Meddysong wrote:You're messing around with a local server?!
If only you lived with somebody who understands all of this stuff ...
(I've just installed this LWT thing on our server. Now you don't have to worry about a local server crashing plus can access it from any device.)
Erm, thanks. It never occurred to me that you'd know how to do it...
StringerBell wrote:I'm so glad you're liking that channel! I was wondering if it was any good, but since I've seen that you've been watching it pretty consistently, I figured that at least it didn't suck.
It genuinely is really good! It's 100% in Russian which made all the videos seem quite difficult to start with (compared to a lot of other things I've tried on Youtube where there have been explanations in English) but I've been watching a video most days and I really feel like I'm making progress now
The guy who does the videos speaks really slowly and clearly, so if I don't understand something it's because I don't know the word as opposed to because I couldn't hear it, and the fact that there are transcripts and subtitles for everything means that I can go away and look up the words I don't know... I might even try putting the transcripts into LWT now that it's been installed for me
25 MarchToday has been pretty productive. I think maybe I peak on Mondays and go rapidly downhill after that. Tomorrow is going to be a challenging day to fit 30 minutes of Russian in, because I've got to spend my evening attending a client meeting.
RussianI was working in Birmingham so I tried extra hard with Pimsleur and got through two lessons: 24 and 25. They were mostly about buying petrol. Apparently petrol is really expensive in Russia. Or, at least, I spent a lot of time learning how to say that petrol is very expensive in Russia.
I listened to a Russian Progress podcast this evening about alcohol. Well, about the fact that Russians apparently don't drink as much vodka as we imagine they do. Lots of new words for me in this one, but my absolute favourite was миф (myth)
My mom is attending a Russian class and she sent me some of her homework exercises, which were about practising the instrumental. I did about half of them but it was a very old-fashioned textbook and by the time I'd got halfway through I'd had enough of the instrumental for one lifetime.
I started chapter 15 of TY Russian. The first grammar point was about prepositional plurals, which was pretty straightforward. The next part is about months and dates, which is one of my least favourite topics in any languages. I stopped at the months of the year, before I got onto the bit about saying which year I was born in etc. I still need to learn the months properly but at least they look significantly easier than in Croatian
The rest of my evening I've spent playing with my new LWT and going through every single word in the first chapter of Twilight for a second time. I'm about two thirds done now and I'm getting to the stage now where I could go on Mastermind with the first chapter of Twilight as my specialist subject
Last night, before I knew my boyfriend was magically going to install LWT for me, I actually read the second chapter of Twilight on Readlang. My thoughts from having done that are that reading on Readlang is a lot quicker than LWT but also a lot less effective. On Readlang you just click on the word and a translation appears, whereas on LWT you have to look the word up and type the translation in yourself. The former sounds good, but it's actually the effort of doing the latter which I think helps me learn the words. Once I've looked a word up for LWT and typed in the definition, there's a reasonable chance of me remembering it. Whereas on Readlang, because I could just click on a definition whenever I wanted one, I didn't feel like any of the words were sticking in my head at all.
Total time = 285 minutes. Streak = 84 days
I tried to be positive and start over and, in fairness, it was clearly going to be less work to go through the first chapter of Twilight a second time because I could genuinely remember the definitions of a lot of the words I'd had to look up first time around. But after 30 minutes or so I left my computer for a while to go for a walk and once I got back, the entire thing had frozen and LWT was declining to work yet again. At this point, I decided to categorically give up. Yes, I'm sure there was a way I could fix it and I'm sure there is a way I could back up and restore all my stuff, but ultimately I am not a computer person and I can't afford to spend half my spare time trying to resolve technical problems which are way above my head 
