Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

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ilmari
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby ilmari » Thu Jan 07, 2021 4:10 am

Well, we have in Poland a joke about it:
A grandson calls his grandpa that lives somewhere in Siberia:
- grandpa, I've heard that it is -60 degrees Celsius at your place!
- no, not that much. I think something like -20
- no, they are showing your village on TV, and they say it is -60!
- Aaaa, so you mean the temperature outside?


If you have Assimil Russian, you can read that one in Lesson 20:

В Сибири
- Алло, Игорь?
- Да, привет!
- Я смотрю прогноз погоды. Говорят, у вас страшный холод.
- Да нет, минус двавцать-двадцать пять...
- Да? А по тевизору говорят - минус сорок пять...
- А-а-а... Ну, так это, может быть, на улице!
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Thu Jan 07, 2021 10:23 pm

Thanks both, I love the joke :lol: Although I don't remember it from Assimil!

7 January
I had a meeting this afternoon which was scheduled for 3 hours and it only ended up taking 1.5 hours, so that was definitely a win :)

Russian
I watched an episode of Татьянин день while on the treadmill. Татьяна 1 is planning to leave Moscow and start a new life in Norilsk. I had to look Norilsk up on the map and it looks like it could be a very cold and dark place to start a new life.

I also read another chapter of '4:50 from Paddington'. This one was longer, about 19 pages. I'm getting into the story a bit now though, so it wasn't too bad.

In Schaum's Grammar, I covered a section on the use of short adjectives. There was an exercise with a list of sentences using long adjectives that you had to rewrite with short adjectives; that was quite useful. I then embarked on the next section, which is about how to decide whether to use a short adjective or a long adjective. I thought I might finish that too, but then I flicked ahead and realised it goes on for about five pages, so I decided to call it a day.

Total - Russian: 110 mins
3 x

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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:22 am

Radioclare wrote:I had to look Norilsk up on the map and it looks like it could be a very cold and dark place to start a new life.

Yeah that's quite the understatement.

I remember when this video first showed up in my recommendations just seeing the title and the thumbnail told me exactly what city it would be about :lol:
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby rdearman » Fri Jan 08, 2021 11:31 am

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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Fri Jan 08, 2021 10:48 pm


Thank you, that's exactly the list I was looking for :)

vonPeterhof wrote:I remember when this video first showed up in my recommendations just seeing the title and the thumbnail told me exactly what city it would be about :lol:

Wow, thanks for sharing :shock: I watched that and then a slightly longer Russian video about Norilsk and now I have a better understanding of the expressions all the other characters pulled when Татьяна said she was going to go to Norilsk :lol:

8 January
First week back at work, survived! I'd kinda lost motivation by mid afternoon. It's hard getting back in the swing of things after Christmas.

Russian
I watched an interesting video about Norilsk and then I read another chapter of 'В 4:50 с вокзала Паддингтон'. I think if I try to read a chapter a day, it will be like the first Super Challenge I did in Croatian where I tried to read for 20 minutes or so on the train to work every morning. Today I actually looked up a couple of words: "амбар", which I think is some sort of barn or outhouse, and "лом", which seems to be a crowbar. A crowbar would sort of make sense in the context of the story, because a character needed it to open a sarcophagus containing a corpse, although I'm not 100% sure why the character just happened to have a crowbar lying around.

Croatian
I'm over halfway through the novel 'Čuvaj me' now, so should hopefully finish it this weekend. And today was a Croatian day for the treadmill, so I watched another episode of 'Drugo ime ljubavi'.

Total - Russian: 40 mins, Croatian: 64 mins
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sat Jan 09, 2021 10:10 pm

9 January
After 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.

Russian
It'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 :lol: 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 :lol: 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.

Croatian
I 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
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Radioclare
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Sun Jan 10, 2021 10:45 pm

10 January
Another quiet day, but I like quiet weekends. I'll have to fake it on Teams tomorrow when colleagues commiserate with me about how boring weekends in lockdown are :lol:

Russian
I finally finished the section in Schaum's Grammar about short adjectives. The topic was certainly covered in a lot more depth than in any of the other textbooks I've used. It finished with a mammoth exercise with 30 questions involving picking the correct form of adjectives. I feel ready for a different topic tomorrow!

Otherwise I just read a couple of chapters of the Agatha Christie. The main word I looked up today was подливка (gravy).

Croatian
I tried to balance out my Russian writing yesterday by writing approx. 700 words in Croatian today. It was obviously considerably easier and I managed to write the same number of words in about half the time. I wouldn't necessarily say it was easy, though. I felt a bit rusty and like I needed to check more things than I would have wanted to. Not sure whether the solution is try writing more frequently or to do some grammar/vocab revision.

I also watched another episode of 'Drugo ime ljubavi' on the treadmill.

Total - Russian: 60 mins, Croatian: 120 mins
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Mon Jan 11, 2021 10:15 pm

11 January
Work gave me a headache today! A thing that was supposed to happen didn't happen, because of a glitch in the computer system which the person who was supposed to do the thing uses to communicate with the person who asks them to do the thing. I'm not the person who is supposed to do the thing or the person who is supposed to ask for the thing to be done and I'm definitely not the person responsible for glitches in the computer system. But apparently the fact that the thing didn't get done is my fault because I should have managed the process better. The joys of being a manager :lol:

Russian
You may have guessed that I am in a bad mood and when I am in a bad mood I don't feel like studying Russian. But the beauty of the 365-challenge is that I have to do 30 minutes of Russian whether I am in a bad mood or not :)

I decided to give Schaum's a miss though and instead read two chapters of 'В 4:50 с вокзала Паддингтон'. They were pretty short chapters, so this was only 18 pages of Russian in total.

Then I watched an episode of Татьянин день. Татьяна is in prison or, at least, in some sort of police custody. That wasn't really a surprise, but what was a surprise was that she's ended up in the same cell as the other character who attempted to kill her husband with a hatstand a few episodes ago.

Total - Russian: 77 mins, Croatian: 16 mins
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Tue Jan 12, 2021 10:24 pm

12 January
I don't feel like I had a very productive day today. I think I was demotivated by yesterday's fiasco.

Russian
I did force myself to open Schaum's though and I studied a short section about when to use какой vs каков, такой vs таков. Tbh this wasn't even on my radar as something to worry about :lol: I did okay on the exercise which followed though.

I read another couple of chapters of Agatha Christie, 32 pages in total. That takes me over the halfway point of the novel :)

Croatian
Today was a 'Drugo ime ljubavi' day for the treadmill. Now I'm getting towards the final part of the series (only about 50 episodes left!) some of the secrets which have been kept for ages are starting to come out into the open.

Also YouTube showed me a video for a new song by Psihomodo Pop, a band I always enjoy listening to :)



Total - Russian: 52 mins, Croatian: 45 mins
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Re: Radioclare's 2021 log (Russian, Croatian)

Postby Radioclare » Wed Jan 13, 2021 11:13 pm

13 January
I was in a more productive frame of mind today but I kept getting interrupted by meetings.

Russian
I started reading the Agatha Christie after dinner, intending just to do one chapter and then move on to Schaum's, but actually I got quite caught up in story and ended up reading over 30 pages again :)

Later I watched an episode of Татьянин день on the treadmill. This one wasn't very eventful. Now that Татьяна 1 is out of the way in prison, Татьяна 2 is getting together with her former fiancé. The two policemen who arrested Татьяна 1 went to a cafe for lunch and had what I think might have been the least appetising meal I've ever seen in a telenovela. It consisted of a hotdog, so pale it looked anaemic, and peas. Lots of peas. With kefir to wash it down. Honestly, if I hadn't already been to Russia and eaten some perfectly nice food, I would be quite concerned about Russian cuisine :lol:

Total - Russian: 92 mins, Croatian: 16 mins
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