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Russian Journal of Weizenkeim | ||
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| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6111 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 47 20 May 2009 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello there,
welcome to my russian learning journal. I already wrote some sentences about my intentions in my profile entry. In here I would like to post everything that strikes me on my journey towards understanding russian language. What did i read, what did I write, what resources did I use, what questions about russian popped up in my head? If you happen to read this, feel free to comment, correct me etc.. I would be very pleased but I am fine with talking to myself too... So how to start this... hmm. Maybe it would be best to just recapitulate a little. Where am I now and how the hell did I get here? Started learning in March 2008. First material was "Assimil - russisch ohne Mühe", it was published 1971 i think. I like to read it in the bathtub, consider it a nice book to start with. I did 2-3 lessons per week in the beginning but it slowed down when i began putting my nose elsewhere. (right now I am at lesson 75 or so.) After a few weeks I started gathering other textbooks, broadening my learning path. 2 old Langenscheidt courses, some 3 volumed course from the 50-s with a very gentle learning curve, a whole lot of GDR schoolbooks... maybe I could one day make a list or review some. I think i would never have sticked to russian this much without the web and computers in general. I liked the Princeton course a lot, at first I just read it from beginning to end in a few days without really studying it. But ocassionally i did some exercises. Gave me a nice overview of russian grammar. Recently I picked it up again, using its additional story to improve my listening skills. Worked pretty well. My system of learning is confused and unstructured but i am not in a hurry. I think as long as i spend at least 1 or 2 hours every day on my russian studies, I will make it in the long run. For learning vocabulary, I started using a free service on the web called vokker(.net) It doesn't offer a lot of special features. Just flashcard reviewing with spaced repetition intervals. It has a really nice interface though, csv-export is possible and one can publish one's wordlists, so others can import them. (It also offers some game like mode, where you drag your unlearned cards upon each other (question<-->answer) in order to get familiar with new items.) After a while I discovered Anki, so I use to enter my words and phrases online on that site, then exporting and reimporting them into Anki. In the beginning I did this, because anki wouldn't allow me to type my answers. Now after the author of anki implemented it, i just kept this habit of using 2 different solutions to learn new words nevertheless. It might be redundant and maybe even a waste of time... I can't say. I just like it. Doppelt gemoppelt hält besser, as we say. (~ double moubled lasts longer? I don't know, but there is no other occurence of the word 'gemoppelt' than in this figure of speech i think) what else - I listen to russian radio a lot. I understand quite a few words by now, ocassionally even complete sentences. my station of choice is radiorussia (mms://live.rfn.ru/radiorussia) I haven't tested much other, because this one works for me. It has a lot of discussions, news and sometimes radio plays, and the music is at least not annoying me. (I also like to listen to russians talking in the subway. Eavesdropping. Shame on me. I don't undestand much of it either though...) I had a short intermezzo with using an internet language site called livemocha last year. The online flash course is quite flawed, but the possibility to get your exercises reviewed by lots of natives worked really well. I eventually stopped visiting, but at least got to know some very nice and helpful people there. Last week I went into a book store in the city. They have some russian literature there. Only 2 shelves, but my reading speed isn't fast enough to complain yet. I didn't feel like reading Tolstoi or Dostojewski. Thus I bought a novel by Сергей Лукьяненко, called Черновик (seems to be not yet published in English, German title: Weltengänger). So right now, this is my current project. I have to look up a lot of words, the first half of the first chapter took me a week. But I have to write them all down and feed my Software. Everything else doesn't feel good. Some words I cannot find in my dictionary, some words I cannot even find in any online-dictionary. So sometimes I am doing hours of research for just one single word, only to find out, that it is just some diminutive of some noun I will certainly never ever see or hear again. and then: isn't that half of the fun? And browsing through all-russian dictionaries is quite useful as well. I started another SciFi story some weeks ago, "Дмитрий Глуховский - Метро 2033" I like it very much, only problem is, that I already read it in German. That made me lazy. To my surprise for me it works better with a book, i don't have a translation for. So I just have to read it in russian or else I won't know how it ends... Now this has been a lot of text. I am going to keep it a little shorter from now on. But it was quite helpful for me, to sum it all up once. Maybe somebody even read it. Ok, summary: - Assimil Урок 75 - Черновик Стр. 9 - 1900 words/phrases in SRS --- Log end of entry 0 --- 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ExtraLean Triglot Senior Member France languagelearners.myf Joined 6001 days ago 897 posts - 880 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 2 of 47 21 May 2009 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I read it, as I said I would. Keep it up and I understand what you mean about needing to read a book that you haven't already read. I too get bored if I know what it is about.
Anywho, goodluck. Thom 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6111 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 47 21 May 2009 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
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thank you for reading again :)
A brief summary of yesterday's studies: word review - 1.5 h listening to radio passively - 3 h reading - half a page + adding 25 new words onto my stack Some thoughts about reading. I only procced painfully slow. This mainly has to do with me getting quite easily distracted though. I find a new word, look up it's meaning. Then I try to think of different examples of usage. I consult different dictionaries, search it in google. I like to really comprehend the essence of certain words. Verbs for example that can't be translated 1:1 but instead represent kind of a conceptual cloud. This is not bad at all. I like the researching part, I am also very interested in the structure of words, and where they originated. I really enjoy meeting words again, that gave me a hard time learning them first, because back then they seemed to be just an obscure cluster of mouthtwisting syllables. Then we see each other again, and suddenly I understand them much better, because by now I learned other words with similar stems, recognize presyllables or identify them as some participle form I hadn't known about before. It appears to me, that the language is like a mesh inside my brain, with links growing and enforcing each other with every new item. Feels good. (hmmm or actually that is what my braintissue is like. Self-similarity in our universe is one of those issues that always fascinate me...) Anyway, this kind of procedure is a little distracting. I quickly lose the reading flow. So I stopped looking up each new word immediately, but just wrote them down into my notebook. And after having gathered some, I tried to put some more effort in guessing them by context. (This seems to get easier every week, the more words i learn.) Then writing them down with a questionmark. And only when I come to a point, where I feel totally lost or have that nagging feeling, that i misinterpreted something, I would stop and work through the list in a quick as possible manner, getting more thorough only when transfering them to my flashcardsoftware. Anyway, the slow reading speed doesn't bother me at all. Another thing I have in mind: I want to keep track about how many unknown words ocur to me per page, so I can see how numbers will decrease in the long run. I am no statistics geek, but I think this could be quite motivating. listening: Yesterday I was quite pleased about how many words I understand already. But now way I can assemble them to a meaningful something in realtime yet. I listened to daily news, news always is good. I know some of what they are talking about already and they often play the same recording more than once during the day. On the other hand they use quite a lot of difficult words when covering economics or political topics. I should maybe start to read a russian newspaper. Suggestions anyone? After that there was a program about Machiavelli. Or at least I guess, because Machiavelli was one of the few words I clearly got. I only listend in a very passive state though, doing work meanwhile. Maybe I should find out how to capture the audiostream. I think it can be done with mplayer somehow, and I could listen to it repeatedly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6111 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 47 21 May 2009 at 11:46am | IP Logged | ||
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grammar: I recently came across a sentence, which I could understand, say guess its meaning. But grammatically I didn't quite get it. It goes like this:
И простоял бы, наверное, ещё несколько минут, не решаясь распахнуть дверь, не раздайся из квартиры звон. I talked to a friend on skype yesterday, who often helps me with my russian questions, and she confirmed, what I already guessed - an imperative form here is used in kind of a subjunctive way. So I would translate it like this - And I would have stood there another few minutes for sure, not daring to push open the door, if it weren't for that sound coming (sounding) from my appartment. hmm, guess that was quite clumsy English, maybe someone would like to finetune it. But I think this is correct regarding its meaning. Vielleicht auch nochmal auf Deutsch, für den Mehrwert. Und bestimmt hätte ich dort noch einige Zeit gestanden und mich nicht getraut, die Tür aufzustoßen, wäre nicht aus der Wohnung ein Geräusch gedrungen (ertönt) I just couldn't find anything about this kind of construction in any of my grammars. Is it colloquial, or book language, does it only work in negations? And what if I said раздайтесь instead. Would it be wrong? Or would it be just very polite to the sound? I really would like to have a more complex grammar of russian than those i own. My books only cover the basics, case endings, verbforms etc.. I have one textbook from 1975 called "Die Verben der Bewegung im russischen" A whole book just about verbs of movement with all their nuances, direct and figurative meanings. Lovely... So if anybody has anything nice to recommend i would be very grateful. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SII Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5799 days ago 184 posts - 194 votes Speaks: Russian* Studies: English | Message 5 of 47 21 May 2009 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
Weizenkeim
This is ordinary complex sentence; we (Russians) use such sentences very often. "Раздайтесь" will be wrong in this sentence because "раздайтесь" related to "звон" and "звон" is singular ("раздайтесь" -- plural). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6111 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 47 21 May 2009 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you SII, singular of course, that makes sense. I guess I will get more confident with such constructions that deviate from the standard textbook blandness, the more I encounter them in everyday's text and talk.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SII Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5799 days ago 184 posts - 194 votes Speaks: Russian* Studies: English | Message 7 of 47 21 May 2009 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Weizenkeim
It is very difficult (probably impossible) to give full and clear definition of the Russian syntax, the structure of sentence. In Russian relations between words in a sentence specify by the forms of the words; in many European languages the relations specify by the word order. Therefore in textbooks you don't meet many things which are used in real Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6782 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 47 22 May 2009 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to the forum, Weizenkeim, and good luck with your Russian studies.
This "не раздайся из квартиры звон" thing is a rare form - at least I don't hear it often in everyday speech. But then again, I don't know if I would say it is book language - it is just uncommon. Actually, you brought up an interesting point. What would happen if instead of "звон", you had a plural noun? What if it had been "звуки", for example? I think it would be WRONG to say, И простоял бы, наверное, ещё несколько минут, не решаясь распахнуть дверь, не раздайтесь из квартиры звуки. I am not 100% sure myself, but I think even with a plural it would be the singular form of раздайся: И простоял бы, наверное, ещё несколько минут, не решаясь распахнуть дверь, не раздайся из квартиры звуки. It does sound just a bit weird, and borderline ungrammatical, but I was able to find similar examples: "Не погрязни в распрях орда с туретчиной, не испугайся они прогресса, не цепляйся за свои допотопные завоевательные догмы, глядишь, юг России остался бы под ними. " "Не научись они этого делать,— ветры, дожди, ливни, бури и ураганы сбивали бы и смывали их, и это грозило бы самому существованию целых видов. " Edited by Russianbear on 22 May 2009 at 1:54am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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