Sleepless in Seattle/the wonderful world that is my life (did I actually refer to “my life” as wonderful? Wow, just wow!). This post is more about pursuing LotR and Russian than most of you may be interested in reading.
Some of it may have been mentioned in previous posts. You’ve been warned. Short version: “Time, time, time. see what's become of me, While I looked around for my possibilities.” – Paul Simon Throwing money at language learning
isn’t necessarily throwing it away,
but it sure might be. Thinking out a process beforehand and gathering materials as you’ve defined your process
still doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best bang for your buck. While having and watching the movie with accurate Russian audio and subtitles will be enormously helpful with developing my listening comprehension and learning dialog,
it will probably be mostly useless for learning descriptive prose from the book.
Duh!Longer version:I’ve mentioned before my fascination with Lord of the Rings (LotR) and the “pie in the sky” ambition of reading a translation of it in Russian (
by Xmas 2018 no less). That’s actually the primary impetus behind picking up Russian again believe it or not. (All you Russian classicists standing in the back of the room laughing at me, put your whips and chains away,
please.
My interest in
marrying Russian and LotR is what it is)… I
have adjusted my timetable as I've encountered things I hadn't considered when developing my plan.
I started with a
very vague idea about how to (re-)learn the little Russian I once thought I knew and have proceeded, over the last few weeks, to actually refine and map out a plan.
Sorta jumped right in and ordered LotR in Russian off the Net and then waited
and waited and waited for it to arrive. Only later did I actually find it online with help from someone on this forum (
thanks Arnaud). So, I COULD have saved myself some money… Sigh. I also came up with the
brilliant idea that watching the
movie dubbed in Russian and
with Russian subtitles would help with the reading. Um, yeah – kinda over-looked the fact that I can’t actually READ the Russian subtitles
at this point – will I ever be able to for that matter?
Once the movie arrived, from Vladivostok no less, it was, of course, a Region 5 disc and the US, where I am, is Region 0. No problem – get a universal/region-free DVD player off fleaBay, right? That took 2 purchases due to poor item descriptions on
fleaBay. And more time. Then, the unit arrived with a "universal" remote that wouldn’t access the menu to show the captions! Wtf?!? Sigh and re-buy. And wait... In the end, I have a Universal/region-free DVD player AND a set of LotR discs that have
both English AND Russian voices and subtitles – and you can choose any pairing or no subs (I may have written that in a previous post).
One of the things that stands out
now is the realization that, as much as I progress in understanding the dialogs in the movie,
that may not help much with the majority of the book which is filled with descriptive prose (at least in the English edition, in Russian, who knows at this point?). But, I know the story well, and Peter Jackson (the writer/director) has stuck with the book’s dialogs pretty closely according to both his own interviews and from what I recognize/know from watching the English language movie. So, I absolutely know and can follow the story with Russian audio even without subtitles of any kind.
How? Mostly, I know and can audibly identify the characters by their names, the camera directs my attention through the scenes in the plot, and I am actually
beginning to develop an ear for spoken Russian. Oh, they’re usually speaking much faster than I can comprehend for the most part, but I’m becoming able to discriminate between words – even more than in a few of the Glossika audio files despite massive repetitions of certain sentences there. This is improving notiveably with each re-play/viewing of the movie. And, for those who like word frequency lists, I’m picking out repetitive words and collocations in the dialogs. Also, and I’m not sure of the linguistic term, I hear, and see in subs, conversational fillers – the equivalents of erm, hmm….
Which I’ve learned to ignore.
That means that I should eventually be able to understand the dialogs.
Which still leaves learning all the vocabulary in the descriptive prose. Welcome to the wonderful world of Learning with Texts (LWT). So much faster than using paper dictionaries. And the changes in the colored text
show my progress, however slow that might be. And it IS slow, let me tell you.
I have no background knowledge of Russian word roots like I do with English (whether Latin-based or German-based). So, because Russian words make extensive use of prefixes, suffixes and intra-word spelling changes, what should be “I can figure this one out by dissecting it” becomes “add another totally new, unrelated to anything” form of a word to my list of unknown words – unless I magically recognize a case ending (a much longer, terribly sadistic learning curve there) and can then stick a note identifying the nominative form of the word in the LWT entry for that version of the word. So, LWT is currently a slog through
a linguistic Pripyat Marsh for sentences, paragraphs, and even pages on end.
Another “
threw money at the problem and didn’t solve it” realization was that I couldn’t view the movie on my PC as it was. My PC DVD player is a Region 1 player. Totally useless for playing a Region 5 DVD…
or is it? I found a couple of over-priced programs claiming to solve that problem, but I didn't like their reviews. And I’m cheap and not generally a risk-taker.
It turns out that
computer DVD players are DVD players are DVD players for the most part. In their firmware, there’s a setting that you can change to make it read/function with various Regional formats. Who knew?
Of course, there’s a catch. You can only change that setting so many times and then you can’t change it again. So, I could end up with a Region 5 DVD player in my computer that is useless for viewing Region 1 discs (99.99999% of what I own now or ever will own). Hmm… that sucks.
FleaBay to the rescue again. For the magnificent sum of $5 plus $5 shipping, I bought a used Region 1 DVD player and will promptly change the setting to make it a Region 5 player and leave it that way! Not much of a dent in my wallet and problem solved. Go me! Now I can rip both video and the audio track(s) and make Anki review cards from the srt/subtitle files.
Did I say I was slow? Um, I’m sure that I did. At least once, or is it twice? 3x maybe? Though I found subtitle files on the Net in both languages and I already own the English language discs and could make cards from the subtitle files, I didn’t have Russian dubs/audio of the whole movie and don't know how to extract snippets of video from DVDs.
So, now I have to learn how to use subs2srs because the Region 5 discs’ Russian audio and subtitles pair up pretty accurately from what I can tell. Others have extolled the befits of making cards this way. I hope to benefit from their experience.
As I’ve begun slogging my way through the Russian translation of the book, another of the things that slow me down is
trying to identify specific dialogs from the movie in the book itself (or vice versa). Unlike with English,
I can’t just scan/skim through the waterfall of page after page of Cyrillic characters and recognize this scene or that scene. So, trying to marry up LWT with specific book scenes/movie dialogs has been
difficult at best and mostly impossible overall to be honest. That’s quite disappointing. I was hoping to identify a scene whose dialog I would work on using the movie subtitles and then read “around” that scene’s dialog using LWT to learn/dissect the descriptive vocabulary. I mean, you can “see” the setting at Rivendell, for instance, when the Fellowship is first assembled. You KNOW what it looks like in your mind. Now all you need are the proper words describing it… perfect match, right?
Um,
I wish it was that easy for me.
So, I’m making progress, such as it is.
Small successes coming intermittently despite really thinking the process out – or I’d thought that I’d really thought the process out. (You don’t really know what you don’t know until you run up against it, ya know?)