9 JanuaryAfter being back at work for a week I really enjoyed having a day off today
Let's hope I don't get back to having to work weekends any time soon.
RussianIt's been quite a productive day for languages. I started by reading two chapters of 'В 4:50 с вокзала Паддингтон' this morning. I'm 100 pages into the story and the action is hotting up now that a body has been found in a sarcophagus.
I felt quite enthusiastic about Russian after that, so I decided to try some more output. I've decided that there is absolutely zero chance of me having the energy and motivation to start writing in Russian after work, so I need to try and set aside time at weekends to concentrate on output. After my experience today, I've remembered why I did zero output last year: it's too hard
I managed to write 737 words today and it probably took two hours. (I've got 62 minutes recorded in Toggl, in which I wrote around 400 words. Then I went for a walk and wrote the remaining words when I came back, but forgot to time myself). However long it was, there were moments when I started to think that sticking pins in my eyes could be a more pleasurable way to spend a Saturday afternoon than writing in Russian. And I was only writing about my family, which was the simplest topic I could think of to try and write about.
The conclusion I should draw from this is probably that I need to do lots more output and then, presumably, it will start to feel less painful. I put what I had written on Lang-8 anyway, because I'd got to the stage where I wasn't confident that I could even string a simple sentence together without a mistake. I got a correction back this evening and actually the result was nowhere near as bad as I expected. By my calculations, I wrote 72 sentences of which 41 had mistakes in them. But that means there were 31 sentences which didn't have mistakes in them, and I feel like that isn't so bad because Slavic languages present infinite opportunities to make mistakes in every sentence
Also some of the sentences which had mistakes in them weren't mistakes which really concern me. I think there must have been about five sentences where the mistake was just a missing comma, for example. So after that I felt more positive
What else? I am still progressing through the uses of short adjectives in Schaum's. And I watched an episode of Татьянин день on the treadmill. My prediction was correct and Татьяна was arrested before she was able to board the plane to Norilsk.
CroatianI finished reading 'Čuvaj me', which gives me 276 pages towards my Croatian Super Challenge. I saw on Goodreads that the book was filed as "chick lit", which I always thinks sounds a bit derogatory, but I enjoyed it and thought it was well written. I did look up some vocabulary I didn't know today: parnica (lawsuit of some sort, it was used in the book in the context of a divorce), kolijevka (cradle), kovano željezo (wrought iron), bunovan (delirious).
Total - Russian: 167 mins, Croatian: 92 mins