Xmmm's Log ...

[Xmmm]

But I was talking about progress bars. You don't even use them.

Progress bars only help when you're travelling from Los Angeles to Bakersfield. My situation is more like this:

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[smallwhite]

But I was talking about progress bars. You don't even use them.

Progress bars only help when you're travelling from Los Angeles to Bakersfield. My situation is more like this:

I mean I was not talking about you.

[Xmmm]

Progress in all categories. With the L-R experiment for Russian, I can't help but wonder if I wouldn't be better off watching TV instead. It's hard to know. I can't compare Russian with Italian. I guess if my Turkish is better than my Russian a year from now I made a mistake.

Russian

So far so good with August 1914. Two chapters a week does take up all the allotted study time I have for Russian, so good thing it's both listening and reading.

Italian

Well, I was going to start Inside the World's Toughest Prisons. Somehow I didn't get there and ended up on Dirty Money, and now somehow I'm starting Wild Wild Country about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's time in Oregon. There's a dearth of TV dramas at the moment so all these documentaries came at the right time.

I had my second Italki lesson -- went well. My time for Italian is breaking down into six hours of TV and one hour of italki each week.

Turkish

Now that I've got my owl and have got a tentative hold on rudimentary grammar and 2000 vocab words, it's time to plunge into Diriliş: Ertuğrul big time. With my current approach (scene by scene Turkish->English->Turkish) I could watch 3 episodes a week, which means that one series could take me a year to finish. Of course, that assumes no progress. If I start picking Turkish up the episodes will go by faster.

These 150 episode Turkish programs are so great compared to what I have to scrounge for in Italian or Russian (six episodes here, eight episodes there).

[Expugnator]

Not willing to let you fall into despair, but I started Russian in November 2012 (this after having dabbled for a while six years before) and I've seen language after language surpass it or equate to it or at least just feel more"learnable" than it ever since.

With Russian, all other languages feel like fun and Russian being where the real (attempt for) learning takes place.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I have a couple of those languages which just feel impossible to get anywhere with. One of them is Mandarin and one is Russian. It wasn't until I (re-)discovered Ilya Frank's site a while ago and started reading a few short stories every day that I enjoyed the process. It really got easier and easier. When I recently discovered A Taste of Russian, I realized that I could actually follow the podcasts pretty OK.

Xmmm, I've "read" Dan Brown in Russian, I've used old textbooks over and over, I've listened to random interviews on Echo Moskvy - some years ago (2008? 2009?) I listened to Russian for one hour per day. Now (nine, ten years later?) I'm starting to feel that there may at least be a tiny chance that I'll get anywhere with the language. I can understand what I read and hear.

Don't give up.

[smallwhite]

Good to see how the new log title has promptly attracted praise and encouragement. Wise choice!

[Xmmm]

Russian

I'm finally getting some traction with August 1914 now that I cut my chapter 'reps' from 7 to 2. I'm on chapter 8. It's a little hard to believe L-R is doing anything useful. I'm now just doing L2/R2, followed by L2/R1. Of course the R1 makes it feel like comprehension has improved, but ... really, are any of the gains permanent? It seems doubtful, but I want to believe.

Russian does have the benefit of thousands of giant novels and plenty of audio books, so if L-R actually works it's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too situation. The alternative to L-R for me would be to go through all the B1 readers I can find, followed by all the B2 ones, etc. And stick with Russian TV on the side--but it's hard to watch a lot of TV in three languages. I'd prefer to use my TV points for Turkish, and have Italian and Russian graduate to L-R.


Italian

I've had three Italki lessons. The tutor provides copious notes of what I did wrong. I'm trying to group the errors by theme, looking for consistent grammatical mistakes. Then I try to 'play' those areas on Clozemaster Pro.

Watching Dirty Money and want to check out Rotten as well.

Turkish

I'm supposed to be watching Diriliş: Ertuğrul. I learn cool vocabulary there like 'veba' (plague), which I'll never forget because the bad guys chortle so much every time they say it. And the story is simple, despite the palace intrigue.

But ... I'm hooked on 46 Yok Olan. I started watching it with English subtitles, followed by Turkish, etc. then just decided the heck with it. English subtitles spoil the mystery, so now I watch with no subtitles. Of course this lowers my comprehension to about 3%, but I have a feeling as long as I don't understand it, it will remain somewhat fresh -- so maybe I can watch these episodes multiple times.

[Xmmm]

Couple things about my new favorite show 46 Yok Olan:

1. They re-use 5 minutes of footage from Episode #1 in Episode #2. Only in Episode #2, the footage has an entirely different meaning.
2. They show the main character reading a letter out loud that he wrote to himself but doesn't remember. This scene is more than 5 minutes long and contains references to character developments which the viewers were not shown. So we have to decide whether to trust the "unreliable narrator" who wrote the letter or not.
3. They show flashback sequences of things that haven't happened yet.


It's mesmerizing. I feel like I'm watching TV from the future ...

[Xmmm]

Italian

I got on a reading kick, trying to hit 5000 pages total by the end of this year. I guess I was inspired by watching Hitler's Circle of Evil on Netflix, because I picked up the Italian version of Ian Kershaw's Hitler: A Biography, which weighs in at about 1000 pages. I'm roughly 200 pages into it with about 90% comprehension, so non-fiction certainly must be easier than fiction.

I'd like to find more non-fiction in kindle form, but am not seeing much on Amazon, alas. I search on books, choose the Italian language, click on kindle edition ... a few classic novels in translation and then a lot of obscure stuff that has zero to one reviews each.

I was going to start watching part 2 of La casa di carta, but disaster struck. Part 2 was not dubbed into Italian. Don't know what's up with that. I can see the English version was given the incredibly maladroit title of "Money Heist", which is so awkward sounding it's hard to believe a native speaker came up with it.


Russian

With August 1914, I'm off in the woods somewhere east of Prussia. I'm getting the gloomy feeling I'll finish the L-R experiment with the conclusion that L-R doesn't work for me.

One interesting side effect of the L-R experiment is that I've become drawn towards graded readers that are written at my (8 to 10 year old) reading level. I have a copy of Человек-амфибия simplified to the B1 level waiting for me.



Turkish

I'm (probably) wasting time with 46 Yok Olan. I've gone back to Turkish subtitles and am actually understanding more than a month ago. Maybe I'm at 10-20% comprehension now. I hit the pause button and look up words a lot. Turkish does sound "cleaner" to me that Russian. Even if Turkish grammar is alien to English grammar, the characters speak in relatively full sentences with fixed word order and clear word boundaries. Whereas the omitted subjects, random word order, general laconic style, and blurriness of Russian still throws me after all this time.

This show is ... really weird. Episode 8 turned into a black comedy, which I didn't expect. A lot of the actions of the protagonist I don't expect. Actually a lot of the other characters do surprising things too. Not so much acting out of character, as maybe the character wasn't what I thought it was. So much of TV is a paint-by-numbers exercise, but this show doesn't follow any rules that I can detect. I thought it was a psychological murder mystery at first, but the murders are piling up and there's no mystery about them. I guess the mystery is what happened to the girl in the coma, and the way they've dragged that out for 9 episodes now is amazing. Highly recommended--still!--to any Turkish learners.

[Glossy]

Whereas the omitted subjects, random word order, general laconic style, and blurriness of Russian still throws me after all this time.

Perhaps you already know this, but word order isn't random in Russian. It's just largely used for different purposes than in English. You can use it to emphasize some words at the expense of others. Or to give sentences an archaic or folksy feeling.