Military historian's corner - EN, HE, ZH, AR, sometimes RU, FR and DE

[cjareck]

I have just finished the last of the texts which were due to 28th February I can breathe with fresh air now! This state surely will not last long, unfortunately.

Hebrew
I managed to keep the ratio of 28 new cards daily. There are 112 unseen cards (with those which are due for Today - I didn't study yet). I prepared the audio for the 29th lesson. After a rough estimate, I can say that it will take me about a week to make and review all the cards from this lesson. I will start probably at the beginning of May.
I still have motivation for the language! But the road ahead is still long...

I also had one LE since my last entry. As always, I enjoyed it very much. I can't measure the progress of my Hebrew between weeks, but when I look at the first ones, I see a tremendous improvement in my speaking. Not only my confidence but also my abilities. My LEPS have also developed their skills a lot.

Other
I limit myself only to my old cards in Anki in Arabic. I have to finish the FSI Hebrew first.
I received my text in German after corrections by an editor and had to explain 2 or 3 fragments. So it was not bad in case of understanding, but when I look at the changes history - it was heavily rewritten.
I practice English, and probably I will be writing some three academic texts this in this language during this year. That will surely be a massive text production exercise for me!
I am thinking also about improving my French. At this time I can't decide whether it should be FSI or DLI. Because of the military vocabulary, I consider the latter to be more attractive to me.

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At the end of this post, I would like to wish all my Readers Happy Easter!

[cjareck]

I have just finished 28th lesson of FSI Hebrew. I decided to speed up a little, and during the last two days I made 42 new cards instead of 28, so I finished it one day earlier.

According to a rough estimate - 29th will need about 150 cards and the 30th about 200 (I thought it would be 300), so it seems to be possible to finish them in May. If only I will have time - I have some students who prepare their m.a. and b.a. thesis under my supervision. It is sometimes hard and time-consuming work to read and correct their chapters

[cjareck]

I decided to show some of my Anki statistics, inspired by Jeff's language log (edit: I corrected the link)

MSA:
Notes: 529
Cards: 2919
Repetitions total: 26976
Time of repetitions total: 54 hours
Age of the deck: days 746 (605 days of learning)

Hebrew:
Notes: 1477
Cards: 7472
Repetitions total: 83392
Time of repetitions total: 206 hours
Age of the deck: days 745 (663 days of learning)

Russian:
Notes: 137
Cards: 299
Repetitions total: 2960
Time of repetitions total: 12 hours
Age of the deck: days 752 (466 days of learning)

Mandarin: (I started learning it for fun some time ago, but who knows maybe it will gain priority someday )
Notes: 702
Cards: 767 (but 562 of them are suspended - they have to be changed into my style cards)
Repetitions total: 21403
Time of repetitions total: 37 hours
Age of the deck: 1384 days (1141 days of learning)

You can easily see the importance of Hebrew in my learning schedule. The Mandarin deck is the oldest one because it includes a lot of old-style cards. I switched others to the new ones about two years ago. Hebrew is the youngest because it was the biggest and the decision to abandon 4699 cards was not easy. The deck is still there but is suspended. It is 2060 days old and has 1207 learning days.

I finished adding Anki cards of the 29th lesson and hopefully I will finish them by the end of April which will be one month ahead of the planned schedule! The weather allows me to ride a bike so I have time for listening

[StringerBell]

CJARECK!!!!

I wanted to recommend a few youtube channels since you are really into historical military "stuff". These are some of my husband's favorite channels (he's a competitive shooter) which I also watch sometimes. The first 2 are C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons.They recently did a collaboration called "Project Lightening" (a 7 part series which I just watched) where they were able to get the light machine guns used in World War 1 and they set up a series of tests to compare them and understand their strengths and weakness. They have a ton of other really interesting videos. There is also InRange; one of the main guys from InRange is also on Forgotten Weapons.

I just watched a series on Forgotten Weapons about the British World War 1 food rations, where Ian (the creator of the channel) followed the wartime rations for 1 week and discussed in detail how it was different from every other country's rationing system. Most of the videos on this site are focused on..."forgotten" weapons, but many of them are war-related in some way.

C&Rsenal channel:


Forgotten Weapons channel:


I watched this recently on InRange and found it really interesting:

[StringerBell]

*It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: if you have any questions about terminology, I'm very happy to explain. Certain words would be unknown to most native English speakers unless they have experience with guns, so some things might be confusing (for example: "the action" refers to the trigger assembly/mechanism > basically everything that is connected to the trigger and moves inside the gun when you pull the trigger).

[cjareck]

CJARECK!!!!

I wanted to recommend a few youtube channels since you are really into historical military "stuff". These are some of my husband's favorite channels (he's a competitive shooter) which I also watch sometimes. The first 2 are C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons.They recently did a collaboration called "Project Lightening" (a 7 part series which I just watched) where they were able to get the light machine guns used in World War 1 and they set up a series of tests to compare them and understand their strengths and weakness. They have a ton of other really interesting videos. There is also InRange; one of the main guys from InRange is also on Forgotten Weapons.

I gain my listening in American English by watching crime shows. I had a little trauma after watching some documentaries on Discovery Channel when I was single (up to 14 years ago). The mistakes of the original were often multiplied by awful translation. The example that I still remember was "Operacja Yellow". I had to figure out what that actually was. So after reverse translating into English I received "Operation Yellow." The next step was to go back to German, and everything was clear: "Fall Gelb"

I watched Intro of "Project Lightening". It seems very interesting since they can actually shoot the guns and the experience gained by them is priceless. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be myself if I would not have some critical remarks to that. First - they mixed automatic rifles with light machineguns. ARs are lighter and served little different purposes than light MGs. Second - they do not look (not at least in the intro) what the instructions and drills for the weapons were. You have to know the purpose of the tool to be able to rate how good it is.
The last thing is more detailed - they said that bipod of MG 08/15 was moved towards the muzzle during modifications in the second world war (about 22:40), but this surely happened earlier. I found a photo from a book from 1932 where as far as I can see, the bipod is already there.

I will surely continue watching the whole series. What concerns food rations - in German Army they had regulations of an amount of sawdust in bread.

[cjareck]

if you have any questions about terminology, I'm very happy to explain. Certain words would be unknown to most native English speakers unless they have experience with guns, so some things might be confusing (for example: "the action" refers to the trigger assembly/mechanism > basically everything that is connected to the trigger and moves inside the gun when you pull the trigger).

Thanks! I will surely ask in case of doubts. The terminology is one of the most crucial things I would like to acquire from that series. The second one is to see those guns in action

[StringerBell]

What concerns food rations - in German Army they had regulations of an amount of sawdust in bread.

In Italy they added cement dust to their bread...I guess I'd take the sawdust!

I was surprised at how good and well-designed the British rationing system was. Ian said that it was completely unlike any other country's system, and that during this period, people actually became healthier.

[cjareck]

Ian said that it was completely unlike any other country's system, and that during this period, people actually became healthier.

Well, it was not limited by the naval blockade. Do not forget it! In November I was in Vienna at the conference about the year 1918. One of the speeches was about hunger in Austria-Hungary. Photographs of children were really shocking. I can't find any on the web, but were similar to that of the siege of Leningrad (1941):

As a father of five, I was deeply moved by them. I can't imagine a situation when I haven't got food for my children...

[StringerBell]

Well, it was not limited by the naval blockade.

I remember it being mentioned in the introduction that England had some pretty big obstacles to deal with because at the time WWII started, 70% of their food was imported, and from as far away as New Zealand and the Americas/Carribbean. Since the Germans had a substantial submarine fleet that blockaded those routes, they had to figure out ways to deal with that. Certain things they just couldn't really get anymore (like onions and tomatoes, because those were mostly imported by boat, so those became very scarce). They restricted distilling wheat into hard alcohol so that they would have the wheat available to make bread. I might be making some mistakes in the details since I'm trying to recall what he said from memory.

My family was in Poland during WWII (Babcia was taken by the Nazis to work in Germany when she was 14 and couldn't really return to Poland after that) so I have heard some really terrible stories about what they went through there during and after the war. The rest of her family stayed in Poland, and as far as I know, Dziadzia's family were all killed in the Warsaw bombings. He was never willing to talk about it, so I don't know any details. The stories I heard about what it was like living under Russian Communist rule after the war from the relatives who stayed sound almost as bad as the conditions during the war under the Germans, but not having lived through it myself, I don't know if that's a fair statement to make; I'm interested to hear your take on life in Poland during WWII vs. afterward under USSR domination. I know these logs aren't supposed to get "political" so hopefully I haven't taken steered us toward a "forbidden" topic.