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Geoffw in TAC2015: RU, HE and Friends | ||
Tags: Football/Soccer | Yiddish | Hebrew | Dutch | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 233 of 251 26 December 2014 at 3:21am | IP Logged |
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Schoenhofs.com is now running their annual end-of-the-year sale on all
Assimil courses in stock (about $30 each). As is now traditional, I just ordered another course, this time Japanese, vol. 1. I have spent a lot of time studying Japanese in the past, but I haven't done anything with it for years. I'm not now committing to any new Japanese project, but I'm sure it'll happen sooner or later, and I'd love to try it with Assimil this time. Meanwhile, I've also picked up some new volumes in Russian, and I'm back on extensive reading with Russian. Texts are slowly continuing to become clearer, and I'm in pretty high spirits right now about my Russian progress. I'm looking forward to another year of Russian TACing. Quite belatedly, I fulfilled one of my goals from earlier in the year (and written in this log): signing up for a Super Challenge in Russian. And I'm also 500 pages into it, which is at least a respectable (belated) start. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 234 of 251 28 December 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged |
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Make it 550 pages of Russian logged, with another 30 or so unlogged.
And...I'm back on the wagon for Russian Assimil! I reviewed the first 60 lessons and picked up where I left off. The active wave is still thankfully pretty easy. This is pretty much what happened when I did French Assimil. I completed 60-some-odd lessons and then dropped Assimil for a while and did mostly extensive reading and listening. When I picked it up again, the level of difficulty seemed to have dropped significantly. With any luck and some perseverance, I should be able to finish the passive wave sometime in January. I had been somewhat discouraged by the apparent length and randomness of Russian words, which was making vocabulary acquisition difficult. Having seen Russian compared to German regarding the way its words are built, I kept my discouragement in check and held out hope that it would eventually become clear, perhaps to the point of being able to predict the meaning of new words (an advantage of German's logical structure). I'm not there yet, but I'm getting to where I can spot roots, prefixes, and suffixes during extensive reading and use them together with context clues to get a rough idea of a lot of previously unknown words. I'm hopeful that this will act as a sort of "turbocharger" where each new word I acquire helps me in turn to learn several new related words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 235 of 251 05 January 2015 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
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Please, please tell me this is a mistake by Assimil, because otherwise I'm completely lost. In lesson 69, we have:
Два маленьких мальчика. Две милие девочки. OK, so from lesson 68, note 5, we have that the numbers 2, 3 and 4 take the genitive singular. From the declension tables, we have that masculine gen. sing. nouns end in -a, and feminine gen. sing. nouns end in -и (based on hard, soft ending), so so far so good. BUT, now we have a gen. plural long-from adjective in the first case (-их), and a nom. plural long-form adjective in the second case (-и). WHAT? WHY? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4837 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 236 of 251 05 January 2015 at 7:21pm | IP Logged |
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This is an unpleasant pecularity of Russian when the numerals 2, 3, and 4 and adjectives and nouns clash together. The rule is as follows:
After the numerals 2, 3, and 4: - Masculine nouns take the genitive singular and their adjectives take the genitive plural; - Feminine nouns take the genitive singular and their adjectives take the nominative plural; - Neuter nouns behave like masculine nouns, so the noun is in the genitive singular and the adjective is in the genitive plural. This is very counterintuitive for any speaker of another language that doesn't have such insane rules, but the historical reason for this is the dual, which used to accompany the 2, and later also 3 and 4. The present-day forms of noun and adjective are remnants of old dual forms which appear to be genitive forms today. Anyway, the above rules only apply to numerals in the nominative and accusative. If the numeral is in a different case, the noun and adjective will be in the same case as well. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 237 of 251 06 January 2015 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
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Josquin, thank you so much for explaining! I had accepted, mostly, that the situation would be crazy, but not that
Assimil would trick me like that. Upon further inspection, I see that the rule you cite for adjective declension is indeed taught by Assimil--LATER, at lesson 70, but does NOT appear to be mentioned earlier. Lesson 69 began with the following special note: "This lesson, which contains very few new words, is an opportunity to practice declining all kinds of nouns and adjectives ... and making sure they agree with the numerals that govern them. If you are having trouble with any of the declensions, go back over previous lessons ..." That sure makes it sound like I should "get it" based on what's already been taught! I looked in the grammar indices, and didn't find any explanation there, either. I see now that it is mentioned, but not where I was looking, and even there it only says, in parentheses, "(feminines adjectives can take the nominative plural, but the genitive plural is preferable)." SIGH. I was almost late for work because I took so long trying to figure this out! I didn't even manage to finish the lesson. But I'm likely to remember the rule now after all that drama!!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 238 of 251 07 January 2015 at 12:55pm | IP Logged |
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OMG, but that's not all? Now that I'm actually going through lesson 70, it says that agreement is different for
animate and inanimate nouns. Furthermore: "After 2, 3, 4, animate nouns (masculine or feminine), whose accusative is the same as the genitive, everything that comes after the numeral is in the genitive plural: Они видят двух маленьких мальчиков и двух болших девочек." So is Assimil saying that the example from lesson 69 WAS wrong? Wait for it... "In colloquial speech, you can hear the same agreement as for inanimate nouns, but this is not recommended: Я вижу две большие девочки." So no, it was just colloquial speech that they don't recommend, but neglected to mention until now. <facepalm> EDIT: The note actually doesn't specify for which cases of the numeral this rule applies. From context, it appears to be the nominative and accusative. Edited by geoffw on 07 January 2015 at 12:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5049 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 239 of 251 07 January 2015 at 3:11pm | IP Logged |
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The distinction between animate and inanimate is found only in the accusative in Russian, so Assimil is talking about the accusative. The rule for the nominative case is formulated by Josquin.
I want to notice that the correct form is милЫе and that две милых девочки is correct too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 240 of 251 08 January 2015 at 12:33pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Марк! That one was my fault--I transcribed it incorrectly.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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