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| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 9 of 14 15 June 2009 at 3:16am | IP Logged |
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June 13-14 2009
I didn't really do much reading or vocabulary work this weekend, but the main highlight was that I was able to get Cyrillic input working correctly on this computer. This computer has the problem that if you hide the language bar, you have to go into the Control Panel and change some things in order to make it appear again. It's strange, because this computer is Windows XP, and so is my laptop, but my laptop hasn't ever had any issues with inputting different scripts. But I was happy because I was able to have a good Russian IM conversation on SharedTalk, and we have each other's contact information now. I talked for a while about uvula piercings, tonsillectomies, and tonsil stones. It was my choice of topic, because I'm weird like that. But it expanded my vocabulary and the speaker corrected my mistakes. I also had a side conversation from a Polish guy who wanted to practice his English. By the way, today I went to a concert where a Russian pianist from Kazan' performed. I was able to meet him afterward and spoke to him in Russian, but our conversation was still very brief and he seemed to prefer English. I'll probably keep using SharedTalk until I go to Russia, because in my situation face-to-face Russian encounters will be rare, and I'll be on the computer a fair amount anyway. It will take away from some of the tedium of vocabulary drilling and reading long texts, but I'll still be gaining something in the end. I think that I need to seriously limit, if not ban, my activities on English-speaking sites. The problem is that I really enjoy reading random topics on this forum and following others' language logs. But another side of me is telling me that I should enjoy it while I can, because in Russia my Internet access will probably be fairly limited and my whole environment will be Russian (which is definitely a good thing!). Next week I'm going to resume my reading and vocabulary drilling. I also didn't touch Japanese at all this weekend, and I'll be getting back into that tomorrow with my kanji book. I'm also going to be posting blog posts in Russian because I want to improve my writing skills, and extra output is always helpful. When I post new entries I will update this page. Edited by snovymgodom on 15 June 2009 at 3:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 10 of 14 15 June 2009 at 9:00am | IP Logged |
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Just After Midnight
I'm adding a late night entry because I've had some recent thoughts. I've spent the last few hours on SharedTalk talking to Russians and I've noticed a pattern. My conversations are usually with new people every time I log onto the site, and therefore I am always asked the questions of "How do you know Russian so well?", "How long have you been studying Russian?", "Why do you study Russian", etc. While it's nice to be praised, it isn't really improving my Russian much because I've responded to these questions in Russian countless times already in real life, and I really want the conversation to be about things other than learning Russian/English, for the sake of vocabulary-building. In the future I'm going to try and be more spontaneous and random on SharedTalk when it comes to topics. I'll read news articles beforehand and use those in conversation. When I think about it, I think that SharedTalk may be a more valuable resource for those who are in their beginning stages of the language. When I study a little more Japanese I will probably try to use it to practice Japanese. But first I want to test some strategies for practicing Russian through SharedTalk. News articles, random questions, maybe discussions of literature, movies, etc. would be good. I've heard from others about people on SharedTalk not being very friendly, but I've found the people very warm and friendly. Maybe it's just the Russians. Well, until tomorrow! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 11 of 14 17 June 2009 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
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June 16 2009
I did some more work on SharedTalk and I've blogged about my experience. I've posted it on my new blog at Blogspot, where I plan to write regularly about my thoughts related to language learning. Shortly I'll be getting back into reading, and Japanese as well... http://zmea.blogspot.com/2009/06/and-other-comments.html 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| KiwiKiwi Tetraglot Groupie Belgium Joined 5694 days ago 50 posts - 50 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 12 of 14 18 June 2009 at 2:19am | IP Logged |
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A good idea to limit your visites to English sites. I juggle between 3 languages everyday, and beginning with a fourth one, and for passive understanding it's only good - i learn more and more. But when i actively use those languages *every day* it takes some time 'to get into' another language. Maybe the other person does not even notice, but i do in my mind... words from other languages pop up then and i notice that i talk slower then.
What i try now is not to use my native language, also not when i write in my diary or write texts. That helps allready and leaves 3 languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| snovymgodom Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5723 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian | Message 13 of 14 18 June 2009 at 5:36am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, I agree, Kiwikiwi. I remember that when I came back from Kazakhstan, having spoken Russian all of the time, it took me a while before I could "get into" speaking Arabic again. Even though Kazakh, Russian, and Arabic have very different structures and are in different families, it's possible to confuse words here and there just because of habit.
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| Freya Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5605 days ago 16 posts - 17 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish, GermanB1 Studies: Norwegian, Japanese | Message 14 of 14 14 August 2009 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
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You were saying that you could possibly buy a Japanese book in Russian. The book written by Нечаева is quite famous. I don't really understand why because it's not very good in terms of grammar explanation - to much description - but maybe I'm just not this type of learner. However, I can recommend first part of it for it teaches well how to write hiragana, katakana and the logic of writing kanji so that you don't need to learn each hieroglyph (I don't know how you learn it). The second part is not good at all in my opinion. Н.И. Васина "Японский речевой этикет" is a good book with real life situations.
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