Adventures in bad memory, Russian

[Ani]

And isn't part of the "strength of the SRS/Anki method" supposed to be making and customizing the cards yourself? If so, convenience doesn't enter the equation.

There are too many weirdnesses and errors in the old Glossika Russian (I have the FR->RU) to make it good material for Anki entry.

You might want to read Lily's log (user blaurelbell). She's not active on the forum anymore but her log was great. She used Learning With Texts (lwt) to read Russian very early on. It might be a significant benefit to you in your Tolkein project. It will also give you great data about how you're progressing.

[Arnaud]

You might want to read Lily's log (user blaurelbell). She's not active on the forum anymore but her log was great. She used Learning With Texts (lwt) to read Russian very early on. It might be a significant benefit to you in your Tolkein project. It will also give you great data about how you're progressing.

Lily's log is here and an article she wrote about LWT is here. Learning with texts
Personally I don't recommand that kind of experiments: It's a good recipe to burn out quickly...but hey, prove me wrong

[drmweaver2]

If you don't feel like reading a rant/whine of frustration, skip this post. Please.

Man, I feel like I've been beaten around the head and shoulders with a baseball bat for the last 16 hours.

I've mentioned that I am using the Glossika method and I have really enjoyed it - up until about 4PM yesterday and through this morning. Everything has been going well with it. I've had little trouble focusing, my listening skills have improved steadily over the last 3 weeks and I'm getting comfortable with the pace and rhythm of the language - or so I thought.

Yesterday's and today's GSMA files have kicked my butt all over hell and gone. I have had very little retention of the new vocab either day even after listening to the 50 sentence groups assigned/scheduled for each of the two days 3 or more times each (Each group theoretically adds only 10 new vocabulary and/or grammar points). I am "gobsmacked" to use a Britishism.

At GSMA 550, the complexity of the individual sentence group difficulty went up astronomically for me - even including 3 sentences per "individual sentence repetition" and the corresponding 3 sentence Russian translation AND 75% of the sentence (group) is incomprehensible/new to my ear. In each of the last three 50 sentence groups, I've been barely able or even unable to process what I've heard before the next sentence (group) begins. (For those who've never used Glossika or don't remember, the GSMA audio files are structured: 1 English sentence (group) followed by 2 Russian translations with appropriate pauses in between. And you've also got the sentences written in the book/PDF to follow along.)

I usually listen to the sentences first, without following along in the book. Then, I listen to the tape again following along in the book - not [u]exactly[/b] the method Glossika recommends, but it's been working for me as I tuned my ear and listening/repeating without written textual assistance during exposure to new vocab is the method used with Pimsleur. Well, that definitely didn't work yesterday or today. I'm mentally worn out already and still have 3/4 of the scheduled Glossika files left - another 50 sentence GSMA file and 2 GSR files.

Okay, rant, or is it a whine, over.
Back to work.

[StringerBell]

Yesterday's and today's GSMA files have kicked my butt all over hell and gone. I have had very little retention of the new vocab either day even after listening to the 50 sentence groups assigned/scheduled for each of the two days 3 or more times each (Each group theoretically adds only 10 new vocabulary and/or grammar points). I am "gobsmacked" to use a Britishism.

As frustrating as this is, this seems normal to me. In this past year of intensively learning Italian and Polish, I've learned that language learning is not a linear process; some days are great, some are average, and every once in a while out of nowhere they totally suck and it feels like I've learned nothing.

However, if you can persevere through those rough patches, it generally gets better pretty quickly. These ups and downs are normal, and they don't mean anything important about your ability or progress. In my case, I have gone from having an hour long conversation with ease to struggling to form simple sentences the next day.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I think if I were to attempt to learn the meaning of random sentences, I'd burn out really quickly. I don't want to knock Glossika or Clozemaster, because I know many people are very satisfied with them, and I think they can be really good for certain things, but for me learning the meaning of sentences in context is much more effective and less stressful because there is built-in scaffolding.

I started out with graded stories, so I had the context of the story to help me figure out the meaning of words and sentences. Even now, when I look at sentences I've written down 8 months ago, I know exactly which story they came from and what was going on in that paragraph so the sentence is really easy for me to understand. Have you considered supplementing your routine with some graded Russian stories? If they exist for Polish, I'm sure they must exist for Russian.

[drmweaver2]

As frustrating as this is, this seems normal to me...language learning is not a linear process; some days are great, some are average, and every once in a while out of nowhere they totally suck and it feels like I've learned nothing....I don't want to knock Glossika...I started out with graded stories...Have you considered supplementing your routine with some graded Russian stories? If they exist for Polish, I'm sure they must exist for Russian.

Thanks for the comments, encouragement and advice.

Normal or not for anyone else, that frustration level hasn't happened to me with anything for years.

Actually, writing the above post and then literally walking away for a few hours silenced the "frustration, confusion and rant rage" enough for me to go back and complete the Glossika effort for the day. I'm not 100% satisfied with the result, but I got through it and am now feeling much better for having completed it.

As far as Glossika and graded readers are concerned, I'm one of those who likes Glossika. I am using it primarily to refresh long forgotten vocab and basic grammar as well as get me over the initial 1000 word vocabulary hump. It's also been great for tuning my ear and providing a generally unstressful way to expose myself to Russian again. But it's certainly not the "be all and end all", one size fits all, absolutely inclusive way to go.

Graded readers still require a certain basic level of vocab knowledge and, until today, have been just outside my ability. After I threw my hands up earlier today, I finally re-located one of the "free" graded reader texts I found online. Unfortunately, it was not a "dual text" formatted document.

But I remembered I'd run across a video or post on LWT, Learning with Texts, which is similar to LingQ and free. I investigated it for a bit, found it was easier to install than I'd feared, and it's now residing happily on my PC. A little fiddling around and the graded reader text was entered, highlights abound and I got some flashcards out of it for importing into Anki. All-in-all a productive hour and a half.

I think this is probably going to be a real help as I find more and more level-appropriate materials. It won't replace my work with Anki, Glossika, Pimsleur and a couple grammar books I've scraped together - and certainly not the YouTube videos in Russian that I am beginning to really enjoy (with subtitles, of course) - but it'll have its place in the toolbox. The toolbox is getting more and more tools as I read logs, search the Interwebs and generally run into others pursuing language learning projects of their own. I've definitely benefited from others' posts, methods and interactions as I've come across them.

So, back to it. Have a great one.

Edited to add: After I went back and completed my Glossika reps, I entered the relevant data into my Excel tracking log and found I've now done over 15,000 reps! The PDF that comes with the Glossika materials indicates that the schedule I'm following will provide ~56,000 reps and I'm doing more reps each day than scheduled though I'm not moving through the actual material faster. So, I'm usually fairly confident at the end of each day/first thing in the morning when I review the (previous) day's work. Still, 15,000 of anything is a significant number of practices.

[drmweaver2]

Tough week so far. Ups and downs followed by more ups and downs...
The good - LWT is a real find for me. Of course, it's going to be a bear identifying all the words I do know at first (or maybe not considering I guess my vocab is somewhere between 650 and 1000 words right now). But that'll make for very colorful LWT reading for a while.

The downers - a couple of tough to handle language learning days - drifting/inability to focus intently, multiple real life distractions (BiL had a stent put in to open a 95% blockage...not cool, another sister may lose her house...), vocab SRSing was difficult most days with lots more reps of new words than usual to get any to stick...

The indeterminate - mental/ethical quandry (found a 1951or57 Assimil Russian course available in a guy's Cloud storage site online, which he deliberately made public and the question is whether or not I should even consider downloading the materials, especially the audio files as my "ear" needs as much help as possible). When I was younger, this wasn't an issue. But I'm pushing the lower end of "geezer age" and my conscience reminds me that I wouldn't steal materials from the library (though I might borrow them and renew them multiple times in a single year, even possibly going so far as copying and temporarily using them before ultimately deleting or burning the copies rather than continually renewing them) or from someone else's house (if they refused to loan them to me). Sigh... decisions.

Inderterminate 2 - Process, progress and distractions - I plan on getting up daily at 6:30 (old habit from military time), starting with ANki reps followed by Glossika and Cyrillic typing practice before lunch. The actuality is I get it all done before noon, but start slowly and not very efficiently. For some unknown reason, I'm so easily distracted by inconsequential things lately even after I get started. SO, I can't say that either my process or progress is actually any good at this point. That's disturbing. Putting in the time without having confidence in the eventual outcome is not something I'm experienced with (um, can we say Type 1 personality with OCD tendencies?).

After lunch, I feel guilty about "forcing" myself back to language stuff despite enjoying it when I do get going. For instance, watching The Hobbit today and yesterday - very enjoyable. After dinner, I deliberately use "lighter" materials in a more passive manner/a manner that is more exposure-related than concentration-required stuff. And just before bed, I'm priming the process-while-sleeping-pump with at least another 30 minutes of Russian audio. (Tonight, I'll probably put on the Russian language LotR audiobook I found and possibly fall asleep to that.)

Measurables so far this week:
Glossika - 4820 reps
Pimsleur - 4 new lessons completed, 3 repeats/reviews (I don't have a feel for how I'd equate Pimsleur and
.............Glossika "rep"-wise)
Film/Tv/audiobook - Watched ALL of Disc 1 of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in Russian without subs
.............Understood maybe 5% of the dialog but it was still fun to watch because I am so familiar with the book
.............and the English version of the movie.
YouTube Russian-related videos - 4 hours on various grammar or vocab topics
LWT - 3 short (~200-300 words) pieces "studied" (took about an hour evaluating/studying each piece)
Graded reader (Lvl A1) - read 1st story of something I bought, decided that LWT would work as well or
............better. I'll finish the reader, but won't buy the next one in the series as LWT seems to work just as good
............for me.
Written language drills - about 200 lines over 3 hours... old school methodology type stuff (I am, you are, he is... I was, we were... I can x(verb)x, You can x(verb)x... sort of things --- really thinking about and not just writing conjugations and phrasal chunks)
Speaking exercises - some shadowing of the Glossika and Pimsleur stuff (obviously), maybe 300 reps but definnitely no more than 500, as right now I have to really push hard to actually work on that (I've never liked the sound of my own recorded voice, even in my native tongue).

Looking at the above now that I've actually typed it, I feel less "I haven't accomplished much this week" but definitely not "Dude, look at what you HAVE accomplished this week!").

[drmweaver2]

A very slow day.
I had trouble sleeping so. at 3am, I popped in my Russian-dubbed Lord of the Rings(LotR) dvd and watched it. Super-cool way to be up, relaxed and passively "making progress" - or so I tell myself. (For some reason, this dvd had both Russian & English subtitles that were actually readable while my Russian-dubbed The Hobbit dvd's subtitles only showed up intermittently. Weird.) Remember, my "pie in the sky" goal is to read and understand LotR in Russian by Xmas/the end of 2018.

After that, I basically pissed away time throughout the day...starting listening to or watching various YT videos about something in Russian but rarely finishing them. I pulled one of the DLI Basic Course workbooks off the 'Net and tried working with it as well as doing the same with the Penguin course book and had limited success with both - again, due to concentration issues. I got 90% of the exercises correct, but my work sessions were 1/4 of the times I usually spend with each of them. So, I don't feel I actually accomplished much today. I just had lots of trouble focusing throughout the day and that also translated as no useful work with either Anki or LWT at all today (everything was HARD, repeated multiple multiple multiple times and, finally, I just shut it down).

It's just after 8:30pm now and I'm finally about to start the Glossika lessons for the day. I'm not particularly enthused about it, but I'm not mentally fried either. (FWIW, I even tried a 5-hour Energy drink earlier and that hasn't changed my energy/focus level much at all.) I anticipate an early bedtime...

Poka.

[drmweaver2]

Has it really been 30 days since I began my re-acquaintance with Russian?
Yes, it has though I only recently joined here. I took a look at what has come out of that 30 days and post it here mostly for the sake of posterity (and my own posterior).

Here’s where I’ve been over the last 30 days (Sep):
0. Concentrated/focused Study Time: Avg 6.5 hours/day of good focused time Actual total: 213 hours
......Priorities: 1. Learning the "system"/learning about learning, listening, finding new materials, vocabulary, other stuff
1. Almost immediately, I settled on using Glossika and Pimsleur for the first 30 days mainly to re-acquaint myself with the sounds. This has been mostly successful though there have been a few glitches – there are some minimal pairs I still have trouble with. Gabriel Wyner's Forever-fluent Pronunciation Trainershttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmmYr0l6hbA and a link to https://www.boostyourrussian.com/russian-minimal-pairs/ have helped tremendously to fill the gaps/reinforce what I haven’t quite gotten from Glossika and Pimsleur in this area. Learning to make use of Audacity has also been crucial – being able to slow down/replay/loop individual sentences or phrases has encouraged me to persist.
2. I have found that Pimsleur I, by itself, is too slow for me. Too few new words each lesson makes the pace seem glacial – BUT, the repetition and clarity of the audio makes it extremely useful despite that. I quickly found that I COULD handle 2, or even 3, Pimsleur lessons per day – except for the time investment (I’d get bored before the end of the 2nd lesson).
3. Both Glossika and Pimsleur’s manuals indicate that completing multiple lessons per day is not only acceptable, but encouraged under certain circumstances. “Stacking” or completing the course at an accelerated pace is justified, so to speak.
4. I am using Glossika according to their suggested 18-week, 70-minuted/day schedule – 2 GMS files and 2 GSR files a day. I considered doubling that up, and actually tried doing so for 3 days, but found that their 9-week pace was too fast for me to follow and acquire all of the vocabulary. So, I’ve returned to the 18-week/70-minute per day schedule. I’m on schedule to finish the Glossika course on/about Jan 6, 2019 with Pimsleur IV being completed ~10 days later.
5. I am still uncomfortable with producing Cyrillic handwriting(script) though I read it fairly easily. My own normal handwritten script is “physician-like”, that is, pretty damn bad. So, this is only exaggerated in Cyrillic. As a result, I type more efficiently (~20wpm) than I write in Russian and I need to rectify this disparity but that is a real drag.
6. After a few iTalki language exchange mishaps and 5 community tutor sessions, I realized that I didn’t (and still don’t) have the vocabulary or confidence to talk for 30 minutes on any subject. My ego demanded that I back off speaking to others until my vocabulary is comfortably above the 1200 known words mark (word roots, not just case endings or conjugation variations) and I have established some conversational islands.
7. Learning with Texts and finding freely available, public domain dual-translation texts has been eye-opening. Combining the two effectively replaces having to invest in graded readers for the foreseeable future. Vocabulary building is no longer limited to specific coursework for me. I’ve thrown newscasts and YouTube video Russian language transcripts into LWT and been able to work out much better transcriptions than the “auto-generated English” I’d had to rely on before this. And, while purchasing a few Red-Kalinka Books with Audio was definitely a consideration at one point, (I DID buy one to try it out and found it to be excellent), I’m pretty sure that they won’t be any more useful than what I’ve been able to locate for free online since then.
8. SRS/Anki – what can I say? I gave DuoLingo, Memrise, LingQ and Lingvist each a week long shot but have settled on Anki partly due to the price (free is always good!), and partly due to the wealth of YT videos on how to set it up and use it effectively (thank you very much med-school student community). I have to admit that I like having physical cards in my hands. But with technology/Anki, it’s so easy to make more memorable cards and the computer handles the reinforcement schedule without any energy wasted on that aspect. Figuring out exactly how to review cards on demand has been the biggest learning curve using Anki (rather than just learning and reviewing cards as the program presents them). Making and reviewing cards specifically related to each day’s Glossika, Pimsleur lessons and LWT readings I’ve done each day has become part of my daily routine but can be a huge time-sink in its own right.
9. One of the banes and benefits of YouTube is that there are so many videos online that I have to force myself to not try to watch them all. On certain subjects (vocabulary/conversational islands), I have spent 4 straight hours watching video after video to try to tweak out “the Russian perspective” on something (ex., the subject of the weather is more than just a few vocabulary words, it’s hearing, reading and understanding a forecast as well as talking with someone what the weather outside is/was right now/yesterday/while on vacation). And then gone back and re-watched those very same videos later, more than once!
10. Overall, I haven’t progressed as far or as fast as I initially wanted/dreamed of over these 30 days. (See #0 above for my actual actual time investment.) My vocabulary is still limited and grammatically, I speak far worse than a 6 year old. (Old saying –> Everything seems easy when you don’t know what’s actually involved.) But I have “recovered” lots of buried vocab and am quite pleased with some of the specific aspects of grammar that I do remember. Cases will continue to haunt me for a while, of that there is no doubt. But I’ll get there.
11. Overall, the totality and individualized “instructional aspects” possible in my daily routine are miles ahead of what I thought was available today and/or failed to take advantage of back during my university days. Now, I just have to consistently work at it each day to make progress. No sweat, right?
12. Lastly, though quite possibly a “pie in the sky” goal, I’m actually pursuing being able to watch and understand the Lord of the Rings movies and read the LotR books by Xmas/year’s end. This personal challenge has been called totally unrealistic and “almost psychotically unreasonable” by a few people elsewhere. It IS 900-1200 pages long depending on the translation and whether or not you include The Hobbit or consider that a completely separate story. As a reference point, I can understand maybe 5% of the first disc of each movie and definitely less than 5% of the first 10 pages of each book right now. But, I have both movies (LotR and The Hobbit) in Russian dubs, in audiobook format and in physical (hardcopy) form. I even have the Russian text of LotR in a Word document that I can copy and place into LWT a couple pages at a time to study and learn from (I’ve run a word frequency count on LotR to see about extracting useful data for inclusion into Anki). (I’m still looking for a digital copy of The Hobbit to do the same with.) So, I remain optimistic.

The plan for the next 30 days (Oct):
0. Priorities: (1)Reading/comprehension, listening, writing, (last)speaking
1. Continue with Glossika GSM/GSR on the current 18-week/70 minutes a day schedule.
2. Over the next week, consider swapping out Pimsleur and introducing Assimil to provide more "general direction" rather than leaning on the textbooks I have or just picking "conversational islands" to sequentially focus on. Pimsleur is only 1/2 hour/day at this point (occasionally 1 hour). It's almost relaxing but I'm not sure how much I'm actually learning from it other than the "ear tuning" aspects.
3. Hand write 3 paragraphs a day - 8 sentences each. Focus on sentence construction first, then script clarity.
....Practice my Cyrillic typing for at least 15 minutes a day. Focus on accuracy first, assuming that speed will increase naturally.
4. Read/study via LWT texts for 1 hour each in the morning and afternoon. Use different texts in the morning and afternoon "sessions". Rotate texts at least every other day between news transcripts (with accompanying audio from NHK, BBC and/or a yet-to-be-determined Russian/Ukrainian news source), easy reader type texts and sections of LotR/The Hobbit and possibly The Hunger Games.
5. Watch a minimum of a 30 minute Russian language TV serial OR LotR/The Hobbit film in the evening at least every other day - use Russian subtitles. Familiarity, my boy. Familiarity. Concentrate on identifying known words in conversational speech at normal speaking rate. Pick out 3-5 words for SRS/Anki deck inclusion each viewing.
6. Make/use grocery lists in Cyrillic.

Priorities the following 30 days (Nov): (1)Reading/comprehension, (2)speaking, listening, writing

[drmweaver2]

Meh...Slow weekend/Mon/Tues... General feeling of malaise made concentration difficult so I scaled back my program a bit. I only managed to do the Glossika and Pimsleur stuff I usually do but that's about it as far as active work. I did listen to some "background noise" Russian as I watched football games but I'm not sure if any of that was useful.

I ran into a sleep problem - up past 4am, sleep til noon or so, Glossika then nap... Glossika again, another nap... passive listening, another nap. (While it's nice to be retired and able to nap whenever, it doesn't accomplish much.) And of course, napping just screws with any type of "normal" day/night routine. Somehow, I need to "rotate" the schedule back to a normal circadian rhythm where LIGHT exists!

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been considering replacing Pimsleur with Assimil. I'm probably going to do that starting next Monday. Why wait? Shrug. Dunno. Just feels right.

I'm also trying to figure out whether to continue with the Penguin New Russian course or switch over to Terence Wade's A Russian Grammar Workbook (1996ed, republished in 2005) (found on fleaBay for under 5USD including shipping). I like the clarity of the exercises more in the latter and I am not wedded to the former. After looking through the first 2 chapters, the workbook appeals to me much more than the Penguin book, which I can always return to later. My gut tells me I'll probably move that way before Friday.

Lastly, for some oddball reason, I've been toying with the idea of going back and trying to pick up Spanish or German again while pursuing Russian (sort of as a "no pressure, relaxation thing"). And, [i]God help me, the thought of giving French a shot has repeatedly popped up in my mind despite having zero background in it, absolutely no use for it in my life, horrible memories of Frenchmen directly insulting the speech of fellow soldiers (DLI French Advanced course grads who were supposedly @C1 level) while we traveled through France to an air show and a mental aversion to the tongue-twisting **** (um, actions) that eluded me the few times I ever tried to imitate a French sentence.[/i] Hell, even my ancestors abandoned that language as soon as they landed here in the US 150 years ago (so I learned while doing some genealogical research). Otoh, my German ancestors held onto their German for another 60 years and there are traces of it in familial documents and discussions even today.

This could be just a momentary distraction as a result of temporary frustrations with Russian.

And I still have my Pimsleur lessons left to do today....I'm going to reward myself afterwards with watching/listening to LotR-The Two Towers in Russian (right now it's on TV in English). Of course, I'll need subtitles and won't understand more than 5%, but it's "all good".

[drmweaver2]

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?)