Morgana's log

[MorkTheFiddle]

I just want to chip in here and say congratulations on finding a couple of languages you really like.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Allergies kicked into full gear finally I have moments everyday where I question if I took my antihistamine or not. For anyone who has not experienced environmental/inhalant allergies before, they're kind of like having the flu, except for the entire summer if you are like me and are allergic to All The Plants. I look forward to the first frost

I hear you, though my allergies hit me in December and January rather than in the summer. Definitely a bummer, and I wish you well.
As for Russian, it's great to hear your enthusiasm. Good luck with it.

[Brun Ugle]

I think the difference between reading L1 in LR and reading L1 subtitles is that you get into a meditative flow stay in LR that’s much harder to find with TV. It’s hard to find at first with LR too and many people find themselves reading ahead at first, but after a while, you learn to just listen and let your eyes skim along taking in information without really reading in the usual sense. There is no subvocalization, for example, and you’re not trying to read every word so much as just pick up the bits you are missing from the audio.

I think there are a couple of reasons why this works in LR and not so much with subs. First of all, there is the flow of the audio. It’s usually just one person reading to you at a fairly steady pace. In TV, there are many people and the pace of the audio is not steady. There is action in between bursts of dialogue. There are also sound effects and often the dialogue can be unclear in places. This makes the flow state harder to achieve. The second reason it works better with LR is that to do LR properly, you have to already have read the book at least once and, preferably, several times. (It should be a book you know well.) This means that there is no excitement to find out what’s happening, which might pull your attention away from the audio and into the L1 text. It also makes it easier to ‘read without reading’. You aren’t using the L1 to find out what’s going on since you already know that. You are just using it as a crutch to keep track of where you are in the story and to remind yourself of details that you might have forgotten. Again, this means it’s easier to avoid getting sucked into reading losing track of the audio.

[StringerBell]

Netflix has these shows - do you know about them? I saw them on this list and noticed they weren't on your watched list...because I thought it would be a good use of my time to look up Swedish shows for some apparent reason.

Fallet | The Case
Welcome to Sweden (bilingual Swedish/English show)
Vår tid är nu | The Restaurant
Tjockare än vatten | Thicker than water

[cjareck]

Other: I have started work on the intro to Colloquial Polish, ie. the pronunciation lol. I can't tell the difference between most of the fricatives I'll try to convince myself to put some effort into that. I'm not starting Polish, btw. This is I don't even know what. I guess sometimes I wish Russian had a more phonemic orthography.

I don't know English terms connected to phonetics, but maybe you find that interesting (No, not Brzęczyszczykiewicz again

What is interesting in the audio is the fact that the reader either comes from "kresy" eastern interwar period Poland or he mimics such pronunciation. The difference is in "ł" which sounds like "l".

[Radioclare]

The foreign script doesn't do me any favours. I know, this is going to turn into an immature rant along the lines of "wah it difficult sob" so you are now warned. Plus the stress/vowel reduction blahblah. I recall the thread on here where a study found Danish children had a smaller vocabulary by a certain age compared to children from the other Scandinavian countries. This difference was attributed to the poor sound-spelling correspondence of the orthography. I am sure results like that can extrapolate to other languages like English and Russian.

Learning a new alphabet absolutely adds to the difficulty of learning a language. You absolutely can memorize the Russian alphabet in a day or two but that is a useless trick that does not translate to being able to read. I probably won't feel comfortable with Cyrillic before the Assimil course is done and probably not for at least several hundred pages of whatever I continue to read afterwards. I wish I could have found people complaining about this in literally any of the places I went looking prior to starting Russian. I would feel better. Despite all of the other difficulties Russian possesses, the alphabet and the stress are the only unenjoyable parts for me.

I had exactly the same experience with the alphabet when I started learning. I was so frustrated because it feels like the internet is full of websites/polyglots telling you that you can learn the Cyrillic alphabet in X amount of time and implying that it's really not a big deal, but like you I found that there was a huge jump between memorising individual letters and actually being able to read. There are definitely some log posts somewhere which involve me ranting about this, but it may be as far back as 2014/15 so they're probably lost in the depths of the old forum.

I first started learning Serbian Cyrillic which I think exacerbated the problem, because I could already read Serbian to a reasonable level in Latin script (I'd been studying Croatian for 2 - 3 years at this point) so I felt like, once I'd memorised the alphabet, I ought to be able to read Serbian in Cyrillic equally well. Instead I found that I couldn't recognise a single word on sight, and had to sound out every word letter by letter like a 5-year old learning to read. Someone wise did comment in my log at the time to point out that I ought to find this easier with Russian, because in Serbian I had learned the vocabulary in Latin so I hadn't learned to recognise the shape of the words in Cyrillic, whereas if I learned Russian I would learn the vocabulary in Cyrillic from the start and so be better able to recognise words.

In fairness to that person (can't remember who it was!) they were right and I have found in a bit easier in Russian. But I have still found the alphabet a huge initial barrier to overcome and I think it's partly to blame for why I've had so many failed attempts at learning Russian over the years. I've had to invest a lot of time up front in learning to type and handwrite in Cyrillic, because I found I'm just incapable of learning anything in a language if I can't type or write. And as someone who normally reads really fast, learning to read in Russian has been really painful. I've stumbled my way through a handful of children's books and I think I've progressed from reading like a 5-year old to reading like a 7-year old, but it's still such hard work

The stress is also a big deal for me and probably the other reason why I've failed to learn Russian so many times, because it makes me really stressed (haha!) to look at a word and not have a clue how to pronounce it. All the other languages I've learned have been much simpler in this respect; Esperanto is obviously completely phonetic and BCMS works on the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written", which I think is an excellent idea I was always quite indifferent about the letter "o" before I started learning Russian and now I hate it with a vengeance

The only way I feel I'm making progress with Russian is by using Memrise. I find SRS deathly dull but it's good because a) it makes me spell words out, and I think the better I get at spelling them, the easier they are to read and b) I add audio from Forvo for every word I learn, to make sure I never learn a new word without knowing how it sounds. Adding the audio is time-consuming and boring, but I'm trying to convince myself that this is just like having to memorise the gender of every word I learned in German.

I will also admit some recent discussions have made me consider why I am doing a category IV language at all when I don't find language learning particularly enjoyable and I could be doing another category I/II instead

I'm so glad to find out that I'm not the only person here who doesn't find language learning particularly enjoyable

[Iversen]

I learnt the Russian far back in the mid 70s before visiting Moscow and Leningrad with a university tour group, and I didn't learn anything apart from the alphabet (except a few touristic words like "пекси кола" and "спасибо") - but it turned out that I was the only one in the group who could read the names of things like metro stations. And my method was brutal, but efficient: I transcribed page after page of Russian text until I knew each and every letter. But I still couldn't understand anything of the language, and even though I did buy some text books and dictionaries near the end of my studies I never really got started. That only happened almost thirty years later, but then I could still recall the letters clearly after just a few hours of studying. And it was easy to add the other Cyrillic alphabets when I got around to the respective languages.

I did the same thing with the Greek alphabet, although there I was aided by the use of single letters in physics and mathematics. Apart from this detail it is the same story: transcribing, transcribing, transcribing page after page - and then the whole thing can be learnt in a few days (and people with better memory than mine could probably have done it in a few hours). I have also learned the Georgian and the Korean writing systems this way before travelling to those places, but since I haven't used those systems later I don't remember them at this moment.

So sheer bulk transcribing will also be my preferred method with other alphabets in the future.

And I still like to study languages - it can only be certain methods that sometimes appear to be slightly boring. Like transcribing texts in unknown languages...

[StringerBell]

Thank you for this. (Seriously.) I don’t mind uncertainty on a larger scale like reading extensively or watching tv without subtitles. But this small-scale “how do I even say this word?” stuff presses all the wrong anxiety buttons.

My husband has been living with me in the US for almost 10 years - he spends 99% of his day in English, and has studied/used/watched English for years even before coming here; I think his English is better than most native English speakers even if he has a mild accent. Not only can he immediately tell which county an English speaker is from (like if they're from New Zealand vs. Australia), but even among Americans, he can identify a person's region/state (and can even differentiate between various southern accents since he spends a lot of time watching southern Youtubers) He knows black inner-city slang (thanks to watching The Wire!) and early 19th century terms and high-level modern vocab that sometimes I don't even know.

Yet, there is still occasionally a moment where he pronounces an English word wrong because he's come across it while reading but never actually heard it said aloud. He can laugh about it and say, "why would I ever think I could figure out how something is pronounced in English?" Here is someone with a truly impressive command of the language who has no way to pronounce something correctly unless he's heard a native speaker say it first - that is so f-ed up, if you think about it. If I weren't a native English speaker, I don't think I'd be able to deal with that, and yet hundreds of millions (or billions) of people learn it, at least to some basic survival level, so clearly it can be done.

Is Russian pronunciation as unknowable as English? Is there really just no way to know how anything is pronounced, or is it an issue with only certain words? I never really realized that this was such an issue in Russian. I guess I should be grateful that at least Polish has an extremely consistent pronunciation (to say nothing of using the same alphabet which is extremely easy to read once you learn a handful of letters/letter combos that don't exist in English - I also don't think I'd cope well having to learn a totally new alphabet even though I'm strangely drawn to the Cyrillic alphabet. I'll try to remember that next time I guess frustrated!

[Radioclare]

Is Russian pronunciation as unknowable as English? Is there really just no way to know how anything is pronounced, or is it an issue with only certain words? I never really realized that this was such an issue in Russian. I guess I should be grateful that at least Polish has an extremely consistent pronunciation (to say nothing of using the same alphabet which is extremely easy to read once you learn a handful of letters/letter combos that don't exist in English - I also don't think I'd cope well having to learn a totally new alphabet even though I'm strangely drawn to the Cyrillic alphabet. I'll try to remember that next time I guess frustrated!

No, it's definitely not as bad as English. I have no idea how anyone ever manages to learn English It's just that stress in Russian can be on any syllable and some of the vowels are pronounced quite differently depending on whether they are stressed or where they are in relation to the stressed syllable. The position of the stress sometimes also moves between different versions of the same word. To take a simple example, water is вода in the nominative with the stress on the second syllable, so it sounds like "va-DA". But in the accusative case, it becomes воду which is stressed on the first syllable, so sounds like "VO-du". While there might be some rules and trends, it generally feels like there's no way of knowing this without memorising the stress of every single word. And outside of texts for beginners the stressed syllable isn't marked, so when you encounter a new word and don't know where the stress falls, you can generally imagine a couple of different pronunciations and have no way of knowing which is right

Thanks for your tips for how you make Russian work (Memrise, typing answers, Forvo audio). I’m doing something similar by putting all the dialogue lines from Assimil into Anki, as well as some extra vocab here and there with audio from Forvo. I only do L2 > L1 cards though so I don’t get the typing practice with the cards, but I do type up some bits of the lessons in order to make some of the cards so it’s not zero practice. I have no doubt it all helps but I think the nature of Russian is that it’s going to feel more opaque than other languages regardless.

I'm keen to see how you get on with Assimil I have the German version for Russian which I tried using a couple of years ago when I had learning Russian as a new year's resolution. I got to the end of the passive wave and was really enjoying the audio, but once my initial January enthusiasm wore off I soon started finding Russian too hard again and gave up. I'm really tempted to go back to Assimil sometime soon though and see if I can do better second time around.

And yes, sometimes I think commiseration is the best thing about this forum

[aaleks]

About stress in Russian words. Native speakers misplace it too. Not the way non-native speakers would, I guess, but it seems there really is no rule so we just know how this or that word is supposed to be pronounced (or just guess). Sometimes misplaced stress might be just a regional way of saying the word, or something like workplace jargon, etc.