Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

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

Postby Radioclare » Tue Aug 13, 2019 8:58 pm

13 August
I was working in Birmingham today but going to another firm of accountants to review files for a new client I'm taking on.

Russian
Because I was going somewhere slightly different, I didn't do any Pimsleur this morning. I still had to walk to get there, so I could technically have done it, but I just felt like I was going to be devoting more of my attention to figuring out whether I was walking the right way than I would have been to Russian grammar.

I did do lots of Russian Memrise on the train though. I didn't have too many reviews this morning so I got through the bulk of them before my train even arrived and was able to make more progress with new vocabulary.

This evening I've been working on adding more verb pairs to my course. I think I've got them all typed up now, but I'm leaving adding the rest of the audio until tomorrow night.

Total time = 56 minutes. Streak = 224 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed Aug 14, 2019 9:50 pm

14 August
Worked from home today. And got some good news that the planned strike at Heathrow has been postponed, so it looks like I will be going to Spain the weekend after next after all :)

Russian
Because I was working from home today I didn't do any studying until about 8pm. When I logged into Memrise at that point I had a crazy amount of reviews again, so I spent 36 minutes in total which was just enough to get through the reviews and learn 10 news words on Memrise 3. I'm making progress with the course though; only about 40 words to go through.

Once I'd done that I continued working through the list of verb pairs in Colloquial Russian. It was very dull, but I've finally got all the audio uploaded. So now all I need to do is actually learn the words! The book shows the conjugation of all the verbs as well, which I looked at for approximately 30 seconds before deciding I wanted to cry and giving up :lol: I don't think trying to memorise the stress patterns for a big list of verbs completely out of context is a good use of my time right now, so I'm not going to bother.

Total time = 52 minutes. Streak = 225 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Teango » Thu Aug 15, 2019 12:50 am

Radioclare wrote:When I logged into Memrise at that point I had a crazy amount of reviews again...
Once I'd done that I continued working through the list of verb pairs in Colloquial Russian. It was very dull, but I've finally got all the audio uploaded. So now all I need to do is actually learn the words! The book shows the conjugation of all the verbs as well, which I looked at for approximately 30 seconds before deciding I wanted to cry and giving up :lol: I don't think trying to memorise the stress patterns for a big list of verbs completely out of context is a good use of my time right now, so I'm not going to bother.

Anything that makes you want to cry and give up is a big warning sign...so your instincts are absolutely spot on! :)

If you find any aspect of independent study to be particularly overwhelming, or mind-numbingly dull, please feel free to bin it or attack it from a more rewarding angle! You can always set it aside for now and replace it with something that makes you smile and feel daily accomplishment instead. Don't worry, those verb conjugations won't swim away, and who knows, perhaps once you're more familiar and comfortable with Russian verbs in general, it might be interesting to return to that little lake of piranhas later on (or not).

The same goes with all those reviews nipping at your ankles every day. It sounds like misery. Believe it or not, all the most useful words and constructions will come up again; they really will. So feel free to throw them out and start afresh if they're really getting you down, or at least dramatically slim down your lists so that they don't take up more than 10-15 minutes of your time each day. It can be quite liberating and cathartic.

And I know...sunken costs...yeah...I'm all too familiar with sunken costs (especially when it comes to watching Netflix :oops:). However there are so many other things you could do right now that are much more rewarding and motivating. And there's the key...wanting and looking forward to doing activities in and through the language, not just today, but tomorrow and onwards, and ideally without the need to endure too many sharp teeth or draining currents along the way.

Take it from someone who bears the scars of initially trying to wade through textbooks, grammar tables, and flashcards the hard way... ;)
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Aug 15, 2019 9:47 pm

Teango wrote:If you find any aspect of independent study to be particularly overwhelming, or mind-numbingly dull, please feel free to bin it or attack it from a more rewarding angle! You can always set it aside for now and replace it with something that makes you smile and feel daily accomplishment instead. Don't worry, those verb conjugations won't swim away, and who knows, perhaps once you're more familiar and comfortable with Russian verbs in general, it might be interesting to return to that little lake of piranhas later on (or not).

The same goes with all those reviews nipping at your ankles every day. It sounds like misery. Believe it or not, all the most useful words and constructions will come up again; they really will. So feel free to throw them out and start afresh if they're really getting you down, or at least dramatically slim down your lists so that they don't take up more than 10-15 minutes of your time each day. It can be quite liberating and cathartic.

And I know...sunken costs...yeah...I'm all too familiar with sunken costs (especially when it comes to watching Netflix :oops:). However there are so many other things you could do right now that are much more rewarding and motivating. And there's the key...wanting and looking forward to doing activities in and through the language, not just today, but tomorrow and onwards, and ideally without the need to endure too many sharp teeth or draining currents along the way.

Take it from someone who bears the scars of initially trying to wade through textbooks, grammar tables, and flashcards the hard way... ;)


Thank you for the advice, Teango :) I thought about it this morning and decided that you were right and my reviews have indeed been pretty miserable recently :lol: So I've had a spring clean of my Memrise today and deleted three of the decks that I was using. I think that must have removed about a thousand words, so hopefully I'll have significantly fewer reviews coming up now!

The ones I deleted were the three official Memrise Russian courses I was working through; I started doing them earlier this year because they had really good audio and there were lots of words and phrases which I thought would be useful for me to practise before going to Russia. This is all true, but there were also loads of really pointless phrases that weren't of any particular use to me and I think I was just stuck in a rut of reviewing them over and over again because I'd put so much effort into memorising them in the first place.

It felt quite good to delete them anyway :) Perhaps I'll come back to them at some point! For now I'm just going to try and focus on the vocab from Colloquial Russian. I am not really a lover of SRS in general but I can't find any other way of learning vocabulary that works for me, and the two main things I'm trying to do with Russian at the moment are increase my active vocabulary and get a proper handle on the grammar. I don't really like grammar study either, but I feel like I need to press on with it because my Russian is at a weird stage where I can understand a surprising amount (mainly due to the benefit of already speaking some Croatian) but can barely string a coherent sentence together myself.

15 August
I had a meeting I was really dreading today. Dreading it has pretty much dominated my week. But it happened, and in reality it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd expected. I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere!

Russian
On the way back from my meeting I had 20 minutes to wait for a train so I used the time to finish the Russian 3 course. It was slightly illogical to finish it, given that I'd already decided I was going to delete it, but as I said yesterday I was only about 40 words away from the end and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I couldn't help myself :lol: I finished it, took a screenshot of it being finished as proof, and then deleted it.

This evening I spent a fair bit of time on the first batch of exercises in chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian. The first one gave sentences with imperfective verbs in the past tense and asked you to rewrite them with perfective verbs in the past tense. That wasn't too bad, because the past tense isn't hard. The second exercise was much tougher because it gave sentences with verbs in the imperfective future and asked you to rewrite them in the perfective future. The perfective future is definitely a weak point for me and I couldn't do most of the exercise without going back to the verb list and looking up the conjugations.

Total time = 93 minutes. Streak = 226 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 15, 2019 10:01 pm

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

Postby Radioclare » Fri Aug 16, 2019 9:05 pm

Sound advice from rdearman, but worrying is one of my key skills :lol:

16 August
I was in the office today and had a lot of frustration dealing with a HR matter, which meant I felt like I didn't get a lot of actual 'work' done. Definitely one of those Fridays where half the to-do list gets rolled forward to Monday!

Russian
Well I definitely felt the benefit of deleting Memrise courses this morning; I logged in and only had 8 words to review :D So that was quite refreshing and meant I could spend some time getting to grips with the new vocab in my current Colloquial chapter.

I'm up to lesson 23 of Pimsleur 3 now. The main thing I remember from today's lesson was learning how to say I wanted to open a bank account. Probably not a phrase I'll ever actually use! But there continues to be some practice of dates and times, which is useful. I feel like I'm slowly starting to get a bit better at them.

This evening I watched a video about learning Polish and was pleasantly surprised how much I understood (of the Russian, I mean, not of any Polish :lol:). Then I made some more progress with the grammar in chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian. Now I've got past all these verb lists there's finally an explanation of when to use which aspect, so I took notes on that this evening but stopped short of doing the exercises.

I know some people aren't into tracking time but I find it really useful to time what I do in Russian. When I was working through Colloquial Russian just now, I finished making notes on the imperfective aspect and I felt like I had literally been studying Russian grammar for ages and could legitimately give up and leave the perfective aspect for tomorrow. But when I looked over at my timer, I could see that it had actually only been 9 minutes! So then I was able to tell myself to get a grip and tackle the perfective aspect too :lol: I just think it's interesting how my perception of how long things are take is sometimes so skewed. I could spend 9 minutes on Twitter in a flash and yet I spent most of 2018 convinced that I didn't have time for any Russian grammar.

Total time = 100 minutes. Streak = 227 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:09 am

17 August
Most of yesterday was taken up with visiting a friend who lives in the direction of London. The journey took a lot longer than it should have done because of problems on the motorway.

Russian
Luckily, I anticipated it might be a long day out and got my 30 minutes of Russian done before I left home :) When I logged into Memrise, I only had 3 words to review :lol: So I had time to make some progress with the aspect exercises in Colloquial Russian. This next set of exercises was about identifying whether to use the perfective or imperfective verb in given sentences. I did okay at identifying which verb to use where, but my (lack of) ability to conjugate verbs correctly let me down at times.

Total time = 31 minutes. Streak = 228 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:15 pm

18 August
I had the rarity of a day at home today, which was nice, though I spent most of it sorting out plans for my upcoming travels.

Russian
Before I got stuck into the travel planning, I decided to tackle the rest of chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian. You might have thought that aspect was enough grammar for one chapter... but you'd be wrong :lol: Once I'd got through the exercises on aspect, there was another whole grammar section about the passive :shock: I think this is the first time I've studied the passive in Russian. Or at least, if it was covered in TY Russian, it wasn't a point which sunk in and this all felt fairly new. I got to the end of the chapter though and I'm ready to start chapter 12, which looks like it's going to be about the genitive plural, so that's something to look forward to :D

Total time = 50 minutes. Streak = 229 days

Croatian
I'm nearly at the end of my series now; only about five episodes left. The story is all coming to a nice conclusion, with the smuggling villagers joining forces with the local police to capture some more dangerous criminals who are trying to smuggle weapons across the border. I was just starting to think about what I'm going to watch next... and then I found out that there's going to be a second series of 'Na granici' starting in the autumn :o I was a bit surprised, because it felt like all the threads of the plot were coming together to a natural ending, but perhaps there's going to be a twist that I don't know about. The date when the new season will start doesn't seem clear yet - the things I've read just say it's in the autumn - so I'm not sure yet whether I need to find something else to watch or whether I can just wait for this second season to start. I'm going to be away for the first two weeks of September anyway, so if it's started by the time I get back, I guess I'll be sorted for another 169 episodes :-)

I've also spent about 2 hours today reading 'Pakao u Madridu' and I'm over halfway through. I'm really enjoying the book and after so much time spent on Russian, reading in Croatian feels very restful :D
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:07 pm

19 August
I continued my theme of having productive Mondays and got through almost three quarters of what was on my to-do list for today :lol: (I haven't quite perfected the art of putting a manageable amount of stuff on my lists!).

Russian
I have so few Memrise reviews on the train now that I'm actually thinking I need to find a new train activity :D I did lesson 24 of Pimsleur today, which was quite amusing by virtue of how dated it was. It opened with a dialogue where a man wanted to make a telephone call to Kiev to ask what the weather was like there, and progressed to asking someone for a telephone book and replying that the telephone book was on the table.

This evening I started chapter 12 of Colloquial Russian, which begins with a long text about a family who have subscribed to a lot of newspapers and magazines and are trying to decide which ones to unsubscribe from to save money. Again feels like a bit of an old-fashioned topic, but never mind. There were lots of genitive plurals in it, which I guess was the main point.

Total time = 81 minutes. Streak = 230 days
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Re: Radioclare's 2019 log (Croatian/Russian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Aug 20, 2019 8:54 pm

20 August
Tuesdays are definitely less productive than Mondays :lol: The reality of the fact that I'm off work for the first two weeks of September is starting to sink in and the list of things which I need to sort out before I go is huuuuge.

Russian
I had a manageable number of Memrise reviews on the train again this morning and then I did lesson 25 of Pimsleur. A few phone books featured in this one too :lol:

This evening I worked through the dialogues in Colloquial Russian, listening to the audio and doing the comprehension questions that follow. I also typed up the new vocabulary from the dialogues into Memrise for future learning. One good thing about the several years I wasted while not quite getting around to learning Russian is that during that timeframe I did manage to learn to type Cyrillic properly, and that means typing up the vocab is a lot quicker than it otherwise would have been :)

Total time = 72 minutes. Streak = 231 days
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