neofight78 returns from his Siberian exile? [RU, ES]

[Teango]

Как здорово - поздравляю!!!

[Arnaud]

deleted

[neofight78]

Спасибо Ребята!

I've decided to reward myself with what looks like a fun, interesting and hopefully useful book:

book1.jpg

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1483123243

[neofight78]

Of course far more important than exam results, is how well I did with my missions

• Buy a Russian SIM card / cheap phone.
• Go to a church service and speak to the Priest.
• Find a book on how to paint icons.
• Get my haircut.
• Go to the dentist.
• Find the local chess club and play some games of chess there.
• Travel to Akademgorodok and meet up with my tutor.

As you can see I didn't do very well. This was mainly due to lack of time, to help prepare for the exam I lined up quite a lot of lessons. 66 hours in two weeks in total! Plus I was pretty tired each day, by the second week I'd got into the habit of taking a 30 minute nap once the day's lessons had ended. The tiredness was partly due to not sleeping all that well and partly due no doubt to the mental strain of working with Russian 24/7. On the plus side, I don't have to think up many more missions for my next trip!

I think I've already written about all the missions I did, so here are just a few thoughts regarding the language learning aspect of it:

[*]Buy a Russian SIM card / cheap phone. - Here I was a bit lost and clearly I need to work on the specific terms related to this technology. I have a good conversational core, but I need to be a bit more systematic in trying to master some additional practical subject areas.

[*]Go to the dentist. - I knew a few bits of terminology here already, so I wan't too lost. I probably need to work on the booking of appointments as something to practice.

[*]Travel to Akademgorodok and meet up with my tutor. - This was pretty straightforward, in terms of asking people which bus was needed and buying tickets etc. This was mostly a case of getting over confidence issues. Which I have to say did improve over the course of the two weeks.

Just another small brain dump from the trip. More to come!...

[Ed1991]

Of course far more important than exam results, is how well I did with my missions

[list]
[*]Buy a Russian SIM card / cheap phone.

The complexity of buying a SIM card in Russia makes this quite an achievement in itself. The number of plans and options etc. I don't think I would want to do this without a native speaker with me!

[neofight78]

I'm afraid I can't claim to have done this unaided, in fact I only played a small part, hence my admission that this a subject area I need to work more on.

[Expugnator]

I think you have accomplished the most important missions, the other being mostly acessory! Next time you'll have to come up with more complicated ones to renew the list!

[neofight78]

Study wise I'm easing myself back into it. I don't even want to look at the size of the flashcard backlog. I started yesterday and today to get back into the routine of doing reviews. At the same time I'm trying to sleep more and get up earlier. I'm also hoping to get some exercise in as well. The goal being to find a bit more of a healthy balance to my routine.

In terms of planning my future studies, the main problem will be deciding what to focus and what to leave out. Sometimes it's like an all you can eat buffet, you think "I'll just have a little of that, ooh and a little of that, and just a tiny bit of this..." and before you know it you've accumulated a mountain of food. The exam result indicates listening comprehension should be a focus. I'm keen to carry on with the sub2srs as it's quite fun, but whether something more is needed I don't know. I'm also quite keen to give my vocabulary a big boost, as that's a cornerstone of comprehension. Grammar wise I'd like to be more active and fluent in my usage of participles and gerunds. One of my recent successes seems to be that I've finally overcome my problem with чтобы, so I'm eager to tackle a few more favourite/persistent mistakes. As discussed during my exam prep, some work on verb/case government would be very useful. I also want to be more consistent and systematic in exploring different subject areas, in an attempt to broaden out from what is a pretty decent conversational core. Expressions are also an area of interest, the book I ordered arrived today, so it will be fun to slowly work my way through that. As you can see the list is already growing too big!...

[neofight78]

My friend got married this weekend, so I'm still not back to serious study. I did manage to get a decent number of flashcards reviews done today, but apparently that was still 2459 reviews short! So it'll take a while to clear that backlog. Hopefully this week I shall be in more of a routine and will be able to put a decent size dent in that figure.

For those who've not yet noticed there is a new season on Нюхач аvailable, so I've started watching that today:



I've started creating some cards from the book of idioms I bought. I'm basically scanning in the entries from the book and blanking out the Russian phrase. I'm then adding the phrase, both text and audio, to the answer side of the card. The result looks something like this:

idiom1.png

We'll see how it goes, but the visual element should make it fun.

[neofight78]

Ok, so my studies are almost back into full swing. The flashcard backlog is down to 613 cards now. I guess I will probably be fully caught up at the weekend. I've imported a couple of texts into LingQ so I can restart my reading tomorrow. I'll be working on the next chunk of Цвет Вольшебства and an article from a site which seems to be a favourite with Russian teachers Школа Жизни.

There's some half finished grammar stuff left over from before the exam that I want to finish off, but I'll wait to my grammar deck is back under control before getting to work on that.

I'm also continuing to watch a little bit of Нюхач each day. The plots seem to be more complicated in this series and there's more of an arching story line as well.

On his log Ed1991 mentioned the film "О чём говорят мужчины" which reminded me about "Квартет И" and their series of videos "Мужской словарь". We used one of their videos in one of the lessons at the language school in Novosibirsk, I might try using some of their videos for listening practice, although perhaps the level is a little too easy for me, we'll see... To carry on the marriage theme here's their video on that subject:



You can see the full list of videos here