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petrklic - Русский Язык (TAC 2011) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5087 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 57 of 68 05 September 2011 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
To clarify, I'm _not_ claiming that Zemfira is pop, much less awful pop. It might be bordering pop, but it's more of a rock music, and very much worth listening to in any case.
Thanks for confirmation!
Indeed :) Kudoz for actually being supportive even though you don't actually study. Maybe if I were like that, you never would have given up, I mean taken a break, in the first place! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5471 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 58 of 68 14 September 2011 at 11:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey Petrklic, I haven't given up! I hope I still have a few years before my brain solidifies and I've been... say... focusing on Spanish. I'm going to a language café event and hope to find some Russian speakers there. If I don't though I'll take what they have, I feel like learning in real conversation for a change...
Congrats on your (apparently, can't understand much of what you write in Russian) amazing progress though! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5087 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 59 of 68 14 September 2011 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, that's pretty cool, gives one a different perspective on things (like that Russians are just as fond of swearing as anyone ;) ). I haven't attended one of those events for ages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5087 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 60 of 68 25 September 2011 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's about time for new report! I wrote another tool for tracking my progress. It outputs my progress, measured in number of words learned, over various time periods. Currently the 7-day report looks like this. It's a date, followed by number of words added from that date until the previous one, or until now:
Like my other progress-measuring tool, this one underestimates a bit, because it cross-references Anki fields with the list of the most frequently used Russian words. This is supposed to reduce false positives, and only include words that have isolated card to themselves, and therefore I can produce the definition even without context. I'm only too eager to show these figures, because they show that I've sprung back to activity over the past two weeks. That comes mostly from reading magazine articles. In particular, this is very well done article about Russian dialects. I read a couple more articles from this resource (Русский Репортёр). Another project of mine has been настойка! In Быков's book Оправдание, which I think I mentioned earlier, there's a character that spends most of his days outside the city, living in a log cabin somewhere in the woods. This person has a habit of настаивать, which means not only "to insist", but also "делать настойку". Настойка is a traditional Russian, possibly alcoholic drink, made of all sorts of berries mixed with vodka. I immediately fell in love with the idea. So I spent last week walking around the nearby streets, randomly picking bunches of elderberry from bushes that are abundant around here. I crawled the web looking for the exact recipe to follow, which has given me many opportunities for a new vocabulary—ошпарить (to scald), брожение (fermentation), бузина (elderberry), рябина (rowan), and many others. My настойка is currently fermenting with sugar, and waiting for me to pour in vodka and let it stand for another couple weeks. Hopefully the resulting drink will be tasty, but even if it's a failure, it was all interesting enough anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5087 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 68 23 October 2011 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm still alive and studying! I attended the first lesson in the new academic year this week. I chose a conversational group course, in hopes it would be more lively and fun than the 1:1's that I practiced last year. The level is somewhat lower than I had hoped, but I think it should be useful anyway, at least for speaking practice. The teacher is native, so that should help.
On word-acquisition front, I'm still pretty much on fire. After about a year of hiatus, I'm finally adding lots new words and progressing nicely. The course helped a bit, too, but the main trick is regular reading of Русский Репортёр. It's online, so it's easy to look up words, and it's not a book, so somehow I don't mind reading it on a screen. The sweet spot! They publish an interesting article every now and then, nice and long, with lots of words that I have not the vaguest notion of. Right now, for example, I'm reading an article from military environment, and getting words like десантник (which is tricky, because desátník in Czech is a military rank, meanwhile десантник is a paratrooper; the etymology is French descente, not Russian десять), or комбат (which has nothing to do with the English word combat! It's actually an abbreviation of командир батальона). But also generally useful words that just happen to be also used in military environment: койка, казённый, тумбочка. I also added a bunch of words for chemical elements. I'm not into chemistry, but one should know at least the basics, like кислород and водород. Nitrogen was surprisingly азот, which is nothing like any word that I know (it comes from Greek, apparently), fluorine is фтор (again, Greek origins), and I also added гелий, helium, so as not to confuse it with something made of gel or whatnot. Oh, and I _must_ mention олово, which in Czech and a couple other Slavic languages means lead, but in Russian it's tin. It's like the famous "вы ужасно воняете", which Czech intuitively understands as "you smell very nice", but which actually means "you horribly stink". What fun! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5471 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 62 of 68 23 October 2011 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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French is definitely very useful for learning Russian ; most of those molitary words are indeed transparent, as well as азот ("azote", N). The French also sometimes use "terrible" (ужасно) to mean "great, amazing", which makes me think there must be something to the notion itself that make it go all the way around and back on the "good" side. I'm saying it must be the notion because this use in French is a very recent, teenager thing. There's also the English "terrific", of course, which is not exactly "terrible" but obviously related. Does anyone have other examples of a confusion between "terrible, horrible" nd "great" in other languages? I'd be curious to know.
As for your courses, I'm glad they're helping you, though I notice you have the same problem as most people on these forums : the level is never, never enough when you also study on your own. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5087 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map | Message 63 of 68 25 October 2011 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh, I bet! And German — lots of words of German origin. Шлагбаум, шлем, штык, штука... is it always ш? Hmm, no, бутерброд! I wanted to write домкрат, too, but cross-checking tells me that one is from Dutch. Well, close enough.
It's like the British "sick", isn't it? I'm not sure what the proper context is, but I've seen it being used with positive connotations.
1:1's were great in this respect, but I like the social element of group courses. And to be honest, I wanted to attend C1, but they didn't open it, so I opted for B2. Which, of course, is symptomatic of what you wrote: there's not enough advanced students. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5471 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 64 of 68 25 October 2011 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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kino... (from German)
Also, you're right, following a course is always good ans that's my main problem with Russian, is that I don't have that incentive to work. Maybe next year if you can convert enough people to self-teaching there'll be a C course! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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