Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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

Postby Radioclare » Fri Dec 27, 2019 7:44 pm

27 December
I flew to Oslo this morning, spent the middle of the day in Oslo airport and then have flown on to Narvik in the north of Norway this evening.

Russian
My alarm went off at 4am this morning so I've been feeling pretty tired. However, while I was waiting for breakfast at Gatwick this morning I spent a few minutes clearing my Memrise reviews. And while I was in Oslo airport, I spent some time finishing chapter 18 of Penguin Russian. As I said yesterday, the rest of the grammar was about relative clauses, so I made notes on that and did the exercises. Then I read through the dialogues and texts at the end of the chapter. There was longish text about Siberia which was quite interesting.

Total time = 35 minutes. Streak = 361 days

Croatian
I finished reading 1984 in Croatian on my second flight. It's years since I read this book in English, and while I found it a bit hard to get into at the beginning in Croatian, towards the end I really enjoyed it :-)
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Dec 28, 2019 9:07 pm

28 December
I arrived in Narvik late last night. It turns out it's really quite hilly here; I didn't really appreciate that fact last night when I was trying to pull my suitcase up steep, ice-covered pavements, but the views today have been nice :)

Russian
Not very exciting studying today, I'm afraid. I was way ahead with the grammar Penguin Russian chapters compared to learning to vocabulary in Memrise, so I needed to finish updating my course for the chapter 17 vocabulary and then type out all the new words from chapter 18. There were several lists of comparatives in chapter 18, so overall the list of new vocabulary was quite long and it took a while. It was good to get it done today though, when I had easy access to my computer, because tomorrow I'm travelling to Sweden.

Total time = 42 minutes. Streak = 362 days
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cjareck
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby cjareck » Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:34 pm

Radioclare wrote:28 December
I arrived in Narvik late last night. It turns out it's really quite hilly here; I didn't really appreciate that fact last night when I was trying to pull my suitcase up steep, ice-covered pavements, but the views today have been nice :)

Since Narvik is quite an important place in Polish military history, I know the topography quite well thanks to Goole Maps. I used it to explain to my students in what conditions the battle took place.

Many years ago, I organized a trip with backpacks and planned everything on the map but didn't care much about lines that have the same height (I don't know the name in English) and we ended going up quite a steep hill. Since then I care much about them ;)
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Dec 29, 2019 8:33 pm

cjareck wrote:Since Narvik is quite an important place in Polish military history, I know the topography quite well thanks to Goole Maps. I used it to explain to my students in what conditions the battle took place.


I should probably have looked at the topography before I booked my accommodation :lol:

Many years ago, I organized a trip with backpacks and planned everything on the map but didn't care much about lines that have the same height (I don't know the name in English) and we ended going up quite a steep hill. Since then I care much about them ;)


I can imagine! They're called contour lines in English :)

29 December
Today turned out to be a bit of an adventure. I travelled from Narvik in Norway to Abisko in Sweden by train, and it was a really beautiful train journey. Because I couldn't check into my hostel in Abisko until late afternoon, I had decided to break the journey at a place on the Swedish border called Riksgränsen. My guidebook had said this was a popular Swedish ski resort with plenty of cafes and restaurants. What I didn't realise, was that the skiing season doesn't start there until February and everything was closed up today. So we ended up spending about four hours sitting in the snow waiting for the next train :lol:

Russian
It was too cold to do any Russian while I was in Riksgränsen. Once I got to Abisko in the evening, I started chapter 19 of Penguin Russian. The first part of the chapter is about the conditional, which isn't always my favourite grammatical theme, but I thought this book did a really good job of explaining it :) There were two exercises; one which involved translating Russian conditional sentences to English, and one which involved translating English conditional sentences to Russian. Both were useful practice :)

Total time = 34 minutes. Streak = 363 days
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Dec 30, 2019 6:12 pm

30 December
Had a great time today walking around Abisko; it's a really beautiful place :)

Russian
This afternoon I continued with chapter 19 of Penguin Russian. I completed the stuff on conditionals yesterday, so started a new part of the chapter today, which was about expressing obligation. Although I've covered this topic before, this book explained things really well and I think I know understand the use of должен better than I did before. I also spent a bit of time catching up on Memrise reviews.

Total time = 32 minutes. Streak = 364 days

The end is in sight for this challenge! I honestly haven't 100% decided whether I'm going to continue with the challenge next year or not; if I do, it will be with a 30 minute target for "generic" rather than Russian, so not as intense as what I've done this year. I'm going to think about it and make a final decision tomorrow :lol:
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Dec 31, 2019 6:31 pm

31 December
Did I mention that Abisko is beautiful? I haven't seen the northern lights yet, but I did get to see some polar stratospheric clouds this morning, which were equally amazing :)

Russian
I was a little bit worried that I was going to forget to study today and accidentally break my streak :lol: The good news is that I didn't! Once I got back to the hostel after the day's activities, I made some more progress with chapter 19 of Penguin Russian. The rest of the chapter is about prefixes, so there was basically a list of prefixes with their meanings and some examples of them being used. I feel like this is all working up to the next chapter being about verbs of motion :( It was a useful list but it took me quite a long time to copy it out with all the examples, so I didn't do any exercises today.

Total time = 37 minutes. Streak = 365 days (yay!!!)
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Dec 31, 2019 6:37 pm

End of year post
Wow, I can't believe that 2019 is over. This has been an interesting year for my language learning, mainly due to the 365 Challenge.

Looking at the first page of my log, my goals for 2019 were:

1. Read 10 novels in German. This is coincidentally the number of German novels I have in my to-read pile after Christmas. And it should be enough to stop my German becoming too rusty.


Failed! I appear to have read a mere 7 German novels this year, which does make sense because I haven't got to the end of my 2019 to-read pile yet. The books I read were:

1. 'Agent 6' by Tom Rob Smith. This was a translation from English, the third in a series set in Soviet Russia. I've read the whole series in German, I think.

2. 'Anonym' by Ursula Poznanski. Have I mentioned how much I like reading Ursula Poznanski? :D This was the first book in a new police series and I really enjoyed it.

3. 'Der Seelenbrecher' by Sebastian Fitzek. Sebastian Fitzek's books are always pretty unusual (I think the genre he writes in is called 'Psychothriller') but this one blew my mind like nothing ever has before. At one point I almost screamed out loud :lol: I wouldn't recommend reading this in a dark house by yourself!

4. 'Das vierte Protokoll' by Frederick Forsyth. Another translation, but I really enjoyed it. A very exciting spy novel.

5. 'Abgeschnitten' by Sebastian Fitzek and Michael Tsokos. This one was too gory for me; way too much autopsy detail. I don't think I could actually have read it if it was in English!

6. 'Amokspiel' by Sebastian Fitzek. This one was less gory :) It was about a psychopath who took a bunch of people hostage on a live radio show. A story with lots of good twists.

7. 'Konklave' by Robert Harris. Wow. I found it incredible how a novel which fundamentally involved a bunch of characters sitting in a room could possibly be so tense. So well written!

2. Read 6,510 pages in Croatian. If I can achieve it, this would be enough for me to finish the current Super Challenge with a double challenge in reading. I'm not sure whether this quantity is actually achievable, as it would mean reading approximately 1.5 novels in Croatian every month, but we will see!


Failed :( I read 12 books in total in Croatian this year, which added up to a mere 3,804 pages. Although I am disappointed about this - particularly because I've completed a Double Challenge for Croatian reading in my past two Super Challenges without any difficulties - I have to confess that this was really a result of my conscious choice to make Russian my priority this year over Croatian.

The books I did manage to read were:

1. 'Dvadeset godina samostalne Hrvatske' by Ivo Goldstein. This felt like a big achievement to start the year; reading my first non-fiction history book in Croatian.

2. 'Salon za plakanje' by Pavao Pavličić. Pavao Pavličić writes atmospheric crime novels set in Zagreb. This was one which kept me guessing until the end.

3. 'Tajna povijest Moskve' by Ekaterina Sedia. This was a translation into Croatian and one of the most bizarre novels I've ever read. It was about the population of Moscow turning into birds.

4. 'Digitalna tvrđava' by Dan Brown. This was a translation of a Dan Brown book I'd not read before. To be honest, all Dan Brown books merge into one in my head, but I remember this one as a fun read.

5. 'Rakova djeca' by Pavao Pavličić. This was a murder mystery set in a cancer ward which probably sounds pretty grim, but it was actually quite exciting.

6. 'Pakao u Madridu' by C J Sansom. I read this novel in English years ago and I really enjoyed re-reading it in Croatian this summer. I felt like I got more out of it now that I've actually been to Spain a few times and understand a bit more about Spanish history.

7. 'Pjesma za rastanak' by Pavao Pavličić. This was a mystery story about a serial killer who was working his way through members of a Zagreb choir.

8. 'Moriarty' by Anthony Horowitz. I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes in any language, so I really enjoyed this one.

9. 'Zivotinjska farma' by George Orwell. I hadn't read this book since I was in school and I think I got more out of it reading as an adult.

10. 'Najlepše basne'. This was a collection of fables in Serbian Cyrillic. It was only slightly over 100 pages, but I am still pretty slow at reading Serbian Cyrillic, so it took me a while to get through.

11. 'Kod kuće: kratka povijest privatnog života' by Bill Bryson. This was a translation of a non-fiction book about the history of the home and I have to admit that I found it pretty heavy going. I guess I'm not a big reader of non-fiction in English, so it stands to reason that I find it tougher than fiction in a foreign language.

12. '1984' by George Orwell. As with 'Animal Farm' above, I hadn't read this book since I was a teenager and I really enjoyed the experience of re-reading it as an adult :)

Overall I finished my Croatian Super Challenge with 146 'books'.

3. Watch 11,871 minutes of Croatian TV. This is the magic number that would bring me to a double challenge in the films part of the Super Challenge too. My first thought was that this number was definitely not achievable. But, when I did the calculations, I found it worked out as 3.8 hours per week which is roughly five 45-minute TV episodes. The series I'm currently watching broadcasts five episodes per week, so suddenly this doesn't feel too unrealistic.


Failed :( This turned out to be a really unrealistic goal in the context of my new found commitment to Russian. Like my Croatian reading Super Challenge, my Croatian film Super Challenge has also suffered as a result of the time I've devoted to Russian in 2019 and I'm only finishing the challenge with 141 'films'.

If I add up everything I've watched this year, I get to 6,409 minutes.

I mainly watched the Croatian series 'Na granici', finishing the first season and starting the second season. During a pause in January when the series was off air, I experimented with a VPN and tried to get into watching Croatian news programmes, with varying levels of success. I listened to some of the Croatian audiobook version of Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility' while on my travels over the summer, and I managed to get through an entire year without watching an actual film :lol:

4. Spend at least 30 minutes per day every day learning Russian as part of the 365-day challenge. This is the big one for me: either I make some significant progress with Russian this year, or I give up. 


Studying 30 minutes of Russian a day has been the thing which has really defined 2019 for me. At the end of 2018 I was feeling pretty down about my inability to learn Russian, which was as much down to my failure to consistently put time into it as the fact that it's a really difficult language. I was definitely on the verge of giving up and deciding that Russian just wasn't for me, so the 365 challenge came around at just the right time (Thank you Peter Mollenburg for starting it!).

To be honest, when I first embarked on the challenge I wasn't convinced I was going to be able to keep it up, because my record for consistently studying Russian had been so poor over the past few years. I'd have a burst of making real progress - probably motivated by a 6WC - and then I'd let some sort of stress (either work or Esperanto-related) get in the way and give up. By the time I got back to studying again (probably the next 6WC!) I'd have forgotten anything I'd learned and have to start at the beginning again. You seriously do not want to know how many times I did the first 10 lessons of Pimsleur :lol:

Signing up to a public challenge gave me the boost of motivation I needed to stick with the daily study in January, with the hope that by the time February came daily Russian would have become enough of a habit for me not to drop it. It was very motivating at the start to see how well everyone else was doing (I didn't want to be one of the first to miss a day!) and it also really motivated me to update my log every day. I haven't written in my log every single day this year, missing some days when travelling and a few when I just didn't feel like it, but on the majority of days it has been one of the last things I've done before going to bed, and knowing that I was going to have to write something in my log helped give me the motivation to actually have to do something. I know it hasn't always been the most inspiring read to hear how many Memrise reviews I had to do on the train in the morning etc, but it has been genuinely helpful to me :lol: And I'm not joking when I say that I was also motivated not to miss a day by the fact that the scoring system for the challenge was so complicated. If it was a choice between doing 30 minutes of Russian and having to read all the challenge posts to figure out how many points I needed to deduct if I didn't, just doing the 30 minutes of Russian always seemed like the easiest choice!

For me it has been a really interesting experiment to commit to doing something every single day and this is probably the longest streak I've ever done anything. It has helped to deconstruct the narrative in my head which told me that I don't have time to learn Russian. There has always been time. Admittedly, some days have been harder than others. There have been days when I have worked really late and days when I've been travelling and really not felt like Russian at all. But on the vast majority of "normal" days it's been quite straight forward to fit in 30 minutes of study. I've studied in 10 different countries, in addition to the UK. I've studied on aeroplanes and in airports, on vast quantities of trains and even a few buses; I've studied when drunk, when tired and when I've felt like my head was going to explode. And I've proved to myself that it is always possible to find the time, if you make something a priority.

That said, I've been pretty lucky this year. Nothing terrible has happened in my personal life and I haven't been ill with anything worse than a cold. The people who have really inspired me in this challenge are the people who have kept their streaks despite serious personal issues and the people who have continued to study every day, despite having missed a day or two. If I'd missed a day, I think I would just have sulked and given up :lol:

The downside of having made Russian my main priority this year is that other priorities have slipped. From a language point of view, the amount of time I've spent on Croatian has drastically reduced and this makes me sad. To do something for 365 days in a row no matter where you are and what is going on in life, you have to be borderline obsessed with it. But there is a limit to the number of things you can be obsessed with, and sometimes I wonder whether it has been worth putting this much time and energy into a language. If I had made it my number 1 priority to get 10,000 steps a day for 365 days instead (for example), perhaps that would have had a more positive impact on my life.

The other thing which hugely motivated me between January and June was fear :lol: In January I booked my first ever trip to Russia and the terror was real. I would have been nervous about going anyway, but I felt extra specially nervous because this was a family trip and everyone was coming on the basis that I was going to be able to speak sufficient Russian to bail them out of any difficulties which arose. Travelling with other people can be difficult anyway, because we all have different expectations of what constitutes a "good" trip. So I felt like I was under a lot of extra pressure to make progress in a short amount of time. But this probably was beneficial in ensuring I didn't break the streak. And once I'd been to Russia and survived, I had extra motivation to continue learning because I didn't want to lose the progress that I'd already made.

I think my first trip to Russia can be considered a success. The visa process felt extremely complicated and it was a relief when our entire group successfully got visas. Seeing St Petersburg and Moscow was amazing. My personal highlights were seeing the statue of Lenin outside Finland Station, seeing Saint Basil's Cathedral in Red Square for the first time, and drinking tonnes of fresh cranberry juice. No, my Russian wasn't as good as I would have hoped it would be for my first trip to Russia and even simple tasks like buying bus tickets felt quite daunting. But we got through a lot of situations without having to fall back on English and you have to start somewhere :)

It was also quite helpful that I'd been to Kiev/Kijiv the weekend before my Russian trip. That allowed me to have a little bit of Russian reading/speaking practice in advance. And I really enjoyed going to Ukraine again.

So, how much progress have I actually made with Russian this year? That's the million dollar question. To be honest, my answer is "I have no idea!". Sometimes it feels like I have made tonnes of progress. Other times it feels like I have made zero progress and can barely construct the simplest of sentences. I wish I had taken a test at the start of the year so that I could retake it now and measure my progress properly. I would like to have felt like I had progressed from being a beginner to the intermediate stage. I don't think I have quite made it to intermediate yet. But I think I can say that I have progressed from being an eternal beginner to a beginner who is at least steadily moving towards the intermediate stage :)

If I think back on a year of Russian learning, some of the positives which stand out to me are:

* My Cyrillic handwriting has improved massively. It's not very pretty but I have written out so many grammar exercises that it comes naturally to me now.
* Improving my listening abilities by listening to the Russian Progress podcasts and videos (Thank you to StringerBell for the recommendation!)
* Finishing all three levels of Pimsleur Russian. I started Pimsleur Russian 1 back in 2011 and to be honest I never thought I would ever get to the end of Russian 3, so this does feel like an accomplishment.
* I started listening to Russian music for the first time ever. I found some songs I really like by bands like Мумий Тролль.
* I finished several textbooks including Teach Yourself Russian, Colloquial Russian and Teach Yourself Russian Grammar. I haven't finished Penguin Russian, but I've got further with it than I have on any previous attempt.
* I read my first books in Russian. Admittedly, they were children's books, but still - it was a step forward :) I also started (slowly) reading some of Twilight in Russian using LWT.

Out of all the resources I've used I think it was - very unexpectedly - Pimsleur which helped most with my confidence when I was in Russia.

The most negative thing about learning Russian has been discovering dill :lol:

I didn't specifically make it a goal, but I did say in my opening post to this log that I was potentially going to learn some Bulgarian this year. I did make my first trip to Bulgaria in September and spent a few weeks dabbling with a beginners' textbook in advance of that. I didn't make any useful level of progress but I did really enjoy the experience (and I loved Bulgaria). That, combined with the fact that I received some Bulgarian resources for Christmas, means I may start learning Bulgarian more seriously during 2020. We shall see!
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