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TAC 2013 MIR Russian TEAM THREAD | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 281 of 586 05 January 2013 at 12:54am | IP Logged | ||
I was thinking of the challenges :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5758 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 282 of 586 05 January 2013 at 12:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Me too actually but any info regarding the audio files is welcome too as they will need to be dealt with eventually.
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 283 of 586 05 January 2013 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||
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As the technical idiot I am, Skype sounds like a good solution.
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| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5758 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 284 of 586 05 January 2013 at 1:16am | IP Logged | ||
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That makes two of us, Cristina.
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| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5218 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 285 of 586 05 January 2013 at 2:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Edit: sorry, I arrived last night very late and I was too sleepy so didn't realize I could read everything later today so I just took 5 seconds to post and hit the sack.
As I said, I can share with the team one of my servers to host all our stuff, on the condition that we don't get crazy uploading (I don't know how much spare space we have up there but don't count on more than a couple GB which is more than enough for a reasonable use anyway). That has -obviously- the advantages of full control, unrestricted FTP and SQL access if needed, etc. but OTOH it has the con that we have to manually install and setup whatever stuff we're to use (like wordpress, which is a 10 minutes thing so no big deal)... so, what's the plan? Edited by mrwarper on 05 January 2013 at 11:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 286 of 586 05 January 2013 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll be on the road for the next few hours, but when I come back I'll post LanguageSponge's list and
questions, and then we can take it from there. And thank you for offering to help mrwarper :-) Cristina Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 05 January 2013 at 11:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 287 of 586 05 January 2013 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ok. So this day did not go quite the way I had planned, so I did not get a chance to sit down and send out LanguageSponge's list until now. We need to consider a few of his questions. For the time being I'll just post the list, and then you can all give your comments.
----------------- List of Little Challenges With Little Challenges come a little set of guidelines: 1. Each challenge you complete, whether written or spoken, should be posted somewhere. So our first task as a team is where should we post them? In a separate thread dedicated to the Little Challenges, or in our Team Thread? 2. There will be a title reward system: After completing… 0-9 challenges – Крепостной/Крепостная (serf) 10 challenges – Хлебопашец/Хлебопашка (serf landlord) 20 challenges - Однодворец/однодворка (serf landowner, emancipated serf) 30 challenges – Генерал/Генеральша (General in the army) 40 challenges – Царевич/Царевна (Son/Daughter of the Tsar) 50 challenges - Вeликий Князнь, Великая Княжна (Grand Duke, Grand Duchess) 60 challenges – Царь всея Руси/Царица всея Руси (Tsar/Tsarina of all the Russias) 3. I propose that members of each level (Beginners or Advanced) choose a Challenge to work on at the same time and we give our responses to a partner who is working towards the same question. After the partner has gone through your answer and sent it back, you can make any necessary changes and then submit it to the Team Thread. You can of course work through challenges by yourself, but I feel that doing a challenge occasionally with a teammate is a good team-building exercise. 4. As for the oral questions, I’ll leave that up to vote. Do you just want to do those individually or would it be too much of an effort to record and upload sound files? Alternately we could use some of our Skype sessions to do this eventually? I, LanguageSponge, will be away from the forum from Saturday 5th January 2013 until the worst case of Tuesday 8th January as I am flying back to China and knowing myself will probably be ill. I will be back, but until then I wish you good luck in any of the challenges you choose to undertake, and I hope they are useful to you. The cursive exercises, which are at the end of this list, can of course be attempted by anyone at any time. I do however recommend that you have a little Russian under your belt before diving into cursive, it’s not the easiest of challenges. Good luck, LanguageSponge/Jack Beginner’s List 1. Write five sentences introducing yourself 2. Write three sentences about who you have in your family 3. Describe a friend in six sentences. What does s/he look like? What is s/he like as a person? 4. Give a five-sentence long description of the town or city you live in. 5. Which languages do you speak? How well do you speak them? Where did you learn them? 6. When you write anything out in Russian, particularly in handwriting because it’s easier, mark the stress on some if not all of the words. Watch out for nouns which change the stress in oblique cases (oblique meaning forms other than the word’s dictionary form.) 7. Where do you go on holiday? Write five sentences about your favourite destination. 8. Think of five adjectives in one of the spelling rule consonants (к, г, х, ш, щ, ж, ч) and write a sentence using each one, using a masculine noun. 9. Write four sentences about a holiday you enjoyed. Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you meet? What was the food like? 10. State five things you did yesterday. What did you do? Where were you? Who were you with? Record it for your teammates to listen to. 11. Think of five soft adjectives and either write or say ten sentences using them. There are about forty soft adjectives and most of them have to do with time. 12. Speak for a minute describing what you have done today. 13. Your Russian pen friend has written to ask you what you want to do on your next visit to Russia. Type a response with the main body of the note being no less than six sentences. Time yourself. How long did it take you to type your note? 14. You are having a bad day and have decided to vent your frustration on paper. Write five sentences mentioning the absence of something you need, or what you don’t have. 15. Write out your shopping list in Russian and use it to go shopping. Only refer to your native or preferred language if absolutely necessary. 16. Write a short diary entry of your day in Russian. No less than three sentences per day if you decide to take up this particular Little Challenge! 17. Record yourself for as long as you need saying three to five sentences about a film you saw recently. 18. What is your favourite time of year? Why? 19. Talk about what you intend to do tomorrow. 20. As a spoken activity, state your family’s birthdays and what you got them for their birthdays last year. 21. Write a few sentences saying what you wanted to be when you grew up. 22. If you write a “to do” list every day, write it in Russian. 23. What was your favourite present you got for Christmas? Why? Talk about it as long as you can. 24. Listen to something unfamiliar but appropriate for your level in Russian, but listen to it with something in the background e g the TV, people talking or a song playing. 25. Take a piece of paper and a pen. Now make five lists, possibly in different colours, with all the Russian prepositions you know and which cases they take, as well as their meanings. 26. What are your strengths and weaknesses? (Answer this like a normal person, not like you’re on a job interview.) 27. Introduce yourself orally in Russian. Try to speak for twenty seconds or longer. For every five seconds over the original thirty that you manage to keep on talking, reward yourself somehow. For example ten extra minutes studying a Wanderlust language. 28. Talk about your family for thirty seconds. Use the same reward system as above. 29. Describe the qualities of a good friend. 30. Stand in front of a mirror and practise pronouncing a sound that you typically have difficulty with. Pay attention to the shape of your mouth or the position of your tongue as you pronounce said sound, as appropriate. Find five common words which contain this letter and practise saying them. Until you become comfortable with the sound, use a few minutes of dead time every day to iron the error out. 31. Think of five Russian nouns which have irregular locative (prepositional) forms with на and в. Now write sentences using them. After you’ve written the sentences, pronounce them, making sure to put the stress on the irregular ending. 32. Find something you’ve written before in another of your target languages and translate it into Russian. The idea is that you should feel out of your depth and it should force you to up your game. 33. Next time you’re late for something, explain what has made you late in Russian. 34. Make a Russian vocabulary list for a special cultural time of year in your or in another country. Examples would be Christmas, the Eisteddfod, Chinese New Year, the Oktoberfest, the Carnival of Venice or even just Pillow Fight Day! Now either talk about it for a few minutes using your new words or write something down. 35. Talk about your travel plans for 2013. 36. Find a song sung in Russian that you like and learn the lyrics. Look up the key words, or the ones that interest you, and learn them. Try to drop them into your written and spoken Russian. 37. Record yourself speaking Russian for as long as you can and play it back. Make a note of any criticisms you have and record yourself again speaking about the same topic. Were you better the second time around? 38. Think up a list of nouns with irregular plural forms. Write a short story using only these irregular plurals. Read it out afterwards, remembering the word-final stress in all cases with á and я́ – адресá, берегá, домá, лесá, городá, друзья́, сыновья́. 39. Make a request of someone in Russian – ask them for something, tell them to do something. Try these even with someone who doesn’t speak Russian – this will encourage them to pay attention to you and will give you lots of practice repeating the same thing! 40. As a speaking exercise, give the ages of everyone in your immediate family. 41. As you are going about your day, say a sentence in Russian explaining either what you are doing now, just have done or are going to do soon. 42. The next time you pick up a phone to dial a number, say the number aloud in Russian as you dial. Or if you cheat and use your phone memory, read the number out to yourself before pressing the call button. 43. Write five sentences about what your friend or a relative does on their day off or on the weekend. 44. You’ve just returned home after a weekend away. You left your eldest child/sibling in charge and they had a party. The house is a mess and there’s lots missing. Write about what isn’t there anymore. 45. State the languages you are thinking of studying next year and give the reasons why. 46. Describe a pet, an animal you like or a wild animal. Write at least 40 words. 47. Write the titles of five topics you find difficult to talk about in Russian on little scraps of paper. Turn them over. Now close your eyes and scramble them up. Pick one and talk about it for thirty seconds. Every time you pick up a new card, increase the time you talk about the topic by ten seconds. 48. Describe an ambition you had when you were younger. Have you achieved it yet, or did it fizzle out as time wore on? 49. Listen to an excerpt of one of your Russian audio courses. Use your imagination to continue the dialogue. 50. Write out all of the Russian prepositions of place that you can think of. Now direct your Russian friend through an imaginary town , telling them where buildings are. 51. Find a text that you’ve written and had corrected. Write it out by hand. Now type it out again while timing yourself. Record your time and retry it. Are you getting faster? 52. Find something written in Russian and read it as slowly and clearly as you can. 53. What did you want to be when you grew up? 54. Talk about your day, trying to use as many of the different case forms that you’ve learn thus far as you can. 55. Imagine you found Aladdin’s cave, and are now face-to-face with the magic genie. What would you wish for? Why? 56. For five minutes of your day today, try to express everything you think in Russian. If you can’t, make a note of the words you don’t know, look them up and learn them as best you can. 57. Look out of the window and describe the weather. Is it raining? Snowing? Is it overcast or is the Sun shining? Does it look slippery outside? 58. What did you get for Christmas? What was your favourite Christmas present as a child? Was there something you looked forward to even more than opening presents on Christmas Day? Describe your Christmas Day. 59. Where do you think you’ll be in five years’ time? 60. Describe your favourite character from a TV series, film or book. Why are they your favourite character? 61. Describe your least favourite character from a TV series, film or book. What is it about them that makes you not like them? 62. Talk about something out of character that you did when you were younger. 63. Why were you given your first name? 64. Describe a difficult situation you have got into abroad 65. Write a short list of verbs which take the genitive, dative or instrumental cases. Now write a paragraph using some of those verbs. 66. Find a song you like in Russian and transcribe the lyrics – you can use either printed Russian letters or cursive depending on whether you can write cursive or not. 67. Come up with a list of verbs and nouns, all of which have no more than three syllables in their base form. Now describe any situation using a minimum of ten words from each list. 68. Talk about an unusual hobby for no less than a minute. 69. Keep a list of common collocations in Russian, for example сильный дождь (heavy rain), мощное движение (heavy traffic), проводить время (to spend time), and write a short story using them all. 70. Describe an inspirational person in your life. 71. Advanced List 1. Write a full-length introduction of no less than half a page. Try to include elements of grammar that you presently find difficult or are unsure about. 2. Give a description of your family, writing no less than five sentences for each person mentioned. 3. Describe a childhood friend or someone you’ve known for a long time 4. Give a written description of your town in half a page. Do you prefer living in the country or in the city? Why? 5. Write about the languages you speak, what drew you to them and your affinity to those languages’ cultures. 6. Look up Russian tongue twisters for sounds that you find difficult to pronounce. Try to say them as quickly as you can without getting tongue-tied. 7. Write about your favourite holiday destinations and tell us why you enjoy said country so much. No less than half a page. 8. Write about previous holiday abroad or in your home country. Enchant us with it for half a page saying for example where you went, what you did, who you went with, why you chose to go there and what you enjoyed about the culture. 9. You are a fly on the wall throughout your parents’ entire wedding day. What is going through your mind? 10. Your Russian pen friend of five years has written to ask you what you what you want to do during your visit to Russia this upcoming summer. Type a response of no less than half a page saying what you would like to do, what you think you will do and referencing what you did on your last visit. Time yourself. How long did it take you to write your letter? 11. Describe an occasion, recorded, where you helped someone who really needed it. 12. You’re going through an old desk drawer and find a diary from when you were a child. You open it to a random page and find an entry about a special day in your life and start to reminisce. 13. You’re having a bad day and decide to write a diary entry about it. No-one else should see it though, so it has to be written in Russian! Write a short diary entry about what didn’t happen, what went wrong, about the absence of something you needed or something you still don’t have that you want. 14. Write out your shopping list in Russian and use it to go shopping for real. Afterwards, cook something following a recipe written in Russian. 15. Describe an occasion where something, or someone, surprised you. 16. Write a short essay of no less than 200 words on a hobby or interest. 17. Write no less than 100 words explaining what you wanted to be when you grew up. Include reasons and perhaps a distinct memory from the time. 18. Pick an interest other than languages and write no less than 200 words about it. 19. Brainstorm the grammatical features of Russian that you find difficult to use but of which you have some knowledge. Now write three sentences using said grammar point and read them aloud afterwards. Repeat every day until that point of grammar becomes somewhat more natural. 20. Describe a pet or an imaginary one as if you had one. Describe what it looks like, what it likes doing, its funny habits, where it tends to hang around the house and anything descriptive you can think of. 21. Cook something following a Russian recipe. Did it go well? Share it Team MIR! 22. Describe the weather on a strange day. What happened? Were you expecting it? What problems did you come across? 23. The next time you don’t know a word for something while speaking Russian, describe it instead of just asking for the word outright. 24. Describe a trip to the hospital. 25. Read about an aspect of Russian culture that you don’t know very well. Now write a short piece about it, ideally with a view to letting us fellow nerds read it afterwards! 26. Describe your favourite wild animal. Where does it live? What does it eat? Is it dangerous? Is it unusual? Does it have an interesting defence mechanism like the chameleon or the dormouse? Does it hibernate? What are its migrations patterns if it migrates? Describe anything else you can think of that I’ve missed. Try for a minimum of 300 words. 27. Spend a minute day-dreaming about your ideal house. Now describe it in detail. 28. It’s 2:30 am and you’ve had three missed phone calls from a friend. Worried, you call them back. Describe the phone conversation (orally) when your friend picks up. 29. Think of a colour that bears a symbolic meaning in your culture – for example yellow in Russian represents madness and red in China represents good fortune. Describe what the colour means and give examples of where we might see this in a real context. 30. Look into Russian customs and superstitions and write about one that interest you. Do you have something similar in your own culture? 31. Describe a first time doing something – your first day of a new job, the first time you got on an aeroplane or your first day living on your own, for example. 32. Look through an old photo album and find a picture you like. Talk about what was happening at the time the picture was taken. 33. Talk about an occasion where you were proud of yourself. 34. We here must all be interested in Space, or else why would we be in Team MIR? Read about an aspect of Russia or the Soviet Union’s involvement in Space exploration. 35. Think of a book you’ve read recently, preferably not in Russian so you don’t have the vocabulary crutch from the novel to lean on. Now write a book review, attempting to write in a more formal style. 36. Look at the Russian news for the day and summarise an article. 37. Open a page in your vocabulary book or SRS deck. Close your eyes and pick out three random words. Write them down and tell a story using those three words. 38. Arrange a Skype chat with a fellow member of Team MIR or with a native Russian speaker. Speak in Russian for the entire duration of the call. 39. Find a Russian article and read it as fast as you can. Time yourself. If you make a mistake, start again from the beginning of the sentence. 40. When did you first become interested in languages? 41. Talk about something ugly – war, hate, fear or cruelty for example – and find the silver lining in it. 42. Imagine waking up in hospital after an accident. You have lost all of your long-term memories. You don’t remember how you came to be there or any of the people around you. What is going through your mind? How did you get here? 43. Write a synopsis of an episode of one of your favourite TV programmes. 44. Imagine you’re a TV critic. Write a review of the episode described above. 45. You’ve been digging in your garden and you find a chest. Describe what you find inside. 46. You are an astronaut on a space mission to explore a new planet. What can you see? Smell? Taste? Hear? Are you scared? Excited? What kind of life can you see? 47. Write a short poem in Russian. 48. Sometimes you can hear a piece of music and be transported back to an earlier time in your mind. Think of such a song and describe where it takes you. Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What can you see, smell, hear? Why does the song mean so much to you? 49. Record yourself retelling an occasion where you did something in a foreign language that you had not done in your native one. 50. Read about an aspect of Russian history you like. Write a diary entry pretending to be someone from that time. 51. Look into a Russian social issue and comment on it. 52. Write an academic-style essay on a topic of your choice, whether related to Russian culture or not. 53. Describe where you think you will be in five, ten years’ time. What will have changed in your life? 54. Describe a memorable coincidence. 55. If you could cook any meal for your family, what would you cook? Does it have a special meaning to you? 56. Think back to a time where you had to be brave and recount it. 57. Imagine you’ve been given access to one of the many fictitious time machines. What time would you go back to, what would you do and why? 58. Make a short recording in which you talk about a time when you were afraid. 59. Write a story of 26 sentences long. Each sentence must begin with a different letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. 60. Tell a story about a boring day where the weather keeps you indoors. What did you occupy yourself with? 61. Describe a memorable event and how it made you feel, but don’t name the feeling. Let the feeling become apparent through your description. 62. Describe a memorable experience in a foreign language. How old were you? How did it make you feel? Where were you? What were you doing? 63. What were you like at languages at school? Did you enjoy them? Were they taught well? Did your teacher have an unusual teaching method? Did you like the teacher? Were they any good? Did languages at school discourage you from studying languages later on in life? Did you get anything out of your language education at school, whether language-related or otherwise? 64. Record yourself talking about a memorable childhood experience. 65. Watch a film. It doesn’t have to be in Russian or have Russian subtitles. Watch and listen to everything carefully. When you see or hear something interesting that you don’t know how to express in Russian, write it down to look up later. 66. Watch the Russian news. After watching a report that interested you, tell its story in Russian and give a short commentary on it. 67. Look at something written in another Slavic language. Write down words you like the sound of and look them up. Do you know them in Russian? Are there any words in the text that you can infer from your knowledge of Russian? Look for roots in the text that you find interesting and look in a Russian dictionary to see whether these roots still exist in some capacity in Russian. 68. Find an interesting text in one of your other target languages and translate it into Russian. Alternately when studying for said other target language, you could find a Russian text and translate it into that language. 69. Have you ever been to Russia? What was it like? If you haven’t, what do you imagine it to be like? Record your response so we can compare stories! 70. If you could only live with one of the five senses, which would you choose and why? Record your answer. Little Challenges for cursive Note: The Little Challenges for handwriting assume that you can already read the printed forms fairly well. 1. Look on the Internet for the Cyrillic handwritten forms. There are quite a few video tutorials on YouTube teaching cursive. Copy out the letters and repeat. Pay special attention to how each letter is joined to the next. 2. Now that you have this list, make a separate list of the handwritten letters which look similar to the Latin alphabet, regardless of whether they have the same sound or not. Now practise writing words which contain just these letters. One of the reasons for this is because they will join together in a familiar way. For example - Мама, папа, кома, комма, лимон, атака, авто, зоо, зоопарк, парк, класс, океан, марка, март, доллар. 3. Either look up or make a list of as many cognates in Russian as possible. For example, космос, космонавт, астронавт, аэропорт, бар, видео, гитара, кларанет, робот, паспорт, зебра, экзамен, мама, папа, студент, шоколад, сандали, водка, директор, Интернет, идея. 4. Choose your favourite letter of the Cyrillic alphabet that is different from the Latin alphabet. Now either go through the dictionary and find words containing your chosen letter, or go onto www.wordreference.com and find some. Now write out the words you find, practising your favourite letter. Remember to pay attention to where it joins to the letters around it. My favourite letter is ж. Жить, Живаго, жёлтый, жена, жажда, ждать, жадность, жалить, желать, жало, жадный, жал, жаль, жариться, жатва, жевать, желток. 5. Make up some nonsense words using some of the stranger-looking letters. Post them on the Team MIR thread. 6. Pick your least favourite Russian letter and do the same as for exercise 4 above. Oftentimes the reason we don’t like something is lack of familiarity. My least favourite letter in Russian is ч. Чемодан, чёрный, чашка, чешка, чех. Чеченца, четыре, чехарда, чешский, чечётка, чешуя, число, читать, чирикать. 7. When you are typing something out in Russian, for whatever purpose, type it out entirely in italics. The italicised forms are almost completely identical to the handwritten forms, with a few exceptions. 8. Write something out in large handwritten script, so it’s nice and clear. Make sure every letter is formed well and it’s clear which letters it is joined to. Now write it out again, only this time slightly smaller. Repeat this process until your handwriting has become quite small. When you reach a stage where your writing looks awkward or difficult to read, repeat the same block of writing a few times, keeping your handwriting this size. Is it getting easier? 9. After you’ve become comfortable with this, try the same exercise with a pen you don’t like. 10. Once you’re happy with your handwriting, write something out in your best Russian, in fairly big handwriting and a reasonably thick pen. Now once you’ve finished, scan it into the computer and send it to your teammates over at Team MIR so we can all tell you how awesome you are 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 288 of 586 05 January 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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By the time I have completed this I will definitely have hit the speaks mark, that is for
sure. Some of these beginner ones feel too easy for me, though; some of the advanced ones feel like I'll have a heart attack just attempting them (and live corrections from Mark guaranteed ;)) How do we pick beginner/advanced? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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