Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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

Postby Radioclare » Thu May 09, 2019 9:40 pm

9 May
Work is not going very well at the moment; too many deadlines and not enough staff. I think the solution is for me to work on Saturday, which is something I hate having to do. Grrr!

Russian
I had a client meeting in a different town this morning and managed to do Memrise on my first train. The rest of the journey there and the journey home were spent dealing with email chaos.

This evening I tried to finish the second adjective chapter in TY Russian Grammar, but I lost the will to live before I got to the end of the sections on comparatives. Like everything else in Russian, comparatives feel complicated and I don't have much patience with long vs short adjectives either; one version of an adjective ought to be enough for any language :lol: I'm consoling myself that when I get to the end of this chapter, the next one is about adverbs. Surely even Russian can't manage to complicate adverbs?!

Later I spent some time working on chapter 8 of Twilight in LWT. I've got it down to "only" about 450 unknown words. Very slow progress!

Total time = 117 minutes. Streak = 129 days
2 x

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

Postby Radioclare » Fri May 10, 2019 9:13 pm

10 May
Very glad it's the weekend because today I've felt like I was getting very close to running out of my supply of patience :lol:

Russian
I was working at a client today but it was on the far side of Birmingham, so I still had my usual train commute to do Memrise. The Memrise 2 course has moved on to talking about shopping now, which feels like a less useful topic for me. Clothes shopping, I mean. I don't think I'm going to go to Russia and start asking shop assistants whether red suits me, or anything like that.

After my second train I had to walk a mile or so to get to my client. That gave me an opportunity to start lesson 18 of Pimsleur 2, and over the course of the rest of the day I've got through all of it. This lesson included a bit about asking how old people are, so more useful practice on numbers.

Outside of Pimsleur, I'm finding that any time I try to formulate even the most basic of sentences in Russian in my own head, it's coming out in Croatian. For that reason, I'm contemplating taking a break from watching my Croatian series until after I get back from my trip. This won't help my Croatian Super Challenge ambitions, but ultimately I guess a few weeks off Croatian isn't going to kill me. I contemplated stopping listening to Croatian/Serbian music for a few weeks as well, but I decided that might kill me :lol: I'm still haven't got tired of listening to the recent Bajaga album on repeat.

I do need to listen to Russian more, though. This evening I watched a new Russian Progress video about Red Square, which was pretty cool to see. I also watched an episode of Thomas the Tank to see whether I could understand more of it than I could last time I watched (probably a couple of months ago now) and on balance I thought I could, so I guess this is progress.

Total time = 73 minutes. Streak = 130 days
3 x

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

Postby IronMike » Fri May 10, 2019 9:55 pm

Radioclare wrote:Outside of Pimsleur, I'm finding that any time I try to formulate even the most basic of sentences in Russian in my own head, it's coming out in Croatian. For that reason, I'm contemplating taking a break from watching my Croatian series until after I get back from my trip. This won't help my Croatian Super Challenge ambitions, but ultimately I guess a few weeks off Croatian isn't going to kill me.


You shouldn't worry too much about this. When I was doing Turbo-Serbo, it took over two months of full-time (8x5x8) or 320 hours of classwork plus 2-3 hours of homework a night (adding another 80-120 hours) before I stopped akanye-ing the /o/ in every BCS word I spoke! Not to mention forgetting the clitics...
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat May 11, 2019 11:38 pm

IronMike wrote:You shouldn't worry too much about this. When I was doing Turbo-Serbo, it took over two months of full-time (8x5x8) or 320 hours of classwork plus 2-3 hours of homework a night (adding another 80-120 hours) before I stopped akanye-ing the /o/ in every BCS word I spoke! Not to mention forgetting the clitics...


This makes me feel a bit better, thanks :)

12 May
Saturday, but I did end up working. It's the first time I've done that this year and I probably only did about 4 hours, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of a weekend, but still annoying.

German
Last night I finished reading 'Anonym' and it was so good! The second book in the series is already on my wishlist for Christmas. I read a lot of crime fiction and what made this one stand out was not so much the plot, but the characterisation. The characters and the relationship between them was so interesting, that at times the actually solution to who the murderer was seemed of secondary importance. Definitely recommend. And it gave me another 379 pages towards my German reading SC, which now stands at 179 'books'.

Russian
After I finished work today I had various admin things I needed to sort and then only a brief window before going out for the evening to get some Russian done. I virtuously did some Memrise, then rewatched the Russian Progress video from yesterday to see whether I understood it better second time around. I think I did, slightly.

I also watched another Thomas the Tank episode but I seemed to have chosen the wrong vintage of Thomas for my tastes, because this episode didn't feature the Fat Controller; instead we had a Thin Controller :? The Fat Controller was always one of my favourite characters as a child, so I found this upsetting :lol:

A while ago I bought a Russian phrasebook, so when I just had a few minutes to kill before going out the door, I started reading through that. While phrasebooks clearly have limitations, I do think they can be pretty useful when you're intending to go somewhere as a tourist and want to be more confident in what to say in specific situations.

Total time = 49 minutes. Streak = 131 days
4 x

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

Postby Radioclare » Sun May 12, 2019 9:16 pm

12 May
No work today :) I had the whole day at home but didn't get through as much studying as I expected, because I spent a lot of time researching travel plans. I'm going to Kiev for a weekend soon, so wanted to make some plans for that. And I spent some time researching options for post-Christmas holidays later this year.

Russian
My computer was downloading some large files from the cloud this morning, which slowed it down a lot, and this was actually helpful because it meant I spent 20 minutes doing Memrise on my phone after breakfast, rather than getting stuck into Esperanto-related work or other things I might have done online.

I then went back to TY Russian Grammar and re-did the entire second chapter on adjectives. I felt like I got a much better grip on the stuff re comparatives after a good night's sleep, and I also did the section on superlatives which felt easier. It took me over an hour to read, make notes and do the exercises in the book.

This evening I've done a little bit more reading on LWT. Still in chapter 8 of Twilight, but I don't mind because this is quite a good chapter. I must have wasted a good five minutes trying to decode the following sentence, though:

"Дойдя до угла, я увидела, что это тупик, подъездная дорога к другому складу".

The source of my great confusion was the word "тупик", which on my first attempt at looking up I translated as "puffin". If you're not as familiar with Twilight as me, this is the chapter in which Bella is being followed by some unsavoury guys in Port Angeles and Edward is about to turn up in his Volvo to rescue her. So at this point she's basically walking through some sort of industrial estate and it is admittedly a couple of years since I listened to the audiobook of this in Croatian, but I was pretty sure that at no point in this scene did she encounter a puffin :?

I eventually realised that "тупик" has a second meaning - "dead end" - which makes a whole load more sense in the context of this story :lol:

Total time = 127 minutes. Streak = 132 days
6 x

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

Postby MamaPata » Mon May 13, 2019 6:50 am

So weird, I only ever knew тупик as a dead end! Don’t know when I’ll come across a text about puffins but at least I am now prepared!
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cjareck
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby cjareck » Mon May 13, 2019 7:01 am

In spoken language they are differentiated by the stress:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1 ... 0%B8%D0%BA
By the way, I learned that this word also means a special type of entrance in fortification which I was able to connect with a Polish counterpart = "wejście labiryntowe" (a literal translation would be "labyrinth entrance," but I do not know the actual name of it in fortification).
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon May 13, 2019 10:09 pm

cjareck wrote:In spoken language they are differentiated by the stress:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1 ... 0%B8%D0%BA

Thank you, that is useful to know :)

MamaPata wrote:So weird, I only ever knew тупик as a dead end! Don’t know when I’ll come across a text about puffins but at least I am now prepared!

I realised after this incident that I don't know the word for puffin in any of my languages. Probably because I never talk about puffins! Wikipedia says that the Croatian word is also "tupik". In Esperanto it's "fraterkulo" and in German "Papageitaucher". Definitely the first time I've ever seen any of those words :lol:

13 May
Today's been reasonably productive and I was grateful to my past self for having made the decision to work on Saturday.

Russian
I've managed over half an hour of Memrise today and am still making good progress with the Russian 2 course. At this rate, I might even manage to finish it before I go to Russia.

I completed lesson 19 of Pimsleur 2 on the way to work and at lunchtime. Pimsleur seems to have gone from something I loathe to one of the most useful resources I'm using.

This evening I worked through the entire chapter on adverbs in TY Russian Grammar. Adverbs are a nice simple grammatical topic :) It felt like it was taking me ages though and I nearly gave up halfway through because I figured I'd been studying for ages already. One of the benefits of this challenge is that it makes me religiously time everything I do and consulting my timer showed that I'd only actually been studying for 14 minutes. 14 minutes doing Russian grammar feels like a really long time!

I continued reading chapter 8 of Twilight with LWT and think I'm about halfway through it now. I read for 45 minutes today and 45 minutes of Twilight feels loads shorter than 14 minutes of adverbs :lol:

Total time = 134 minutes. Streak = 133 days
3 x

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

Postby Radioclare » Tue May 14, 2019 10:19 pm

14 May
Work continues to be hard. I tell myself that Jan - March is the busy time, but I think I'm a lot busier now than I was in January.

Russian
I worked from home today but I didn't stop until 8 and then I drank vodka, which slightly hindered subsequent opportunities to be productive.

All I've managed is some Memrise and a bit more reading of Twilight. There was a new video on the Russian Progress channel so I watched that a couple of times, with and without subtitles. It was a video that involved multiple people talking and with quite a bit of background noise, so I didn't do too well at understanding it without the subtitles.

Total time = 104 minutes. Streak = 134 days
3 x

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

Postby IronMike » Wed May 15, 2019 1:55 pm

Radioclare wrote:... and then I drank vodka, which slightly hindered subsequent opportunities to be productive.


Hinder schminder. Count this as cultural immersion. Everyone speaks Russian better with vodka, even Russians. Swallow the endings like you do the vodka!
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