Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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cjareck
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby cjareck » Thu Aug 08, 2019 7:18 am

Radioclare wrote:Anyone want to guess a number?! It was so high that I immediately closed the tab again and decided it definitely needed to wait for a day when I have more energy :lol:

Well, but from your post, it seems to be so low that you are going to do it in one day. Base on that, I would presume something like 500.
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Aug 08, 2019 10:13 pm

cjareck wrote:Well, but from your post, it seems to be so low that you are going to do it in one day. Base on that, I would presume something like 500.

Sorry, the way I phrased it was a bit ambiguous, but it is definitely more than I will get through in a day...

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8 August
Felt a bit better today but have got a very irritating cough. I was lucky that I didn't have any meetings planned for today so was able to work from home again.

Russian
Between finishing work and having dinner I did Russian Memrise. For some reason I had loads of reviews again today (175) so I didn't learn any new words. I spent some time trying to reduce the number of words flagged as being "difficult" for me (if you practise them enough times and get them right, the "difficult" flag disappears) in the hope that that might reduce the number of reviews I have tomorrow.

After dinner I decided to start chapter 11 of 'Colloquial Russian'. This chapter is definitely 100% new to me and that means I haven't input the vocabulary to Memrise yet for learning. So prepare for lots of log posts with me moaning about how long it takes to input the vocab next week :lol: I decided to just focus on the first dialogue in the chapter today but even in that, there was a lot of new vocab so I made slow progress. I have a premonition that this is going to be the chapter that introduces aspect, because suddenly the aspect of all the verbs in the vocab lists was marked (it hasn't been previously).

Total time = 47 minutes. Streak = 219 days


PS. I'm going camping for the weekend, so I may not update my log for a few days.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Aug 11, 2019 8:51 pm

9 August
I was working in Birmingham on Friday and had to sit through a really boring presentation about transfer pricing. I spent most of the time trying not to cough :lol: After work I travelled to where I was camping with my boyfriend for the weekend but everything that could go wrong with our journeys did go wrong, so it was quite a frustrating evening overall. And pouring with rain when we did ultimately arrive, so I was very glad that we were staying in a camping pod rather than a tent!

Russian
I did Memrise on my train to Birmingham as usual in the morning and another 20 minutes or so on my evening train to Shrewsbury. When I eventually got a seat on that train, I experimented with reading a bit of Colloquial Russian on my phone. At some point I virtuously paid for the e-book so I can theoretically read it on the Kindle app of my phone, but it doesn't always display perfectly. I don't know whether it would be better if I was reading it on an actual Kindle :? The main problem I was having on Friday night was that in the dialogue I was reading from chapter 11, there were no spaces between any of the words. That was an interesting test of my Cyrillic reading abilities :lol: What else? Earlier in the day I'd already completed lesson 21 of Pimsleur 3. By the time I got to the campsite, I was too tired/annoyed to do anything else and just went to bed.

Total time = 85 minutes. Streak = 220 days

10 August
We'd chosen one of the worst possible weekends for camping and it was threatening to rain all morning. By the evening things had really brightened up though and I was able to sit outside and do some Russian :)

Russian
I decide to make a serious attempt at chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian. The chapter starts with a long text about one of the characters trying to rent a flat in Moscow and it was full of vocabulary I didn't know. I forced myself to copy the entire text out by hand in the end to help me start getting to grips with the words, because I knew it was going to be a while before I got them all entered into Memrise so that I could learn them properly. That text was followed by a couple of dialogues which were a lot easier, or at least felt a lot easier to me. One of them was clearly for the purpose of teaching furniture vocabulary, but coincidentally I'd already been learning furniture vocabulary on Memrise earlier in the week, so that was some nice reinforcement.

As I suspected, the theme of this chapter is aspect, but it approaches it in a rather unusual way. Rather than starting by trying to explain what the difference between imperfective and perfective is in terms of meaning, it just states that verbs exist in pairs, explains how to form the future from perfective verbs and then launches into several pages listing pairs of verbs. The lists are helpful in that they are split between pairs that differentiate by the addition of prefixes and those that differentiate by what it calls internal modification. The second list in particular is really useful, because for me those are definitely the most difficult perfective verbs, and I'm sure I'll get a lot out of the chapter overall. I just thought it was a bit odd to have several pages on the topic without an explanation of when which verb should be used; if I didn't already have some knowledge of that, I think I'd be rather confused about why I was suddenly supposed to be memorising all these extra verbs.

Total time = 50 minutes. Streak = 221 days

Croatian
I spent about two hours reading 'Pakao u Madridu' before the daylight disappeared. I haven't read in Croatian for ages; partly on purpose, because I didn't want to addle my brain before going to Russia, and partly by accident because I've just been a bit rubbish with reading this year. It's a really good book and I think I'm enjoying reading it a lot more now that I know a lot more about Spain than I did the first time I read it in 2012. I got quite excited yesterday when some of the characters went to a cafe which I'd been to last time I was in Madrid :)

11 August
Writing that date, I've just realised that 20 years ago today I was in Switzerland. It was the first time I'd ever been abroad and I hadn't 100% decided whether I liked "abroad" or not :lol: But I remember the date because it was the solar eclipse, which everyone had been extremely excited about in the UK, and I was disappointed to be missing it. Feels like a lifetime ago now; if you'd told me then that one day I'd travel as much as I do now, I'm not sure I would have survived the shock :lol:

Russian
I didn't do any Russian until the evening when I got home from camping. I decided to start by catching up on my Memrise reviews, because I'd only had shaky internet while camping, so I'd completely neglected them. That took upwards of 20 minutes and then I went back to chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian and began the mindnumbingly boring task of trying to get all the vocabulary into Memrise. This is going to be a task which spreads into several evenings this week. Tonight, I managed to type up the vocab lists from the opening texts and dialogues, plus the list of imperfective/perfective verbs which differentiate with prefixes, but I didn't start the (much, much longer) list of verbs which differentiate by internal modification, and I didn't upload audio for any of them. So, definitely a work in progress!

Total time = 89 minutes. Streak = 222 days

Croatian (Serbian)
I haven't posted much about music this year, which is more accidental than deliberate. Over the past few weeks I've started listening to a girlband from Serbia called The Frajle. Girlbands are not normally my thing at all, but this one seems quite cool :)

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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby StringerBell » Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:11 pm

Radioclare wrote: but I didn't start the (much, much longer) list of verbs which differentiate by internal modification, and I didn't upload audio for any of them.


Where do you take the audio from and how do you upload it to Memrise? I've thought about making a course but I think I changed my mind when I realized it wouldn't have audio; I didn't even realize you could upload audio.
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby IronMike » Mon Aug 12, 2019 5:21 pm

Radioclare wrote:11 August
Writing that date, I've just realised that 20 years ago today I was in Switzerland. It was the first time I'd ever been abroad and I hadn't 100% decided whether I liked "abroad" or not :lol:

Makes sense. We were all about to die with Y2K just around the corner, so I can see why you were holding off on deciding if you liked "abroad" or not. :o
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Aug 12, 2019 6:59 pm

StringerBell wrote:
Radioclare wrote: but I didn't start the (much, much longer) list of verbs which differentiate by internal modification, and I didn't upload audio for any of them.


Where do you take the audio from and how do you upload it to Memrise? I've thought about making a course but I think I changed my mind when I realized it wouldn't have audio; I didn't even realize you could upload audio.


I download the audio from Forvo. At least for Russian it's really good and has the pronunciation of pretty much every word I've looked for :) When you're adding words to a course you've created, there should be a column for audio on the right and you've got the option either to upload or record. It's pretty easy to do; just a bit of a boring task!

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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby StringerBell » Mon Aug 12, 2019 7:40 pm

Thanks! Now that I know this, I might motivate myself to make a course or two in Memrise comprised of vocabulary/sentences I've mined from either TV shows or books I'm reading. I doubt it would be of interest to other people, but I think the process of creating the deck would be useful at least for me. Do you have any way to know if other people have used the Russian course you created?
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:22 pm

12 August
Normally Mondays are really productive for me but I spent a lot of today dealing with people issues as opposed to doing any of the things I'd optimistically written on my Monday to-do list on Friday afternoon.

Russian
I made quite a bit more progress with the Russian 3 Memrise course on the train to work. I've only got 72 words left to learn now and I'm kinda looking forward to finishing it. I seem to have a lot of things which are almost, but not quite, finished at the moment so it will be a nice feeling to actually finish something.

I did lesson 22 of Pimsleur 3 on the way to work. The past few lessons have started practising dates. I really hate dates and I'm also really terrible at them, so this is both good and bad. I mean, good because I need to practice and bad because I find it really painful :lol: Pimsleur is another one of those things which it feels like I've been on the verge of finishing for months, but I think there are still about 10 lessons to go, which in practice means it will take me about 3 weeks to get to the end.

This evening I watched part of a Russian documentary about polyglots on Youtube. And I spent half an hour or so on my Colloquial Russian Memrise course. I've entered 115 words from chapter 11 now and uploaded all the audio, but I still have over a page of verbs to enter. Tomorrow! I forgot to say that one of the useful things about entering words in Memrise and then copy/pasting them to Forvo is that, if Forvo can't find a pronunciation, I know I've probably made a typo :lol: Typos happen all the time with my Cyrillic typing so this is a useful way of making sure that I don't accidentally learn an incorrect spelling of a word!

Total time = 122 minutes. Streak = 223 days

StringerBell wrote:Thanks! Now that I know this, I might motivate myself to make a course or two in Memrise comprised of vocabulary/sentences I've mined from either TV shows or books I'm reading. I doubt it would be of interest to other people, but I think the process of creating the deck would be useful at least for me. Do you have any way to know if other people have used the Russian course you created?


When you create the course you can choose to set the status either to "published" or "unlisted". If it's published, other people can find it and learn it too, whereas if it's unlisted it's private. For the published courses, there will be a leaderboard on the course page, so you'll be able to see who else is using the course and who's got the most points that week/month/all time. If you keep the course private, there will still be a leaderboard but you'll be the only person on it so you'll always be top of the class :lol: My Russian course is private but I've got a couple of Croatian ones which are public and I've just realised I'm only in 7th place on the all-time leaderboard for one of them and 3rd place for the other, so other people are obviously enjoying them more than me :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby cjareck » Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:43 pm

Isn't агенство rather an agency than an agent?
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:03 pm

cjareck wrote:Isn't агенство rather an agency than an agent?


Yes, you're correct :D I guess in English I use "estate agent" sloppily to mean both the person and the business.
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