maybe that explains it ...

[StringerBell]

Grammar:100 Reading:790 Listening:750 Speaking:50 Writing:10

I'm satisfied with my grammar, speaking, and writing given how much time I've devoted to them. It's mostly the listening that frustrates me. I can understand 70% or more of native Italian TV dramas, versus 50% of native Russian TV dramas. Although, truth be told, the breakdown of my 1000 Italian hours would be:

Grammar:50 reading:250 listening:665 Speaking:30 Writing:5

So in relative terms, I've done far more listening in Italian than Russian ... maybe that explains it ...

At this point, I'm about even in terms of how much time I've spent between Italian and Polish, and like you, Italian is by far easier for me in terms of listening, reading, and speaking; there's no comparison. Whenever I'm tempted to feel frustrated that my progress is far slower with Polish, I remind myself that Slavic languages are a Category 4 for a reason; they are more distant and they just take way longer. You really can't expect that your progress will be equal between a Cat 1 and a Cat 4 language.

Plus, 750 hours for listening in Russian vs. 665 hours listening in Italian - those numbers are pretty close. For your listening comprehension in Russian to be equivalent to your listening comprehension in Italian, I'd expect to see something like 2,000-2,500 hours listening in Russian to 665 hours listening in Italian. So I think you're actually doing really well.