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My Little понимание - Russian Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 17 of 26 17 June 2014 at 1:08am | IP Logged |
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June in a nutshell:
A pretty good month for studying with not too much downtime. Started watching Кухня series and studying the transcripts - should be productive. I needed to look up 128 and 134 words in the first two episodes! A fair bit of reading, grammar reviews. Watched a lot more films and listened to more podcasts, still need more speaking and listening though. My progress is no longer in leaps and bounds but I can still sense it happening. 
Achievement list (from most to least useful): 3x 90-minute classes attended 10 lessons + 2 tests on LearnRussian.RT.com 4 episodes of Кухня watched 2 transcripts of Кухня read, researched, understood 2 Taste of Russian podcasts 2 RussianPodcast.eu podcasts 2 long articles read on Lingocracy, + word practice 2 chapters of Маленкий Принц 1 chapter of Тамань, + questions 5 lessons of Assimil 2 units of Zhili-Byli completed + exercises 5 (!) Russian films watched 6 grammar review worksheets completed 1 lesson of Hugo 8 audio units from Reed College 1 short reading video recorded 1 music video Proverb podcasts from RussianPod101 other scraps Material covered: Prepositions of place and time; Time expressions; Dative case; a bit more Russian culture and history. Biggest hurdles so far: - As I increase the level of difficulty, reading and listening are still a challenge at times. - In colloquial stuff like Кухня there are so many little word combos (и, а, ж, же, так, как, вот...) which generally go over my head. - And of course the low-frequency words which I can never guess and don't bother to memorise. Biggest triumphs so far: I can't think of any this month, so I'll just put this: Четыре is almost among the weirdest films I've seen, and Возвращение is a very good watch. Next month: - It will soon be halfway through my first year of Russian so perhaps I will celebrate by writing a substantial text or making a video. - Also: listen to Russian radio, Russian news bulletins, or a Russian football match. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 18 of 26 19 July 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
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July in a nutshell:
With the hot weather, trips, barbecues, cycling on TV, and work, it has been hard to get motivated and put in long study hours. At least not as long as in January and February. This is the 6-month point in my Russian project and it coincides not only with the end of my weekly class for summer, but also with a feeling that progress has been stalling for some time and returns are only going to diminish month on month. It would be a shame to give up now... the below list is quite impressive for a "bad month". But maybe a new strategy, or "shake-up", is a good idea at this time, to continue with a fresh perspective. 
Achievement list (from most to least useful): - 6 chapters of Penguin Russian Course - 4 transcripts of Кухня read & vocabbed - 6 episodes of Кухня watched - 5x 90-minute classes - 1 book review written for TAC Challenge - 2 long texts on Lingocracy - 9 paragraphs of Ilya Frank on Lingocracy - 12x Интересная Неделя watched - 7 grammar worksheets - 3 chapters of Жили-Были (coursebook + workbook) - 4 chapters of Маленький принц - 1 chapter of Тамань - 5 lessons + test on LearnRussian.RT.com - 100 words learned on Memrise - 2 chapters of Hugo - 2x Вечерный Ургант watched - 2x A Taste of Russian podcast - 2x RussianPodcast.eu - 2x Everyday Russian podcast - 2x Ochen Po-Russky podcast - 1x The Big Podcast Material covered: Dative, impersonal constructions, prepositional with "o", aspect, verbs of motion, motion prefixes, the rarer prepositions, listening to native materials, focus on quantity of vocabulary. Biggest hurdles so far: - The verbs of motion. Doing hundreds of exercises has helped, and идти/ходить, ехать/ездить are coming into focus. I'm ok with most of the prefixed ones. But all the носить's, возить's etc are beyond my grasp. - Understanding enough speech to follow, say, a talk show is still well beyond my abilities. Biggest triumphs so far: - Lately it's been great fun to watch a couple of episodes of Кухня and then read the transcripts later and start understanding stuff. I'm sure the repetitious nature of it will help to increment my vocabulary. - The sheer volume of grammar exercises my teacher gives out are helping things like verbs and case endings to really stick a bit more. Next month: I haven't decided quite how to shake things up. I have written down a lot of words and phrases in notebooks that I want to review. I'd like to work with snippets of audio, and sentences that I take from my vocabulary lists, courses and maybe Tatoeba. I want to increase my vocabulary from 2000 to 4000, using contextual sentences, and continue consuming native materials at an increased rate. And I want to create a decent playlist of songs that I can learn the lyrics to. I am also on the lookout for a local teacher otherwise I will have no spoken interactions until September. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 19 of 26 19 July 2014 at 9:28pm | IP Logged |
Bonus post: this is how good Lingocracy's flawed word-counting system can make you feel:
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| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 20 of 26 07 September 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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Hey chokofingrz, how's it going? Still studying Russian? It would be good to hear from you sometime again.
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| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 21 of 26 17 December 2014 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't posted to my log for 5 months and that is partly because I took an extended break from studying Russian (62 days - longer than I intended) in August and September. However, in the past 3 months I have been back studying just as hard as before, only without logging my progress here.
But it doesn't feel right to abandon my log without a massive dump of data, a screen-obliterating spreadsheet and a few finishing thoughts to wrap up my first TAC and first year of Russian. Stay tuned... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 22 of 26 17 December 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged |
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The last 3 months in a nutshell:
Since resuming my studies in October, my focus has been on extensive input: watching more films and TV than before, reading more advanced texts, working with vocabulary lists I've harvested from past texts. Grammar-wise I've leaned on LR.RT.com for advanced topics and my weekly classes to keep the basic principles refreshed. I have seen some real progress in written and oral comprehension and can't wait to get my teeth into more advanced materials. Active skills are also coming along, but are not my main focus for now. 
Achievement list (from most to least useful): 10 episodes of Кухня watched 12 episodes of Кухня studied / vocabbed 25 grammar lessons done on LR.RT.com (total now 75) 10x 90-minute classes attended 1 Skype chat 3 texts written 5 texts posted on Lang-8 2 music videos studied / transcribed 90 sentences on ListeningPractice.org 17 films watched 2 Russian film subtitles translated Half of Russian Fables book read (c.4000 words) 1 class presentation 5 episodes of Интересная Неделя 2x "A Taste of Russian" podcast 3 grammar worksheets 4 chapters of Жили-Были completed 200 words added on Memrise 4 chapters of Маленький Принц read (1700 words) 40 mp3s Ilya Frank - "Tales from Zaikina" 13 Ilya Frank - "Tales from Zaikina" paragraphs 2x "The Big Podcast" Material covered: Grammatical case studies have been done and redone, almost to death. Verbal aspect too (it's still not enough). Now I'm more interested in discovering idiomatic expressions and analysing the grammar of everyday speech. This is reflected in a greater use of native materials (books, films, TV, podcasts) and less time spent on beginner instructional materials. Biggest hurdles: - Movable word stress (although I have found a resource to aid with this). - Vocabulary size. I feel that in reading and writing intermediate-and-above-level texts, my vocabulary is smaller than I would desire. I will continue to focus on this area until I am certain of having a concrete 3000+ words. Biggest triumphs: - I can now watch films without subtitles and get a reasonable amount of the plot and dialogue. - I'm much better at selecting the correct aspect. - The Team Катюша Skype chat we had was my first real test of improvised speaking (i.e. outside of a controlled classroom setting). I coped with that better than I expected. - Using ListeningPractice has improved my ear for those small, easily missed prepositions and silent letters. Ambiguous endings are still challenging though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 23 of 26 17 December 2014 at 6:30pm | IP Logged |
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Year-End Conclusion
Russian - what a language! On my 12-month (ok, 10-month) journey from A0 level to possibly the A2/B1 border, I have found the language to be beautiful, logical, simple, complex, mystifying and unfathomable. There are so many rules to learn and quirks to memorise, but when you start to know and understand them you can find a lot of beauty in their spellings, grammar and expressions. To me, learning Russian really has been worth the time invested. I got through a lot of materials this year (I estimate 300-400 hours). Some were better than others, but the materials tended to self-select based on results and engagement. As a self-study learner, I was very impressed to find a huge number of resources out there online for studying - texts, podcasts, TV, grammar tools, lessons, websites, apps, communities. And more are appearing online all the time. You only have to look and you will find. I will post an updated list here later. I can not yet converse naturally with Russian people, or read Russian literature, but I feel like I am more than 50% of the way towards that goal. Being a member of TAC Team Катюша has been a help in a few ways: - the initial general enthusiasm boosted my motivation, - the monthly challenges inspired me to write longer and more accurate texts, - the one Skype meeting I participated in was great speaking practice. However it was disappointing that the team quickly shrank down to 3-4 key members and there was not a lot of general back-and-forth posting about Russian. In 2015 I will continue to work more slowly on Russian with several of my unfinished resources (Assimil, LR.RT.com, Маленький Принц, Кухня); take up online lessons on iTalki instead of a local class; and work on a dual-language book which is above my current level. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5187 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 24 of 26 17 December 2014 at 6:35pm | IP Logged |
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New resources - to be added to the first post
ListeningPractice.org - the quiz interface to Tatoeba which turns a big resource into a powerful one Lingua.ly - finds short articles for you to read which contain words you are just learning Kaban.tv - watch many Russian TV channels online. Great for random bursts of exposure and cultural insight. Lingocracy.com - my preferred reading and vocabulary-building tool RussianStress.info - analysis of irregular stressed words 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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