18 MarchToday was quite a productive day because I was working in Birmingham.
RussianI got through all my Memrise/Anki reviews on the train and then used the walk to work to make a start on lesson 20 of Pimsleur. I finished it at lunchtime and by the end of the day I managed to walk for long enough to get through all of lesson 21 as well. To be honest, they weren't terribly useful lessons as they were mainly teaching how to ask people whether they've got children and say how many children you've got. But I've decided that, since I only do Pimsleur when I'm in Birmingham and my schedule means I'm only working in Birmingham for a couple of days a week at the moment, I need to make the most of those days to get through as much Pimsleur as possible
Inspired by finding the text and audio of Twilight in Russian last night, I decided to install LWT on my computer. In a fit of over-optimism, I convinced myself that I could do this because I'd successfully installed it on a previous computer a few years back. I even went back through old logs to locate a useful post from Brun Ugle which I remembered following to install it last time. If I'd managed it last time, surely I could successfully follow the same instructions now...
Nope, an hour later I was ready to throw my computer at the wall. LWT is probably the only thing which makes Anki seem user-friendly. Eventually, after a significant amount of googling, I realised that last time I'd installed this damn thing I was using Windows 8.1 and the instructions are slightly different if you're on Windows 10.
I managed it in the end, but I haven't managed to get the Glosbe dictionary working for Russian. I don't know why - I did manage to get it working for Croatian in 2017, so there's no logical reason for this. Instead I found instructions online for how to set up the Word Reference dictionary as Dictionary 1 and Forvo as Dictionary 2. I normally love Forvo but I don't think it's terribly useful for translations, so I'll have to make another attempt at getting Glosbe to work at some point...
Anyway, after all this effort, I was then able to use LWT to read the prologue to Twilight. If you're familiar with the book, you'll know it's a mere 100 words or so. So the effort definitely feels worthwhile
I decided to cheer myself up by definitely quitting Anki and starting off my list of useful vocab from TY Russian in Memrise instead. Based on the ratio of words added to time spent so far, I'd say it's at least twice as quick to add the words to Memrise than to add them to Anki. I hope the whole Decks app thing works out. I cancelled my Memrise Pro subscription but I couldn't get a refund, so I've still got Pro until it was due to run out at the end of October anyway. It sounds like that will enable me to use the Decks app offline, once it's created, and I guess by the time my subscription runs out in October I'll be in a better position to judge whether I want to subscribe again.
Total time = 150 minutes. Streak = 77 days
Maybe some sort of bonus??
