Adventures in bad memory, Russian

[Arnaud]

I read that there are 6 translations in russian of LoTR. Which one do you use ?

[Teango]

I read that there are 6 translations in russian of LoTR. Which one do you use ?

Just look for the one with the hidden inscription: one translation to rule them all, one translation to find them, one translation to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them...

[drmweaver2]

For some reason, this wouldn't "post" in the wee hours of the morning... so references to "tomoorow morning" might be off... I'm not going to recheck it for that.
Let's see. Slow progress as "life" interfered most of the last few days.

Glossika reps - got behind, made up most of them while watching football. As these are the tail end Charlie reps (reviews) for the Level 1 program/set, I'm not too worried. No new vocab, just reviews and reinforcements. Doubling that up for a few days isn't bad. I'll be moving on to the Level 2 files in the middle of the week once I finish the 30th day of Glossika Level 1.
I'll also be adding a "scriptorium" session in the morning as part of an "active wave" to reinforce my listening/dictation/transcription skills - probably starting about GSM-B-501. I have no clue how long this will take each day. Max I'm allowing is an hour to to do the writing and then "grade/correct" it.

LWT - mostly still "front-loading" vocab via relatively easy, short texts for "bigger, better" more involved reading about a week to ten days from now. A sea of blue text (unknown words) isn't conducive to building confidence...lots of colored words indicating familiarity that is higher than known-level-3 is much better for my ego. This hasn't been happening at a consistent time or pace and that needs to change starting Wednesday (my first day with Glossika Level 2 [there's a relation between my Glossika reps and the LWT work, but it's definitely not obvious]).

Anki - I've been using Anki for a while now but not as effectively as I should. It's only been in the last couple of days that I became >85% comfortable with adding audio from various sources to my cards. Between Forvo, Google translate and various audio clips (extracted from YT vids, films and other sources via Audacity), I've now spent a number of hours updating (improving with audio clips) about 750 cards that are "active or waiting to be learned". Hours, I tell you... hours! Good thing it's semi-mindless work doing so. I had the aforementioned Glossika files playing through my earphones while working on this... Passive learning... who knows how much or how little I'll benefit from that.

From tomorrow onward, my schedule will include an hour each in the morning and afternoon of grammar study and exercises. I've settled on Terence Wade's grammar book and workbook. An additional hour in the afternoon will be spent using&listening to the Routledge Colloquial Russian audio files that I found online and downloaded. Getting used to hearing different voices and speech timings can't hurt. Additional vocabulary is also a foreseeable benefit.

So, my hand writing skills will be getting a real workout in comparison to what I've done thus far. I also spend at least 15 minutes a day on a typing trainer/tester using the Cyrillic keyboard but my speed's not increasing though my accuracy is now about as good as my QWERTY keyboarding is.

[drmweaver2]

If it's Tuesday, this must be the place to be!

I finished Glossika Level 1 today. Over 21,000 reps. I feel like I have >80% retention and understanding of >85% of the material. There are individual expressions/sentences that just don't stick as they aren't of interest, something I wouldn't normally say even in L1, or kinda don't make sense to me vocabulary-wise.

Tomorrow, I start Level 2.

I received 2 books from fleaBay in the mail today. One I am very disappointed with because it isn't what I was expecting. Russian Grammar by Terence Wade is more of a dense reference book, like might sit on a shelf and rarely be opened, than I expected after working a few days with the associated Russian Grammar Workbook by him. I had "settled on using it", as mentioned in my previous post, because of the Workbook. The reference boook simply doesn't lend itself to "working through" like the Workbook does. At least it wasn't expensive.

The other, Modern Russian 1 by Dawson, Bidwell and Humesky is a pretty nice textbook with lots of examples, explanations and exercises. Having found the associated audio files online, this is something I might start using soon because I now need to re-evaluate what grammar/text/workbook I'm going to be spending an hour or two a day working through. It's a toss-up between this book, Colloquial Russian and The RoutledgeNew Penguin Russian course/book. Having found all of them cheaply and/or the associated audio files online, it may just be a matter of flipping a coin and going with whatever the coin says (okay, a random number generated selection in Excel as I don't have any 3-sided coins). Um, maybe 4-sided as the FSI FAST course is also attractive to me.... decisions, decisions.

At various points in the past, I considered myself pretty PC/mini(midi)-computer-knowledgeable. I really did (including some $$big bucks$$ paid consultant work and "recognition by military awards"). But for some reason, manipulating the Anki deck setup and card/note designs (not inputting the data for or reviewing each card) continues to be an "exercise" for me! Seriously. I downloaded and installed multiple deck designs and played with them trying to decide what info and format I like for my cards. Should be pretty simple and straightforward, right? I mean, it's not an overly complicated question. So, how is it that I managed to spend 3 hours messing around with card design and am still not able to remember the sequence to get to the card edit popup without futzing around like a fish out of water? I recognize the screen I'm looking for when I find it, but I wind up opening multiple menus (and re-opening some of the wrong ones as many as 3 times!) before I finally get where I can edit the freakin' card design! :facepalm!!! Is this what the first stages of senility are like? If so, holy ****!

On the other hand, I did get in my handwriting practice (still looks like chicken scratches) and my Cyrillic typing practice by copying 3 pages of The Hobbit (probably should have been LotR but I wasn't thinking straight after my Anki frustrations) in each written form.

As a distraction (I meant, as a reward... yeah, yeah, that's the ticket! a reward!), I read a few threads on HTLAL about L-R, LWT and a few other concepts of interest. You guys and gals sure have explored the field and left gold nuggets lying all around! It's a pity I can't incorporate everything by osmosis!

Edited to correct "woould" to "wouldn't" -way up top. Doh!
Also corrected "Routledge Penguin" to "New Penguin Russian" course. Damn typos...

[drmweaver2]

Whew... Long day with a couple hours of "work" left to go. But I needed a break so here goes the day's entry.

Anki - hours and hours (again) fixing/modifying the deck(s) I want to use. Learning about the Cloze-whatever-it's-called design. Modifying/updating non-Cloze cards(notes? frigging confusing terms!) to a single this-is-what-I-want format. Combining decks and/or maling some of them subordinate to others. Deleting duplicated cards from multiple decks that are now combined but formerly had different design formats - that's the problem with using shared decks! And then, of course, having to actually do the Anki learn-and-review your cards thing. I think I finally have a handle on it.... only took me 30 days to get it "nearly correct".

I got my Glossika Level 2 started today!
I also did my handwriting and typing "exercises" this morning.

But the biggest time-sink today has been a YouTube video. Okay, I admit that I did watch more than one. But there was/remains a single video that is both grammatically and vocabularily over my head that I decided I SIMPLY HAD TO UNDERSTAND (or I'd be a total failure ). So, I've been making a side-by-side, Russian-English transcript. I'm sure that EVERYONE KNOWS YT actually has a feature that (sometimes) allows for a time-sync'ed transcript. But it actually sucks with this video. The YT-er actually hard-coded Russian captions into the video, which is cool. But the YT captions/transcript you can "open" to highlight and copy don't match what's hard-coded on the screen and I wasn't sure what she embedded was 100% accurate either. (When I'm paranoid, I'm paranoid....and I was already invested here, okay?!?!)

So, I wound up typing what was embedded in the video into MS Word... then I had to make sure that it was accurate - hello Audacity, goodbye more time. Finally, I got around to actually trying to translate the Russian I'd heard/typed into English (because, of course, the auto-generated English captions sucked big time - what do you expect when the auto--generated Russian was inaccurate in the first place?

What a headache! It's an "intermediate" level script according to the YT-er, a professional language teacher in St. Petersberg who also teaches Russian on iTalki. But, if this is intermediate, the "fluency" scale doesn't go far enough below zero to measure me! Naval terminology, words like "(the) promenade", a sign that says "Don't swing on the gun barrel!" - I was so lost! But I really wanted to follow what she was saying as the visuals of the video were interesting (basically, she was talking about the history and sights in/around Vladivostok).

4 hours later, I'm (only) at the 7:30 mark of a 16 minute long video. I could have stopped at just reading a Google->Russian-English translation, but she's got some notes & definitions embedded in the video also, that once you considered those, well, it made the Google->R-E output read like a dunce wrote it.

After it's all done, I'm going to use it for some serious L-R study. I'll definitely stick it into LWT and generate some Anki cards from there.

And I noticed for the first time, just how many commas Russians use when they punctuate sentences! Aren't they afraid of running out? Or do they get paid by the number used somehow? Is this a Dark Net economy for these things?

Okay, break's over... Back to the time-sink.

[drmweaver2]

I read that there are 6 translations in russian of LoTR. Which one do you use ?

Sorry, I somehow overlooked this post/question.... Better late than never....

Hardcopy - Перевод б В. Мурфбьеба. А. Кусмякщбского
ISBN: 5-04-008176-6

Edited to add: You might find these pages interesting reads.
http://www.theonering.com/news/the-lord-of-the-rings-movies/lost-in-translation-the-lord-of-the-rings-in-russian
http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/Mark-Hooker-Question-and-Answers.php

Also:
The book Tolkien Through Russian Eyes examines the sociological impact of the translation and publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's works in post-Soviet Russia. After 70 years of obligatory State atheism, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian society began actively seeking new sets of spiritual values. The Christian-like doctrine of Tolkienism has attracted a substantial following. During the Soviet era, The Lord of the Rings was a banned book, which was translated independently by a number of underground translators. The result of this is that there are numerous contemporary published translations competing with each other for the reader's attention. There are 10 translations of The Lord of the Rings; 9 translations of The Hobbit and 6 translations of The Silmarillion. Each translator has a slightly different approach to the text. Each translation has a slightly different interpretation of Tolkien. Each translator has a different story to tell. Most of the existing translations are only Tolkienesque, they are not really Tolkienian. They have been adapted to the Russian mental climate. This book relates the history of the publication of Tolkien's works; examines the philosophical distortions introduced by the competing translations, attempts to explain their origins and how they will be perceived by the Russian reader. No knowledge of Russian is necessary. Mr. Hooker's articles on Tolkien have been published in the specialist periodical press in English, in Dutch and in Russian. The results of his research have been presented at a number of conferences, both in the United States and in Holland.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3952142476?ie=UTF8&tag=tolkienlibrar-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=3952142476

[drmweaver2]

As the post's title says, I'm ridiculously proud of myself for finishing my first, detailed, side-by-side transcription/translation of the YT video I mentioned in a previous post. It involved "gisting", loose interpretation of words and phrases and then "close-reading"/direct word-for-word translation. It absolutely took a lot longer than it should have. But, I wound up with something I wouldn't be ashamed to show anyone else (though I'm sure it's not "perfect").

It took me the better part of two days to listen to the whole 16min video, move the audio into Audacity, and then go through it word by word, phrase by phrase to make sure I was hearing the words and endings correctly - and finally transcribing them, despite the embeded Russian captions. I started out trying to use the YT transcript as a guide, but that actually created as much work as it helped me. First it had incorrect case endings for some words, then it didn't include some of the words or punctuation (which threw off the phrasing). Finally, the Google Translate English version of the Google auto-generated Russian captions was simply awkward when it wasn't just plain bad or incorrect. After I finally got it all typed into the Word document correctly, I had to translate it phrase-by-phrase, word by word because some of the phrases appeared to be idiomatic. My vocabulary remains relatively small so I had to use online translation to help out 90% of the time. And, of course, Google Translate doesn't deal with idioms well - heck, nothing I know of does. Used Reverso-Context on my second pass through and some things still didn't translate easily - or well.

But I've finished it now. And I'm sure it's 95% correct. It's definitely understandable in translation if not "natively-smooth English-speak".

Now I just have to learn it. My first pass through it, it was incomprehensible to me. Even with the translation, well, it's eye-opening. Supposedly this is an intermediate level video - other videos she's made say she targets B1/low-B2. Um, yeah. At best, I'm low-A2 vocabulary-wise.

I would never have thought that I'd hear the words "submarine", "flowers", "19th century", and "cable-stay bridge" in the space of 16 minutes in a single foreign-language discussion (at least not sine I left the field of military intelligence). Oh, and throw in "ship repair facility", "city founder" and "watermelon" just for good measure. Can you say new cards for the Anki-deck? I knew that you could.

So, today I began to study THAT deck. If it wasn't for Cloze-style cards, this would be very difficult. But I finally figured out how to make them and learning words with them has definitely added a new level of vocabulary comprehension due to the contextual presentation of the target words. I'm finding that the pics I added to word-only cards give too much of a clue, but the Cloze cards provide context without giving away the cow with the milk.

As a break today, I started reading the English translation of the Russian version of Tolkien Through Russian Eyes by Mark Hooker, which is ironic in a way. Here's a guy who explores the difficulties, successes and failures of the various translations of LotR (and the Hobbit and Silmarillion) including discussing the whys of various translation choices - ex., why choose to change Tolkien's characters' names or add/leave out entire scenes. It's freely available online, hosted by a Tolkein fanatic, um club, yeah, club, websitehttp://www.nto-ttt.ru/books/book2/. In a way, it shows the goal of reading LotR is actually somewhat daunting; in another, it's inspiring me to want to read more than one translation of LotR to see what Hooker is talking about.

Oh, laugh of the day. I was smoothing out the final side-by-side translation pages and changed the font size to make it easier to read. Um, WRONG THING TO DO. It realigned everything. Line breaks were off. Sentences wrapped where I'd had them just about correct....all across the 7 pages of the document. !@#!! But the fonts needed to be the new size for me to read when I printed the pages out. So I had to spend a half hour re-aligning the whole thing - again (3rd time I'd done it). I can laugh at myself now.. but it was frustrating at the time.

Later.

[drmweaver2]

It sucks to be ill...which I have been for the last few days. In addition to other things, I had an earache bad enough to cause vertigo, interfere with any and all attempts at concentration, and somehow made me too nauseous to eat (which is nearly historic as I can ALWAYS eat).

So, I got little language learning done for a few days - pretty much as soon as I finished the work on the parallel text transcription of that video (which was not as much 'studying' as 'simple', trudgingly-hard work) - I spent the next two days mostly horizontal. Even sitting up caused the room to spin. If it weren't for a Text-to-Speech reader, I wouldn't have been able to follow anything here. My recent forum posts took an hour each to write in Word and then copy/paste into here. Looking at the computer screen literally hurt. Glad that's over now.

Finally got back to the basic schedule today - Anki (way too many cards unknown, too few mature ones, 15 new ones/day, 200 max reviews/day), Clozemaster (for the sentences but I am definitely guessing the answer pretty much 80% of the time so far) and Glossika (over 21,000 reps done). And, of course, typing and handwriting practice.

When I went out to get the mail in this morning, I found a nice surprise. A relative I rarely see actually sent me his unused-for-a-decade copies of the Michel Thomas Foundation, Advanced and Vocabulary Russian courses. Whee! It's always fun and interesting seeing new and different materials. I have zero knowledge or background with MT though I know some here have used them for various languages. So, now I get to try and figure out how to best incorporate them into what I have(had?) planned.

With no real reason to think this should work, I'm very tempted to just swap out my morning session of Glossika for MT for some odd reason though I like Glossika. Maybe it's a timing thing - I just finished Glossika Lvl 1 and am not yet "invested" in Lvl 2. I also swapped out the Pimsleur Lvl 1 for the FSI Russian course in the evenings just before I got ill.

Is it really time for a change? Or am I just pointlessly searching for that magic key to make "faster progress"?

I dunno.

[drmweaver2]

An interesting day though it wasn't directly studying Russian.

Oh, I got through my Anki and Glossika reps. Even did my minimum Clozemaster reps. (Notice that I said, "I got through them"?) Yeah... did them but there wasn't much enjoyment in the accomplishment.

I wound up looking for a distraction and found one... MS Excel and creating a frequency word list for LotR-The Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah. Not your everyday pursuit.

It hasn't been as easy nor as difficult as you might think. I imported a UTF-8 text into Excel which gave me a 1 sentence per ~4500 row(s) file. Then I figured out how to separate each word from within each sentence (ultimately, I used spaces as field[cell] delimiters). Eventually, I got all the individual words in a sorted list in Col A. Finally, I wrote a VBA routine to identify each instance of a "unique" word in Col A, copied it into/made an entry for that unique word in Col B and then kept a running count of each unique word in cells in Col C. I'm not the most efficient or proficient VBA coder, but what I wrote did the job.
((Unique words is defined similarly to the way LingQ does it - any spelling variation of a word is a unique word, so a noun could have, what, six variations due to cases and more due to number[singular/plural]?))

Very rough numbers at this point looked like this:
Total Sentences: ~4500
Total Words: >76,000
Unique Words: >17,400 (using the definition above for "unique word")
Most frequent word: и - 3717 times

I've done most of the grunt work and am now going through the list identifying the most frequent words to make Anki cards for. This involves re-sorting the list alphabetically in order to extract all character and place Names (they can be ignored), grouping&reducing multiple entries for words (roots or infinitives of nouns, adjectives and verbs) down to 1 word and manually "re-count" those, and then re-sorting the list again using the new counts. This should give a reasonably accurate/useful word frequency list specific to Book 1 of LotR.

Between that, Anki and LWT, I think I should be able to increase my progress through the book as a means to learning Russian - well, at least according to the translator.

Still haven't decided how/when/if I'm going to incorporate the MT materials from my cousin... Today's project allowed me to "play like I'm actually accomplishing something" without actually doing so.

Edited: modified comment relating to "number" variations of nouns

[MamaPata]

An interesting day though it wasn't directly studying Russian.

Oh, I got through my Anki and Glossika reps. Even did my minimum Clozemaster reps. (Notice that I said, "I got through them"?) Yeah... did them but there wasn't much enjoyment in the accomplishment.

I wound up looking for a distraction and found one... MS Excel and creating a frequency word list for LotR-The Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah. Not your everyday pursuit.

It hasn't been as easy nor as difficult as you might think. I imported a UTF-8 text into Excel which gave me a 1 sentence per ~4500 row(s) file. Then I figured out how to separate each word from within each sentence (ultimately, I used spaces as field[cell] delimiters). Eventually, I got all the individual words in a sorted list in Col A. Finally, I wrote a VBA routine to identify each instance of a "unique" word in Col A, copied it into/made an entry for that unique word in Col B and then kept a running count of each unique word in cells in Col C. I'm not the most efficient or proficient VBA coder, but what I wrote did the job.
((Unique words is defined similarly to the way LingQ does it - any spelling variation of a word is a unique word, so a noun could have, what, six variations due to cases and more due to number[singular/plural]?))

Very rough numbers at this point looked like this:
Total Sentences: ~4500
Total Words: >76,000
Unique Words: >17,400 (using the definition above for "unique word")
Most frequent word: и - 3717 times

I've done most of the grunt work and am now going through the list identifying the most frequent words to make Anki cards for. This involves re-sorting the list alphabetically in order to extract all character and place Names (they can be ignored), grouping&reducing multiple entries for words (roots or infinitives of nouns, adjectives and verbs) down to 1 word and manually "re-count" those, and then re-sorting the list again using the new counts. This should give a reasonably accurate/useful word frequency list specific to Book 1 of LotR.

Between that, Anki and LWT, I think I should be able to increase my progress through the book as a means to learning Russian - well, at least according to the translator.

Still haven't decided how/when/if I'm going to incorporate the MT materials from my cousin... Today's project allowed me to "play like I'm actually accomplishing something" without actually doing so.

Edited: modified comment relating to "number" variations of nouns

This is really interesting and something I'd love to be able to do!