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July 2008 - Russian L-R, etc | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 15 04 August 2008 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's a cursory report of the studying I did during my vacation.
I did roughly 45 hours of Russian L-R during my vacation: specifically, one complete pass through each of "Crime and Punishment" and "The Master and Margarita", over the course of nearly two weeks. This had reasonable results, but was frankly too little time for particularly spectacular ones. As I'd expect, 45 hours was not enough to reach natural listening; consequently, I did not attempt to gain active use (though I have some - see 'Results', below). I peaked at about 6 hours per day, but didn't sustain it. Pitfalls: - I was essentially forced to listen to bad input, and to produce output too early. One of my relatives enjoyed spouting extremely poorly pronounced Russian (although I eventually got him to stop). Another speaks it well, although without a native accent; we interacted a bit in Russian, which forced early output. - I was ill enough for my studies to be compromised for three days in the middle. Being quite tired on a number of other days also impeded me; doing L-R while tired is a good way to learn very little and fall asleep very quickly, as I've repeatedly observed. During the second week, I also slacked off a bit more. Results: - On my 7th day of study, I talked to my relative who speaks Russian well; I'd done about 20 hours of L-R with "Crime and Punishment" (the first 20 of a 26-hour recording) at that point. It took me a few seconds to recognize the meaning of "kak vi"; I responded in Italian, and then he told me how to say "very good", a word I knew but wouldn't have naturally responded with in this context yet (and won't attempt to romanize clumsily). A few other words also took me a while, or I didn't recognize them until he told me in Italian what he'd meant; this was partly due to his accent, I think. Ironically enough, I recognized the word for 'my dear' that he used in Russian, but not the regional Italian translation of it he gave. My accent was atrocious, and I wasn't using stress properly - but this was extremely early on, before serious phonetic work or any focused output work. I also knew all the words to say a number of things, but couldn't yet glue them together with correct prepositions and cases. I managed to comprehensibly say "This is our little dog" to introduce it (entirely on my own, without any prompting, help, or previous related conversation), but my cases and genders may have been entirely wrong; I don't know. My relative also attempted to help me with stress, by reciting something with an intentionally extremely unnatural intonation that made the stress patterns obvious; I don't know if this had any effects. - I'm quite comfortable with a number of false friends between Polish and Russian, such as "dobre/dobr" (good or well/kind) and "miasto/mesto" (city or town / place), to possibly mispell and roughly summarize them. Similarly, I recognize a huge number of cognates. - While I'm not at natural listening, I feel 'comfortable' with L-R'ing Russian; I can almost always map every word in a Russian sentence to its role conveyed in the corresponding English phrase, and recognize a number of rudiments of grammar, most but not all of which are shared by Polish. I can sometimes pick out a significant minority of words in podcasts or music lyrics or phrases; I often have an idea of the topic, but don't catch all of the gist yet, much less details. - I can read Cyrillic nearly effortlessly, despite having spent essentially no time studying it for its own sake (perhaps 2 minutes to solidify a few characters with a chart, after I'd done a fair amount of L-R). Watching "How to teach children to read" in Russian also helped, I think. I wouldn't dream of calling my reading of Cyrillic reading it as Russian, though - I haven't internalized devoicing rules, vowel reduction, etc. I'm hardly less comfortable finding my place in a parallel text with Cyrillic than I was with Polish at a comparable number of hours of L-R. - I'm unhappy with my grasp of Russian phonetics. I found contrasting minimal pairs for Polish to be extremely helpful, but I haven't been able to find recordings of all the contrasting minimal pairs in Russian. Recordings of a variety of sounds and how they influence each other is nice, but I find the former material much more helpful this early on. - I've found Russian L-R to be ridiculously easy to do after the first few hours, but the slurring together of words and dropping and alterations of sounds remain problematic for me. Russian reminds me of French, and Polish of German, in terms of how slurry or staccato the languages are. Misc notes: - Aspect in Russian doesn't really seem to be that bad; it's the rich prefixes and their combinations that strike me as the hardest part of the language. An aside to an aside - my Polish L-R notes repeatedly mention thinking I had an idea of aspect and then realizing I was wrong; actually, the general ideas were sound, but I was confused (by various grammars that only mentioned one prefix or another and which implied that only the single prefix mentioned changed aspect) into thinking that the prefixes I'd identified weren't doing what I thought they were and must be something else. - My Polish and Russian don't seem to interfere with each other. They do clearly help each other. Much of what I learned of Polish carried over, the points still confusing me in Polish that are shared with Russian still largely confuse me in Russian, and the few such points that I internalized carried back over into Polish. - During the second week, I tried shadowing a few phonetically simple words and two-word phrases I could clearly identify the stress of, like "da". I could usually get it right, but became inconsistent and slightly off whenever I shadowed too many times in a row without listening. I decided to end this experiment until I've listened more and become more comfortable with Russian phonetics. ------------- Outside of Russian, I did a few other things, the most notable of which were a quick dip into trying to L-R Spanish with Assimil, and a bit of Polish work. For Polish, I did two things. The first was to spend an hour on the beach reading an Italian phrasebook for speakers of Polish. I read the explanations of Italian grammar (picking up words like 'consonant' in the process) and perhaps 30 pages of vocabulary and phrases. This was a bit over a week into my Russian L-R. After this, I started contrasting Polish and Russian, rather than only seeing similarities. The second was right before I left, after I'd L-R'd both long books I'd brought with me. I picked a 30-minute chapter I liked (chapter 7 of "The Master and Margarita) and L-R'd it in Russian, then in Polish. This threw quite a lot of differences into clear contrast. I'd been greatly overemphasizing the similarities of the languages before, as that was what I had been looking for. Also, this showed an interesting effect of the memory curve: there were more words I couldn't correlate with their meaning in the Polish versian than the Russian, but I was much more comfortable with the 'uniquely' Polish grammatical structures than the 'uniquely' Russian ones. Being exposed to Polish again was a shock for the first paragraph of L-R; by the end of the second, it felt like it had slid back into place. There were similar but lesser effects when I played with the Polish phrasebook. Driving down to the South, I stumbled across Assimil's "Using Spanish". I did a "modified L-R" of the first CD, reading both the English and the Spanish as I listened to it, going straight through from lesson to lesson, and without having read the English first. This worked significantly better than my Polish Assimil L-R experiment; I thought fluidly in Spanish for perhaps a quarter hour afterwards, until falling asleep, although it was largely based on what I'd heard, rather than thought on arbitrary topics; I hadn't previously experienced fluid thought in Spanish. I have a few guesses as to why: - "Using Spanish" has far more interesting material than "Le Polonais sans peine"; it's full of interesting snippets about Spain's regions, culture, etc, rather than contrived dialogues. Hence, it held my attention approximately as well as a continuous narrative would. - My English is better than my French. My French was rarely a stumbling block, but when it was, that was annoying. Also, in non-English languages, going quickly with material that doesn't really interest me, I have a tendency to read it, understand, and forget immediately. - I didn't use the combination of listening to each lesson twice in a row, first listening, then listening and reading. That combination turned out to be a highly unsatisfying meld of two very effective techniques: L-R and a hybrid of repeated listening in a somewhat 'onion-like' approach. I consider this as definitely meriting further experimentation; I would have done so, but my attempt to rip the CDs to mp3s (so I could use my mp3 player) produced unusable ones, and I didn't have a chance to try again or use my laptop significantly until I arrived at my main destination, at which point I wanted to start serious Russian L-R. Other than that, I did some phonetics work. This focused on the cardinal vowels, with a digression into stress that helped me with Russian; my conflation of stress with pitch and loudness had been confusing me greatly. Unsurprisingly, I also spoke lots of Italian. During the last few days, I gave into laziness and read a couple of novels in Italian as well. ------ Next directions: I have several thoughts in this area, but this post is already too long. With regards to "hybrid L-R" (doing L-R of language courses), I have a few things I intend to try: - doing it with the whole "Using Spanish" course. - doing it with "Mówimy po Polsku: A Beginners' Course of Polish" if I manage to obtain a copy; this was suggested to me as avoiding some of the pitfalls I found with Assimil's Polish course. - trying it with a Dunwoody reader, by reading the English first, then using the modified L-R several other forum members have of alternating listening while reading the English, then the target language. I'm rather intrigued by this possibility, as there are quite a large number of less-studied languages with little material available in this format, and I expect it would be significantly more authentic input than that usually found in language courses. --------------------------- Edit: further results from before doing further studying, found after I wrote the above: - I can easily understand what newspaper articles in Russian are about, but not always get the gist. I did this experiment with google news in Russian on the 5th or 6th. - I can easily 'natural listen' (understand the gist and many of the details) of simplified Russian webcasts for people who have done two years of college Russian, without using any of the supporting material (transcripts, wordlists, and exercises). I did this experiment with http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/webcast/, on August 07. Thanks to everyone who pointed me to this podcast, including shapd. There are a few interesting things to note from these results. To me, the most interesting is that I've lost so little, despite not having hit 'natural listening' on real material, only doing half an hour of study on August 03rd, and doing none whatsoever on the 4th-6th (or until after the webcast experiment on the 07th). I have listened to an average of a few hours of Russian music per day though - with relatively low comprehension. Edited by Volte on 07 August 2008 at 12:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6485 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 2 of 15 06 August 2008 at 4:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Great job, man. I can't imagine myself re-reading these 2 bloody books. :-D I made efforts to read them, but that was almost painful.
So good luck with your language studies! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 15 06 August 2008 at 6:41am | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for wishing me good luck. I can read most books, although I agree, some are bloody painful. I don't think I've ever managed to get 10 pages into "Pride and Prejudice", and I've tried several times over the last 15 years! Similarly, I haven't managed to make myself get through more than a few chapters of "Anna Karenina", even just in English, so going through it at less than a quarter of the pace while listening would be torture. With books like the two I L-R'd with Russian, or anything by Eco, I have a much more mixed reaction. Given that you're a native Russian speaker, do you have any recommendations for music, or for Russian books you particularly like (including contemporary literature and non-fiction, not just classical fiction)? So far, my favorite Russian singer is "Dima Bilan". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6485 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 4 of 15 06 August 2008 at 9:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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BTW, forgot to mention that I actually read "Crime and Punishment", but "Anna Karenina" got too boring between 100 and 200 page. :)
Dima Bilan is the mainstreamest singer nowadays, is played on pop radio stations. I heard few songs, they're ok, well-made, but not interesting to me. I don't know what to recommend in Russian music, because these years I listen mostly Italian and Spanish. I can adivse Strugatski brothers as good fiction writers, wrote in 1960s-1980s http://www.lib.ru/STRUGACKIE/ their most famous books are Пикник на обочине, Трудно быть богом, Понедельник начинается в субботу (though the latter is very cultural, with allusions to Soviet reality). I personally liked Хищные вещи века, though it hasn't much action. Very famous these years: Сергей Минаев, Духless (2006) Виктор Пелевин is very famous, I tried reading, but liked only "Поколение П" (1999) Non-fiction that stunned me: Андрей Ланьков. "Северная Корея: вчера и сегодня". (1995) and the brief epologue of the story: Естественная смерть корейского сталинизма (2007) Edited by Siberiano on 06 August 2008 at 9:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 15 06 August 2008 at 9:48am | IP Logged | |||||
My Russian music tastes are still based on the sounds; I don't know what a fair chunk of the songs I have are about. My tastes will most likely change drastically once I do understand new songs in real-time; it has in every other language I've hit that stage in. So, who do you recommend for Spanish and Italian music?
Thanks a million! I'll make a point of trying those as soon as I'm able. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| charlmartell Super Polyglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6236 days ago 286 posts - 298 votes Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 15 06 August 2008 at 12:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My favourite singer: Булат Окуджава (died in '97, but his songs still live on).
Allright, so I only have one rather worn-out cassette with some of his songs, which I've now been listening to on and off for some 30 years. My Ucranian household helper brought me back a whole book of his lyrics when she went home on a holiday. But reading is not quite the same as hearing. Thanks for bringing this up. A little search has brought up this page with a link to downloadable songs. I'll be able to replace my tired old cassette. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 15 06 August 2008 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, better listen to Okudzhava than to Bilan...
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 15 06 August 2008 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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charlmartell, serpent: thanks for the advice. Булат Окуджава is indeed incomparably better on the grounds I can judge him on - the music, his voice, and the translations of his lyrics.
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