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Trans-Siberian Express | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 55 10 June 2011 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
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@David Hayter
Wow - the real thing! And the Trans-Mongolian route no less!! You should definitely keep a log for the journey and take plenty of photos along the way. Perhaps when you get back you could also post something up on the web. I for one would be fascinated to read all about it, as I'm sure would others. When are you due to head off, if you don't mind me asking? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5058 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 10 of 55 10 June 2011 at 10:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Do you need smaller vocabulary to read literature in other languages?
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 11 of 55 10 June 2011 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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@ellasevia
Thanks so much. I'd been feeling a bit down about not making much progress lately, so a new project was just what the doctor ordered! I'm sure you'll get your own голубой вагон moving along soon too, although in your case, there are many more routes on the board, and the station manager's hopefully taking a much-deserved break on the beach right now. ;) @Medialis Wonderful imagery...I feel like an extra in a classic Soviet art film, sipping квас and discussing Dostoevsky under the lindens! Let's make it happen one day. :) How are you getting on with Мастер и Маргарита incidentally? @Марк That's a tough one really, as I don't feel I'm qualified yet to best answer this question. In a way, I'm still learning to read literature in my own language (lol). I guess the question boils down to i) what I mean by being able to "read literature", ii) what I consider to be "smaller vocabulary", and iii) what my current "needs" are? i) Personally, I don't feel comfortable reading unaided unless I understand at least 95-98% of the vocabulary in general. It's something I need to work on, I know, but at the moment it's just so hard to let go of wanting to understand everything on the page. This also depends largely on the difficulty level of what I'm reading, my aim being to read with ease and enjoy challenging authors like Turgenev one day. ii) Personally, I found it much easier to reach higher reading levels in German, French, Spanish and Swedish, as the vocabulary was much closer to English and involved less morphological variation. Russian, by contrast, is rich in grammatical complexity and has proved to take twice the amount of time so far to learn. So when I consider the size of vocabulary, I don't just think about single instances of a word, but also how many word families I know well. In this respect, Russian is a double-edged sword. Once I know the root of a word, it can help me work out the meaning of other related words in context. However, it takes a good while to get used to all the inflections and conjugations, and I can often skip over words simply because of my ignorance of grammar. iii) Initially, if I already know the story well (or have just read the English translation in advance), I find I only need to follow the gist in order to keep track. This tends to occur after learning approximately 2,000-3,000 word families in most languages for me. However my ultimate goal is to pick up enough vocabulary and learn to deal sufficiently with uncertainty, at least to be able to pick out a brand new Russian novel in the bookstore and digest everything comfortably on its own (something Professor Arguelles sometimes refers to as the "airplane test"). So in a way, my vocabulary needs change along the way: at first I'm a caterpillar munching holes in pages, then I'm a chrysalis biding his time in the intermediate listening and reading stage. Finally, if I make it through all this, I might just end up being able to fly in a whole new world of words. :) Edited by Teango on 10 June 2011 at 12:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5058 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 12 of 55 10 June 2011 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Spanish conjugations are much more complex than Russian.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 55 10 June 2011 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Kind of. The Spanish temporal system is fairly straightforward to native English speakers. The conditional and subjunctive take some work to understand. The sheer number of forms is much larger than you have for Russian, admittedly. However, Russian has an incredibly rich use of affixes, and not only with verbs. Verbal aspect is also difficult for most people who don't natively speak a Slavic language, and every single description I've seen of it has been deeply unsatisfying. As a native English speaker, I've definitely found Slavic languages' verbs more challenging than those of Romance languages. Edit: Also, good luck, Teango! Fascinating approach. Edited by Volte on 10 June 2011 at 3:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 55 11 June 2011 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Volte
¡Gracias amiga! I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who has trouble getting their head around Russian verbs. Sometimes I feel that I'll never really get the hang of all these intricacies... With my eyes on Polish from time to time, I'd be interested to hear how you found the grammar compared with Russian? @Марк Although Spanish does admittedly boast an extensive number of forms, I found patterns much easier to pick up after a good measure of listening and reading with parallel texts. When it came to conversation afterwards, however, my biggest mistake was mixing up the preterito indefinido and imperfecto tenses. And of course, still only a veritable novice, there's probably a whole other world within the Spanish verbal system that I'm not even aware of yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5058 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 15 of 55 11 June 2011 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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To me the difference between imperfecto and preterito indefinido was obvious. In general,
imperfecto refers to imperfective aspect and indefinido to perfective... I understood the difference between preterito indefinido and preterito perfecto only because I had already known English Present Perfect though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 55 11 June 2011 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||
If I recall correctly, my impression was that Russian was more ornate. However, I think this was probably shaped by the fact that I used Russian literature for both Russian and Polish - in the original for Russian, and in Polish translation for Polish. Translations tend to feel simpler, regardless of the languages involved, I find. A lot of details of Russian seemed simpler (and/or more frustrating) due to previous exposure (and sometimes incomprehension) to them with Polish. I don't mean simpler than Polish, I mean they were simpler to me the second time I encountered them in a language, unsurprisingly. Polish and Russian have a lot of overlap, but they also each have some individual quirks. A proper understanding of either goes a long way. I was quite unhappy with the grammatical descriptions I found for both, despite reading half a dozen reference grammars. I've let my Slavic languages rust far too much, and I'm sad about that. I can still work with both of them to some extent (and I'm fairly comfortable reading short things in Cyrillic, though my pronunciation would be appalling if I were reading out loud), but a couple of years of fairly little exposure has taken its toll. I hope to pick them back up in 2012. Hopefully I'll ride the Trans-Siberian express next year. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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