Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

[Radioclare]

21 August
We had guests this evening so I needed to make sure I got lots of Russian done earlier during the day.

Russian
I did Memrise on the train and then lesson 26 of Pimsleur while walking to the office. That was more than enough to get my 30 minutes in, but I've set myself the goal of trying to finish Pimsleur before I go on holiday, so I forced myself to go out of the office for a walk at lunchtime and start lesson 27 as well, ultimately finishing it on the walk back to the station in the evening. Both lessons were variations on the theme of going to the American embassy to get a visa. Although Pimsleur has grown on me a lot during the course of the past year, an hour of it in one day definitely felt like a lot! I would say that I'm not going to do two lessons in one day again but I probably will have to do it on one more day if I really am going to finish the course by the end of the month

Total time = 79 minutes. Streak = 232 days

[Radioclare]

22 August
Busy busy busy. I stayed a couple of hours late at work tonight to try and get stuff done.

Russian
I only did one lesson of Pimsleur today - lesson 28 This one was mainly about how to say you'd lost your keys. I hope I never in end up in the situation of being in Russia and having lost my keys

This evening I was working on my Colloquial Russian Memrise course. I've learned all the vocab from chapter 11 now, so I needed to add the audio for the chapter 12 words.

Total time = 62 minutes. Streak = 233 days

Croatian
This evening I watched the final episode (number 169!) of the first season of my series 'Na granici'. I said a few days ago that I thought all the threads of the storyline were coming together to a nice conclusion, but I was completely wrong In the last few episodes things really hotted up, with one character getting kidnapped and another accidentally shooting at a police officer and having to flee the country. So now I'm quite impatient for the second season to start

[Radioclare]

23 August
Worked from home today which should have made a nice relaxing start to the bank holiday weekend, but then I ended up working until 8pm so it wasn't really

Russian
That meant I didn't do any Russian until after dinner... and I didn't have a whole lot of time to spare because I'm going away for the long weekend and needed to pack.

I did my Memrise reviews, which only took 8 minutes, and then I watched a new Russian Progress video. It was really interesting, about a town called Sortavala, which is currently in Russia but which at various points in history has been in Finland. I started watching without the subtitles but then the audio got a bit too quiet, so I started again with subtitles.

Total time = 31 minutes. Streak = 234 days

I'm going to Segovia for the weekend so not surely whether I'll update for the next few days.

[Radioclare]

24 August
This morning I flew to Madrid, from where I took a train to the town of Segovia. So far it's absolutely beautiful Although I find Spanish baffling

Russian
I tried to do some Memrise reviews in the airport this morning, which felt quite a brave thing to try before my first coffee of the day, but I had so few reviews to do that I only clocked up 4 minutes.

On the plane from London to Madrid I managed 28 minutes of Colloquial Russian. I've started the grammar section of chapter 12. Overall the theme of the chapter seems to be plurals, so I was a bit apprehensive that I was going to have to deal with the genitive plural. But the good news is that the first grammar point was on the nominative plural and the nominative plural is one of the few bits of Russian grammar that I feel I have a reasonable grasp of, so I had spent quite a nice half an hour making notes about things I was already fairly familiar with and then doing exercises which I could actually get right

My boyfriend asked me earlier if I was looking forward to the end of the year and being able to give up my streak. I can't decide what the answer to that question is. Today is definitely one of those days when if it wasn't for the 365 challenge, I wouldn't have bothered doing any studying today. Studying Russian grammar on a cramped budget flight having had about 4.5 hours sleep is definitely not ideal. But the good thing about the challenge is that it forces you to study even when the conditions are less than ideal. I think I need to wait until the end of the year and assess how much progress I've made in Russian before I decide whether this is a habit I want to keep going in 2020.

Total time = 32 minutes. Streak = 235 days

Croatian
I wanted to finish reading 'Pakao u Madridu' before I came to Spain, but I failed. The book is a big hardback and I'm only travelling with a fairly small backpack this weekend, so I didn't feel I could justify bringing it with me to finish, both in terms of the space it would have taken up in my bag and the weight I would have had to carry.

I've been enjoying reading in Croatian though, so I brought another Croatian novel with me. This one is called 'Rakova djeca' by Pavao Pavličić. It's a detective story, about a series of murders where the victims are cancer patients, already terminally ill, and so there's a big mystery about what anyone's motivation would be to murder them. That sounds like quite a depressing theme, and it is a bit dark, but it's also really well written; one of those books that are a pleasure to read regardless of how the storyline ultimately plays out. I've been reading it on the plane and on a train today, so I'm already about 2/3 of the way through and will probably finish the rest of it tomorrow.

[Radioclare]

25 August
Segovia is gorgeous; an amazing aqueduct, a beautiful cathedral and a castle too

Croatian
As predicted, I finished reading 'Rakova djeca' this afternoon. I thought I'd guessed the murderer twice and both times I was wrong, which I think is a sign of a good detective novel It was 250 pages which means that I've (finally!!!) finished my Croatian Super Challenge. I'm not going to make it to a double challenge this time around, so this is as good as it gets.

Russian
I cleared a few Memrise reviews this morning and then this afternoon I felt brave enough to tackle the genitive plural in 'Colloquial Russian'. Although this is clearly not my favourite grammar topic, I do think that this textbook managed to present it in quite an accessible way. I made three pages of notes (!) and I did feel like some of it is starting to sink in a little bit more now. After the notes I did the exercises, which I did okay on, so that was a nice confidence boost. It definitely does help me seeing the same subject presented in different ways by different textbooks.

All in all that took over an hour and I was hoping that it might bring me to the end of the grammar points in chapter 12. But I was wrong; the chapter goes on to teach the imperative and then has a section about numbers. I had no more energy left for grammar by this stage, so those will be a treat for tomorrow, perhaps on the plane home!

Total time = 76 minutes. Streak = 236 days

[Radioclare]

26 August
I had an amazing day in the walled town of Ávila. I was going to say that it's the best walled town I've ever been to, but the best would clearly be Dubrovnik and the second best would probably be Carcassonne in France, so Ávila is probably only my third favourite walled town I was due to fly back from Madrid to the UK on Monday evening, but heavy rain meant my flight was delayed and the airline have had to put me up in a hotel overnight

Russian
I was originally planning to study Colloquial Russian on the plane, but the train I took from Ávila to Madrid was surprisingly nice, so I decided to study there instead, which was probably just as well I finished chapter 12, covering the section about the imperative and a further section about genitive after numbers. I didn't do terribly well at the exercise on the imperative, which I think highlights that I'm not very good at conjugating verbs and should try to focus on this a bit more.

Total time = 48 minutes. Streak = 237 days

[Radioclare]

27 August
My flight finally left Madrid this evening, over 20 hours behind schedule. On the one hand I've had quite a restful day, enjoying a free hotel, breakfast and lunch at the airline's expense. On the other hand, it's incredibly stressful because I've not been able to do any work and I have so much which I need to get done before Friday evening!

Russian
Before I left the hotel to go to the airport this morning, I did some Russian Memrise. I hadn't logged into Memrise for a day or so, so I had a bit of a backlog of reviews to catch up on, but I also wanted to make some progress with learning the vocabulary from chapter 12 of Colloquial Russian.

I then spent a bit of time starting chapter 13 of Colloquial Russian. I copied out the first text and made a list of the new vocabulary. I'm not 100% sure what the theme of this chapter is yet. The text was about a character who has just rented a flat going to the market to buy food, so there were lots of genitive plurals in it.

Total time = 40 minutes. Streak = 238 days

[Meddysong]

26 August
I was due to fly back from Madrid to the UK on Monday evening, but heavy rain meant my flight was delayed and the airline have had to put me up in a hotel overnight

Do you remember that hailstorm we travelled through on the train earlier that day? The one that sounded like gushing water?

https://timeofftakeoff.com/holidays/201 ... mment=1254

And still people reacted to the cancellation with their utterly selfish "I don't want free food, I want a flight" nonsense!

[Radioclare]

Do you remember that hailstorm we travelled through on the train earlier that day? The one that sounded like gushing water?

Wow okay, now I understand a bit better why the flight was delayed

28 August
I managed to miss 44 emails while I was stuck in Madrid yesterday. So today was quite a busy day.

Russian
I did some Memrise on the train to work. I didn't have many reviews, so I was able to concentrate on learning new vocab from chapter 12.

I also got through lesson 29 of Pimsleur 3. Ironically, given I'd missed a couple of meetings that yesterday that I needed to reschedule today, today's episode involved learning how to say that you were going to be late for a meeting and needed to reschedule it

Total time = 46 minutes. Streak = 239 days

[Radioclare]

29 August
Still trying to make up the work hours I missed on Tuesday - and I have a lot to do anyway before I go to Bulgaria - so I stayed at work until after 9pm tonight. I could have stayed a bit later but I got nervous because I was the only person left on my floor and I couldn't remember what time the outer door gets locked. Also the lights are motion-sensitive, so when you're the only person left you have to keep standing up and running round in a circle to turn them back on after they time out

Russian
I did some Memrise on the train. Actually my train was a bit delayed, so I got through all my reviews before it even arrived, and then I did some new vocab on the way to the office.

I also did Pimsleur 3 lesson 30 today, which mostly about how to tell people you've finished your work and you're going back to the USA now. My iPod informed me there were 32 lessons in Pimsleur 3 so I was thinking that this could be a pretty boring concept to practise for the three remaining lessons... Then I got to the end of the lesson and found it was actually the end of the course Well, sort of. It turns out that lessons 31 and 32 are for practice with the reading booklet as opposed to being normal lessons. Because I'd stayed late at work, I couldn't get a train back to the town where I live, so I had to go to a different station for my boyfriend to pick me up. On the way I listened to lesson 31 and although I didn't have the reading booklet in front of me, there were some useful bits of pronunciation advice in there, so I'll probably listen to lesson 32 tomorrow, and then I can say that I have officially finished with Pimsleur

Total time = 79 minutes. Streak = 240 days