|
 |
Russian through literature | ||
Tags: Literature | Russian | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6482 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Smi, Latin | Message 17 of 148 07 November 2008 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
|
What type of words have you learnt most? :) New adjectives, verbs or nouns?
I'm on page 17 of "Doktor Zhivago", and the sentence structure is quite blurred due to the old(ish) verbs that I can't even find in my dictionary.. Anyway, understanding the main idea of each sentence is my priority, not understanding every damn word. I find those EasyReader books just annoying, nothing else. I tried to read one of them a year ago, but the "question-answer/wrong words explained" form almost made me puke. I have yet to find a decent simplified book to read. By the way, how much grammar have you studied? And how much vocabulary did you know when you started reading Lermontov's brick? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6706 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 18 of 148 07 November 2008 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Hi there :)
What type of words... I'm not sure actually, I think a little bit of everything. I have learnt to recognize a lot of adjectives, but I still mix them up, but I remember that same thing from my days of learning French through reading, when I thought all words began with "e" and I could never keep them apart. My problem is rather that even though I understand all the words, the meaning still remains unclear ;D Sometimes I am just too lazy to look for grammatical indications and fall back onto Germanic faithful word order and misinterpret things... I didn't like EasyReaders when I did French either, but now I'm accepting it as an intermediary step. How much grammar... well >_> I never manage to study in any structured way (or with any consistency, until these last months), so I have no idea whatsoever of my vocabulary span or anything really. I do, however, find that even though I do grammar exercises and occassional chapters in books or courses, I never remember ANYTHING about it afterwards. I mostly just write things (on lang-8.com) and read, and look up things that bother me in grammar books (like verbs of motion...), and hope to advance that way. I'm also going to read Doktor Zhivago one day! :) I haven't got it yet though, so it will be for later. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6482 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Smi, Latin | Message 19 of 148 07 November 2008 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I mix up all the adjectives, too! It's so difficult to tell them apart, because they all look very similar.. :/ And I think recognising them is not enough (at least not for me), they should become part of the active vocabulary.
So you don't write any wordlists or stuff like that? You just read, read, read..? How is your spoken Russian? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6706 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 20 of 148 08 November 2008 at 2:54am | IP Logged | ||
|
Since it is here question of rather old books, I will only save some words for later (using Anki). As I read, I underline all the words and phrases that I think are important (based on the translation), but since they may be old ways of speaking and dated adjectives, I will content myself with merely recognizing them. If I later want to write something, and need to look up a certain word, for example "noble", then if I have encountered this word in a text, I will recognize it and know that it is the one I want or do not want in that context. Also, if the words are important and still used today, they will surely pop up in modern texts as well. I will add words from newspapers a podcasts and similar things to Anki, since I know those are OK to use.
The words from books that I do add I always look up first, to see that they are among the first synonyms to show up for a word. Well, since I never speak to any Russians, I have no idea how my spontaneous spoken Russian is. I record texts from books and send the recording to my very helpful friend Aleksey, who listens to them and writes down which words were wrong and why. That isn't really the same thing as speaking in a live situation though. But... then I don't really like people or to speak with them, so perhaps that is just fine :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| I'm Russian Senior Member Russian Federation svet-v-mir.narod.ru Joined 6176 days ago 111 posts - 113 votes 1 sounds Studies: English | Message 21 of 148 08 November 2008 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
Yeah. I go to present to you the phrase in the Dostoevsky style: Она ходила ломая руки, не зная что начать. Nobody speaks in such way now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6706 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 22 of 148 08 November 2008 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
|
Is there something that is specific about Dostoevsky's way of writing that you think I should take notice of while reading?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| I'm Russian Senior Member Russian Federation svet-v-mir.narod.ru Joined 6176 days ago 111 posts - 113 votes 1 sounds Studies: English | Message 23 of 148 08 November 2008 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||
When you see начать, кончить or обделать you should to become alerted. The first meaning of "Кончить" is "came to climax" now, and "обделать" does mean "to poo something" or "to soil". These are just few words that came to my mind right away. I looked through Идиот now and have found that it has a pretty good Russian. I like it very much. I can see now why foreigners sometimes speak such good Russian - they have read Dostoevsky! But Russians dont read books by him now unfortunally. The books by Dostoevsky might cost about 10 roubles(30 cents) per brick in a bazaar now but they are above price! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6706 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 24 of 148 10 November 2008 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I'm Russian: Isn't начать just a normal verb, to begin in the perfective? Whenever I write я начинала it seems to be wrong and I am corrected with я начала. Thanks though!
I posted some pictures from my book to show what it looks like and how the comments/questions are structured. If it is visible on the photo, that is. http://snezhnost.wordpress.com/ I am now somewhere around page 45 and very happy about the book. It is really good! And I discovered with quite a lot of satisfaction that I can easily and quickly read whole pages and understand everything or at least 90-95%. While I read like this, I underline all the words I do not know, and then my annoyingly compulsive personality makes me look up every single one and write down the translation, re-read every sentence again, and make SURE-SURE I got it all. I never stop doing this. Even when I read in my own language I can't stop myself from rereading the same paragrahps several times if I happen to discover that I actually read them quickly. Frustrating. I did read at least 15 pages today though, and answered almost three sets of questions. And I can't help but like the photos in the book. Lots of pretty people ^^ 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
