neofight78 returns from his Siberian exile? [RU, ES]
Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 12:30 am
Hey all!
As this is not the start of my journey here's a little background:
I've been studying Russian for about 3 years (6 months + several years gap + 2.5 years). I passed the TRKI-1 exam last summer, and I'm round about the B2 level now (more on this shortly). I started off on Rosetta Stone (yes I was naive, but actually I think the product gets a bad rap). I then progressed to taking lessons, flashcards and LingQ. Eventually Rosetta Stone got dropped, but actually I am grateful for the good start it gave me and the safe environment it gives for the complete language learning newbie. I shall no doubt flesh out the details of this brief description as the log progresses...
This week:
The main news is that I've booked myself in for a 2-week course + TRKI-2 exam in October with these guys: http://www.exlinguo.com/en/russian-course/russia/novosibirsk. I'm pretty excited about going to Russia for the first time and can't wait. My tutor lives in Novosibirsk and I'm looking forward to meeting up with her too. She's been such an immense help along the way. However, I think a bit closer to the date I'll get slightly more stressy about the exam. Whilst generally speaking I take exams in my stride, it's a somewhat artificial scenario which will test my knowledge in a more academic than a practical way. Reading materials will be using a different style of Russian than what I'm used to, and I'll need to talk and write with structure rather than using my usual conversational style overflowing with tangents and random humour. The other slightly scary prospect will be facing scenarios where I *need* Russian for a practical reason to communicate with people who don't care that I'm a language learner. I definitely want to make sure I use the evenings and weekends to take myself away from the classroom and out of my comfort zone, but at the same time it's a little bit scary.
In terms of study, as I am preparing for the exam, I'm taking a more structured approach than normal (wayward really is the key word in the log's name). I got two practice letters written, and some grammar exercises done, all in addition to my normal non exam orientated study routine. The back end of the week has seen my motivation drop off, which is unusual for me. Most likely it is down to far too much sleep deprivation. But anyhow, this is why I'm sat here drinking a beer and writing a log instead of studying
Normally, I do quite well on grammar exercises (although of course it's a different matter to actually internalise the material). But this week I got a lot of the answers wrong. Which is not actually a bad thing, as it shows that I'm working on something that well, err... needs working on! Impersonal / passive constructions seem to be a weak point (among many others). To be honest with my subs2srs experiment (sorry, that's going to have to be another post), I had already noticed this. The upside is, that I think if I can manage to get on top of this area of grammar, I'm going to be a lot more competent at dealing with native materials, which is what I'm intending to do more and more of now that I've got a fairly decent grounding in the language.
As this is not the start of my journey here's a little background:
I've been studying Russian for about 3 years (6 months + several years gap + 2.5 years). I passed the TRKI-1 exam last summer, and I'm round about the B2 level now (more on this shortly). I started off on Rosetta Stone (yes I was naive, but actually I think the product gets a bad rap). I then progressed to taking lessons, flashcards and LingQ. Eventually Rosetta Stone got dropped, but actually I am grateful for the good start it gave me and the safe environment it gives for the complete language learning newbie. I shall no doubt flesh out the details of this brief description as the log progresses...
This week:
The main news is that I've booked myself in for a 2-week course + TRKI-2 exam in October with these guys: http://www.exlinguo.com/en/russian-course/russia/novosibirsk. I'm pretty excited about going to Russia for the first time and can't wait. My tutor lives in Novosibirsk and I'm looking forward to meeting up with her too. She's been such an immense help along the way. However, I think a bit closer to the date I'll get slightly more stressy about the exam. Whilst generally speaking I take exams in my stride, it's a somewhat artificial scenario which will test my knowledge in a more academic than a practical way. Reading materials will be using a different style of Russian than what I'm used to, and I'll need to talk and write with structure rather than using my usual conversational style overflowing with tangents and random humour. The other slightly scary prospect will be facing scenarios where I *need* Russian for a practical reason to communicate with people who don't care that I'm a language learner. I definitely want to make sure I use the evenings and weekends to take myself away from the classroom and out of my comfort zone, but at the same time it's a little bit scary.
In terms of study, as I am preparing for the exam, I'm taking a more structured approach than normal (wayward really is the key word in the log's name). I got two practice letters written, and some grammar exercises done, all in addition to my normal non exam orientated study routine. The back end of the week has seen my motivation drop off, which is unusual for me. Most likely it is down to far too much sleep deprivation. But anyhow, this is why I'm sat here drinking a beer and writing a log instead of studying
Normally, I do quite well on grammar exercises (although of course it's a different matter to actually internalise the material). But this week I got a lot of the answers wrong. Which is not actually a bad thing, as it shows that I'm working on something that well, err... needs working on! Impersonal / passive constructions seem to be a weak point (among many others). To be honest with my subs2srs experiment (sorry, that's going to have to be another post), I had already noticed this. The upside is, that I think if I can manage to get on top of this area of grammar, I'm going to be a lot more competent at dealing with native materials, which is what I'm intending to do more and more of now that I've got a fairly decent grounding in the language.