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Russian Journal of Weizenkeim | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 47 22 May 2009 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
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wow, first page and already I love the direction this heads to. I am still struggling a little with the example sentences you posted, Russianbear. My vocabulary is still too limited to just read them with ease. I think I have to dissect them for now, like I did with texts in latin class in my school days. I never really enjoyed it back then. Translating from latin always felt like solving a huge puzzle with tons of tricky pieces, but without getting a nice picture in the end. Actually I like solving tricky puzzles, but latin always felt stale and dusty for me.
hmmm. Russian does not. It feels pretty alive. So I better say, I am going to vivisect those examples. Anyway, thanks a lot for adding this to my journal. I really appreciate this. My friend sent me an interesting article yesterday btw. Or at least I hope it is an interesting one, as I am not yet through with it. It can be read online here and is all about russian imperative. I hope it will give me even more insight. Well actually I don't really care if not. But it is actually fun to read a long russian text about grammar issues. It reads quicker than my novel, partially because I didn't worry too much about the unknown words. But I could guess a lot of words too, quite a few I just recently learned from my sci-fi lecture, others I was able to translate by knowing similar words. Like knowing действовать makes действие an easy guess... ---- Yesterday's progress: word review ~ 2 hours over day reading - another half page of my book with the usual process of getting distracted by wikipedia and co. (I am always fascinated by the many languages, the more common wiki-articles are available in, some of which i have never heard about before) 3 paragraphs of article ИМПЕРАТИВ 25 flashcards added listening to assimil lessons in shuffle mode before sleeping (but slept away soon after the 'Горький tagging the turtle' story) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 47 22 May 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't want to spend too much time on posting, even learning russian today. I have cut some of my more urgent work down in favor of language studies recently. Oh no.
But maybe just some thoughts about the path that lies ahead. I'd like to define some near future goals for myself-- this month I want to finish the first chapter of my story. I extract more words from it every day than I turn into flashcards. I have experienced in the past, that I suffer some kind of mental overload when adding much more than 25 items a day to my voc-stack. My brain starts getting very hot then and I am worried, that it might eventually shrink. Just like my socks in the washing machine. (Or to stick to this analogy, I could even be in danger of losing one half. And if so, would I just lose 1000 of my 2000 learned words then?) Anyway. I think I could get the chapter done by next week. Then pausing the book for another week, starting to build sentences with the new words, returning to assimil for a while again. I also happened to get the novel as an audiobook. It is still hard to follow, even those parts I have already read. But what I did before was, to put difficult audio on my mp3player and do an A-B loop just the length of 3 sentences or so, listening for 20 minutes actively or passively, then proceed to the next 3 sentences and so on. This worked quite well. I don't know if it really helps in understanding unknown spoken russian, but it always feels a little like getting the words branded with an iron because of the bits listened to being so short. One of my long term goals is something I have had in mind for quite some time. I would like to create a set of more complex flashcards, that carry an interesting sentence together with a related picture on one, translation and refining grammar hints on the other side. Maybe they could resemble those collectible cards for kids, just a little larger in size. It wouldn't be a real boost for my language learning experience I guess. But i like the idea, already collected some sentences, made some sketches. Finally I am thinking about getting some russian movies on DVD. So far I have only watched american TV-series to which I could find subtitle-files on the web. That was quite nice either for quickly grasping written text. But it would be even better with audio. Speaking of the web, this is a website I like very much. They feature an article about one russian word, rare or common, every day, be it a verb, a food noun or whatsoever. Interesting often pretty funny background information, grammar hints, example sentences. If you are learning russian or plan to do so, you might give it a try. Edited by Weizenkeim on 23 May 2009 at 12:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 47 22 May 2009 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I took my mp3player to work. I listened to the story I am currently reading, put it on repeat from the beginning to the point I stopped yesterday. I set the volume very low, because I had to concentrate on what I was doing. But every now and then a sentence penetrated the shield of concentration and I was able to connect it to the story. The longer it went, the more often this happened. That was quite satisfiying.
Still there are some passages that I am uneasy with. Even if I listen very carefully and even if I know what the narrator is saying (even if I read the sentence while listening), it doesn't quite fit. It came to me that this happens most of the time with sentences that use grammatical structures, that are very different from or at least unusual in my native language. Especially the frequent use of all those different participles is keeping my brain busy. While I am internally transcoding it into some meaningful German sentence, the story has long time proceeded and I am literally lost in translation. Which leads to the conclusion, that I still don't really think russian. I think I can cope with this by listenig more, but what I definitely should put on my to-do list is producing. -> to do: produce some russian text about a topic I am interested in, trying to rely only on my active vocabulary 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 47 22 May 2009 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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--some thoughts on computer aided language learning (call? what a lovely acronyme...)--
So when I started with russian I felt like climbing the mount everest - in slippers and t-shirt. In contrast to learning English, where flexion of words is close to nonexistent, here I got 6+ cases. Instead of learning but some irregular verbforms I encountered verbal aspects and except for words like профЕссор or бутербрОд I just had to memorize wordmonsters like достопримечАтельность or происхождЕние, no way to draw some parallels to any roman or Germanic words I already knew, not to mention mixing up words like дАже, Уже, ещё и.т.д.. And then I learned about flashcards, spaced repetition learning. зажигАлка for my personal end of the tunnel. I finally became friend with anki and some similar internet service. Now, after a year I am astonished how much words I actually have crammed into my tiny head. (It works so well, I even considered making a flashcard deck about the whereabouts of my belongings, because I keep forgetting where I put this key, that brush, those papers.... but that's a different one) But creating russian flashcards with computer requires one being able to type cyrillic letters. So I ordered some set of sticky stickers to sticker them upon my unstickered keyboardkeys. In the meantime, while waiting for the stickers to arrive, I printed out a йцукен keyboard layout and started typing. And finally when the stickers arrived, I didn't need them anymore. Funny situation, I never learned blind typing on my qwertz layout, but after having entered десЯтки тЫсяч of russian words i can now do 10 finger cyrillic typing faster than I type latin. (I configured the caps lock key to be the layout switch btw. This is extremely convenient as I previously never made use of it anyway. Getting my windows desktop-pc to do this was an adventure, but I use to type my russian stuff on my laptop anyway, and with linux it is super easy. Oh thankyou Mr. anki-developer for that awesome sync option) But where am I heading? I made a card model with 3 items. 1-Question, 2-answer and 3-additional content. Now whenever I do my daily review, I let the machine force me to type the answer - if it is from German to russian - or type the irregular flexions stored in 3 - if it happens to be an irregular russian verb or some obscure genitive or whatever. Today though I sat back and thought about it a little more. That is: I seem to remember difficult words not only by using some type of memory hooks (the German word is Eselsbrücke - donkey bridge btw. but don't ask me why, I hope they aren't refering to me) but also on the key positions. So sometimes I for example don't remember adding a ь after an л for the reason of 'because' but only because I hardcoded that 'k' to 'm' movement of my fingers. (for this reason I often type the infinitve of a verb instead of 3rd person form just because it is so convenient to type ть. I think the cyrillic layout is much more ergonomic than the latin one because it is more or less constructed to serve a single language, but i may be wrong about this) Now remembering words by finger movement might be a nice hook but I realized, that I often started typing, before the complete word/ phrase came to my mind, then uttering it in the speed I was typing. Like I get a card asking me to answer 'travel'/'reisen' and I type 'путешЕствовать' while uttering - п-п-уууу- -тт--и-шшшшшшш-ее-сс-тт-вва-вввааа- ть' typing and talking together, giving me the clue to that word (and at the same time sounding like a robot (which again is one of the very few slavic rooted words)). but could I have grabbed it without my fingers? Today I started forcing me to first say it and really trying to be quick, any minor brainrummaging serving as an indicator to not really know it, rating it accordingly. Now i wrote a very long story about just this one point. It may seem tiny and unimportant. But to me it wasn't. I have to get quicker in recognizing words. When I see the question, I want to be able to say the word immediately, or to use a martial German phrase: it ought to be answered like it was shot out of the gun - wie aus der Pistole geschossen. Gute Nacht. Edited by Weizenkeim on 22 May 2009 at 10:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6607 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 47 22 May 2009 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | ||
I started doing this some time ago, and I just wrote about it in my log today. Bottom line is that I also thought it might be motivating, but so far it isn't. But I'm not in the long run yet... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 47 22 May 2009 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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----die spendierhosen anhaben---
this is a post not about russian, but about a German phrase. spendieren - that is giving away something to someone, because you are in the mood to do so. Doing a walk on a sunny day with your son or daughter you will eventually buy an icecream for him or her. that is: ein eis spendieren. a night out with your colleagues, paying for all their drinks because you just feel generous or maybe you won in the lottery? so you seem to wear the spending trousers: die spendierhosen anhaben. Ich hab heute meine Spendierhose an. <-> Today I wear my generous pants. I just thougt about this. I use a software, that is excellent. It is free, it is improved on a regular base. Somebody out there spends a lot of time programming it, removes bugs as they are reported, adds features as they are requested. Offers a server for syncing. I am more than grateful. First time I payed for something that comes free. Edited by Weizenkeim on 23 May 2009 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 47 23 May 2009 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did my reviews yesterday - with lots of failed answers. Did some listening and a futile attempt of reading russian on the subway. I got stuck after a few sentences. I didn't add any cards. Maybe I should give a day to let it all settle and just do some repetitions or exercises today. There is nothing more fun than doing grammar exercises on a sunny saturday.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Weizenkeim Diglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6108 days ago 70 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 47 24 May 2009 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
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back to routine -
- read half a page of черновик - did flashcard review 1+ hours, - added 25 new words - learned some interesting facts about russian numbers and then, when I was browsing through my russian bookshelf, I found 2 books I had completely forgotten about. I had found them in some boxes in my parents garage that were full of books once belonging to my grandparents already some time ago. The books are No.1 and 2 of a series called "russisches Leseheft" Each containing about 10 short stories or excerpts from books of famous russian authors, also some folktales. The editorial says that they are slightly simplified. It also says: approved by the censorship department of the sowjet military administration. (Разрешено цензурой СВА под № 52250) The paper is all brown and they smell of moth balls, but best thing is - Every word that is a little uncommon can be found in an alfabetic index at the end of the book. Also they are small, about the size of my hand, spine at the short side, so they easily fit in my pocket. I can read it on the metro and then, if someone would ask me about it, I could say: Oh, it's just Tolstoi, you know? but the original of course. The translation has sooo many shortcomings :) Ach, well... better not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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