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Playadom - TAC 2012 - Team Sputnik

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playadom
Diglot
Newbie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5748 days ago

18 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 1 of 9
16 January 2012 at 5:57pm | IP Logged 
This is just a preliminary post -- I have a large music theory paper due tomorrow, so I
need to occupy myself with lots and lots of proofreading -- more will come soon.

My main language goal for this year is to achieve at least B2 in Russian. I'm coming
into the challenge having studied about 75ish hours worth of Russian (mostly from
Russian Without Toil and NPRC), with one unfortunate catch: that was early last year,
so I've forgotten most of it. One could say that I have a small Russian-shaped hole in
my brain.

I dabbled a bit with LR-ing in Russian a couple of weeks ago. This didn't give me any
real benefits in terms of proficiency, but it seems to have greatly increased my
motivation to study Russian.

I'll probably resume Russian Without Toil as soon as possible, supplementing it with
either a newer Assimil course, the Princeton course, Modern Russian 1, Karavanova's
Survival Russian, or some unholy combination thereof (I'll worry about this when I
don't have a paper due the next day!). Over the past few days, I've been going through
all of the Assimil lessons that I had covered, and I seem to be able to understand more
or less what I was able to when I stopped (perhaps I should thank the brief bout with
LR for refreshing my Russian).

My secondary goal is to increase my Italian vocabulary. I started studying in November
of 2010 to prepare for a trip to Italy during May of 2011. I was able to achieve C1 in
reading and a solid B2 level in speaking and writing. I achieved this by studying
approximately three hours per day: assuming I can maintain the pace, that would equal
between 1000 and 1100 hours of Russian study for the year, about as much as would be
required to get the same result as my Italian study.

I haven't had much chance to practice speaking Italian: I need it for academic
purposes, so most of the practice that I have is through reading or through opera. I'll
probably continue reading a lot and start up another Anki deck for vocab.

Ultimately (3-5y out), Russian is the language I'm most concerned about achieving
native-like grammar and accent in: my girlfriend is from Belarus, and we'd like to
raise our kids to be bilingual in English and Russian (plus whatever assorted languages
I manage to secretly teach them...this is far in the future, so I have time to pick up
a few other languages before I have to worry about that =D).


Edited by playadom on 16 January 2012 at 5:57pm

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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5129 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 2 of 9
17 January 2012 at 10:22pm | IP Logged 
Hope your music paper went well! And I think your future plans sound great. Russian and English sounds like a fantastic gift for any child.
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playadom
Diglot
Newbie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5748 days ago

18 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 3 of 9
20 January 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged 
Alright, it's time to get deeper into studying!

For the past week or so, I've been trying to reactivate the little bit of Russian
that's floating around in my head, mainly by re-listening to and re-reading the old
Russian Without Toil lessons and reading through textbooks to get the grammatical
charts and lots of example sentences fresh in my head.

Where next? Probably more L-R, for the time being. I've noticed that continuing with
low-volume (2hrs or less a day) LR still seems to work for me -- it's helping to make
the case endings spontaneously producible rather than the product of several seconds of
effort.

I'll probably also copy out the example sentences, exercises, and dialogues from the
New Penguin Russian Course (I had completed the first 15 last time I was studying
Russian). It shouldn't take terribly long, and I imagine I'll be able to be a lot more
precise with the grammar rules now that it's the second go around).


1 person has voted this message useful



playadom
Diglot
Newbie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5748 days ago

18 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 4 of 9
27 January 2012 at 5:44am | IP Logged 
I made a wonderful find in the library last night. I now have the scores to scores of
songs by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky, plus several books intended for
singers that contain IPA realizations of the Russian, interlinear glosses of the texts,
as well as literary translations. The music is absolutely fantastic, and so is the sonic
quality of the poetry.

I'll do some short scriptorium sessions with the song texts in order to drill the poems
into my head (luckily, since the books are for singers, there's loads of information
about diction).
1 person has voted this message useful



Ellsworth
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4752 days ago

345 posts - 528 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish

 
 Message 5 of 9
27 January 2012 at 1:07pm | IP Logged 
Ah that sounds great. I wish I could sing. It would make language learning so much more
fun. Good luck anyway!
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Woodsei
Bilingual Diglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Woodsei
Joined 4592 days ago

614 posts - 782 votes 
Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)*
Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian

 
 Message 6 of 9
28 January 2012 at 11:19pm | IP Logged 
Welcome to the team! Music and languages is a great combination, and Russian is full of
it! The interlinear texts sound fantastic. I'm jealous :) Interesting project, and I'm
sure great results are waiting for you out there. Keep up the good work!
1 person has voted this message useful



Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5129 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 7 of 9
28 January 2012 at 11:32pm | IP Logged 
playadom wrote:


For the past week or so, I've been trying to reactivate the little bit of Russian
that's floating around in my head, mainly by re-listening to and re-reading the old
Russian Without Toil lessons



How far have you gotten? I am using the French version, but for some reason I seem unable to go beyound lesson 30.
1 person has voted this message useful



playadom
Diglot
Newbie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5748 days ago

18 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 8 of 9
29 January 2012 at 2:21am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
playadom wrote:


For the past week or so, I've been trying to reactivate the little bit of Russian
that's floating around in my head, mainly by re-listening to and re-reading the old
Russian Without Toil lessons



How far have you gotten? I am using the French version, but for some reason I seem unable to go beyound lesson 30.



I made it through the first 52 lessons of Without Toil. After showing it to several Russian friends, I've made the decision to not do the вторая волна, since the language is awkward and archaic (which must be pretty bad, since even the English half of the course sounds ridiculous). I'll be passively going through the lessons for listening practice and vocabulary. I'll do the second wave of Il Nuovo Russo Senza Sforzo when I get to it. I'm currently 16 lessons in, but I've known virtually everything so far, so the amount of time spent on each lesson was as long as the audio lasted.



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