Шаг за Шагом

До Свиданя

Well, that's it. What with my new job (which is very mobile and unsettled at the moment) I'm barely in a position to maintain my old blog without pretending that I can sensibly post to this blog as well. Something has to give and this blog is it. I'll leave it up for a while longer but its days are numbered.

I haven't given up on Russian yet but I'm struggling to devote a lot of time to it. It took me many years of study to get a French degree so I am particularly persistent in these matters and will not give up. Linguistically, I feel as if I've made one of those treks up as far as the comprehension base-camp. Much of the hard work is yet to come but you can see the summit of fluency from there and that's encouraging.

In all honesty the alphabet is now second nature and much of the grammar didn't prove to be difficult (I'm partly fooling myself here by consigning all the case endings into some sort of lexical variation category).  It's the vocabulary which has proven to be the main stumbling block. I know that repeated usage will overcome that problem but I'm simply not using the words enough for them to stick at the moment. Not totally true, the verb сообшать (to report) stuck last week but at the rate of one word a week I'll be dead before I'm fluent at that rate.

Enjoy your  studies, everyone. It was fun while it lasted. Thanks to all those who hepled me out once or twice. До свиданя !

Happy New Year !

Well, here we are at the end of 2005. Where precisely did I get to with my fledgling attempts at learning Russian ? Not as far as I would have liked but I've made progress. I can look at a sentence and disassemble it grammatically to the point that I can generally translate the gist with the aid of a dictionary. To be honest I haven't so much learnt Russian as Russian Grammar but that's a function of my personal preferences and approach. Only through a much more diligent and repeated approach will my vocabulary and ability to 'memorise' correct case endings develop. Vocabulary has been the killer and I'm not sure whether that's a function of my declining number of brain cells or the relative lack of Germanic or Romance look-alikes or both.

The CDs I bought, 'Take Off in Russian' proved a major disappointment. The learning curve was just too steep. One minute I could follow the leasson, the next I was drowning with only a few familiar words to cling to. Too hard by far. It was relatively cheap and, of course, you only get what you pay for. Perhaps the answer here is a new course with an audiovisual emphasis - straight audio learning has never been a successful method for me.

Anyway, it kept the mind entertained and challenged and that has to be a good thing. It only remains for me to wish all fellow bloggers a Happy New Year - I'd also do it in Russian but this computer simply won't co-operate.

Back Again

Well, that's a whole month gone by and no posts, very slack I know, but a number of circumstances overtook me and Russian studies were well down the agenda most of the time. Yesterday though I did pick up one of my books en route to work and started trying to absorb information again. About the only thing that stuck was that никогда means 'never' but that's better than nothing !

A complete lack of time to study was the biggest problem during the last month or so. Work was very busy and we also went off to Tasmania for a short holiday. I also started (and finished) reading Anne Applebaum's book, 'Gulag', a good summary of the Soviet imprisonment system from 1919 onwards. I'm not sure how it stacks up against comparable texts but it was quite illuminating. It's no small volume either and took up most of my spare time travelling for the month, hence no Russian studies or blogging.

I seem to have run into a complete brick-wall as far as vocab acquisition goes and what I feel is lacking is the repetitive action to make words stick. I'm going to have a go at compiling a list of basic, useful phrases and translating those in the hope it will restart the learning process. I have also spoken with a Russian lady who's out here on holiday ! It was a challenging exercise and I had great difficulty making her understand my faltering attempts to speak but I shall persevere. My focus to date has been on reading and writing so it wasn't a big surprise but it did ram home to me the importance of getting the emphasis and sound right. Next time I see her I might give her a list of tricky words and get her to pronounce them out loud for me.

Since my last post, Otto has taken me to task over my frustrations concerning the old lady in the second-hand bookshop who didn't know who Solzhenitsyn was. I think he may have read a bit more into it than I intended but I do find it frustrating that someone working in a bookshop has never heard of him. Otto obviously has greater expectations of the Queensland education system than I do but with a wife employed by Queensland education who is, furthermore, involved in the thankless task of trying to teach a foreign language, my sense of frustration is based on a reasonable understanding of the current state of learning in Queensland, a state which I could only describe as currently woeful. We seem to have spent so long teaching people how to learn that we have actually omitted to teach them anything else, like facts. Otto, meanwhile, has put up a fascinating post (and promises another) on Brisbane's Russian immigrants and the Merivale Street riots which accompanied a wave of anti-Bolshevik fervour that swept the city after WWI. I can't quite agree with Otto's suggestion that these events are common knowledge in Queensland since my dear wife, who I would consider to be a well educated Queenslander, hadn't heard of them. I agree, they should be common knowledge but they're not, sadly. I can excuse my own ignorance of the affair by claiming an overseas education.

Lastly, the Russian community finally showed its hand and came out in force for Bundaberg's 14th Multicultural Food and Wine Festival last Sunday. An elderly couple manned a small stand showcasing Russia culture while the Hot Russian Food caravan seemed to be doing a roaring trade.

Завтра Работа !

Back to work tomorrow with an early departure from the airport at 6.45am and then the long haul up to Mt Isa. Still, I should get the chance to absorb a few bits of Russian grammar on the way. I've decided to focus on obligation and ability (долхен  and мочь) since I find both those structures generally very useful. The former looks pretty straightforward and is essentially adjectival, the latter is an irregular verb so it will require some digesting. Hopefully it will prove more palatable than the Qantas breakfast, or what passes for breakfast on the short hop down to Brisbane.

Correction !

Did I say the OB ending was indicative of the dative ? WRONG ! It's indicative of the genitive, and sometimes the accusative, depending on the nominative ending of the masculine noun.  This is decidedly harder than Latin. One of the words I couldn't get on the poster (предлогается) was a bit of a puzzle but is, on closer perusal of Multitran very close to предлагать - to offer (is it the reflexive form ?) that the word must mean 'offers'.

I can't get any study done at all at home at the moment. Too many visitors and too many distractions.

My other new purchases turned up though:

First 1000 Words in Russian which also has a site you can link to, to hear the words - should be useful. So far I've learnt the word for bathroom and bath...

and...

Oxford Take Off in Russian - audio CDs at last. Now all I need is a Walkman or Ipod thingy and I'll be able to listen while I walk.

That's it, not buying anything else. If I can't progress with that little lot I never will.

Vladimir's Ball

Here's the poster advertising Vladimir's Ball that I mentioned in the last post.  I've had a stab at translating the poster, helped a little by my perusal (at the time) of the English language equivalent which was also in the shop window but which I purposely didn't photograph. Perhaps not surprisingly I've found it vastly easier to translate this poster compared to the previous one, a function of my now reasonable degree of comfort with the alphabet - both reading and typing. I still ran into a couple of problems though, not all of which I suspect are of my own making. Here's what I ended up with:

The Russian Community Centre

Invites you to

Vladimir's Ball

which takes place on Friday 29 July
at address 19 Lotus Street, Woolloongabba
starting at 7.30 in the evening.

предлогается you (promises ? - can't flush this one out of a dictionary at all !)

• Plentiful Evening Meal
• Entertaining programme with  ensemble gemstone participating (the band Gemstone ?)
• Bar
• Dancing to an orchestra
• Raffle

Enquiries and orders for tickets by phone :

Elena 3394 4236
Vladislav 3864 2866
Peter & Beverley 3398 8710
Russian Community Centre 3391 3432

Price of tickets: $40
$35 for members, pensioners and students (up to 18 years)

Number of Tables Restricted (ограниченно - is this a typo on the poster ?)

Orders will be  приниматся (?) up to 15 July 2005. (accepted ? should it be приниматься ?)

So, if anyone wants to go, there are the numbers to ring ! The big question is, how much of it will I remember ? Not a lot probably, but it's just another step in becoming familiar with the language - characters, bits of grammar (note the abundant masculine plural dative case endings - ов) and plenty of words that sound and even look like the English equivalents: orchestra, pensioners, students, even words from French - billets and ensemble. Thankfully there were no cursive characters to make life difficult this time.

до свидания

Blog Update

Well, I'm still here but that was my intention. Progress is still slow but not imperceptible so I'm encouraged enough to continue.

Trying to learn in my own 'style' hasn't been as effective as I'd hoped, e.g. trying to memorise all the cases of the different personal pronouns simply isn't viable without context based support for the cases and genders. When I did Latin at UNE, there was obviously a lot more contextual support for such grammatical data sets than I had fully appreciated. I still think that rote learning of such grammatical tabulations (conjugations, declensions etc) is still an important methodology for myself though, so I shan't dispense with the technique in its entirety.

While I've often felt as if I spend half my life on the computer, access to the web for online 'learning' simply isn't possible out of working hours so I'm going to fall back onto more traditional learning materials and I've splashed out on Amazon (UK) for a couple of books - 501 Russian verbs by Beyer and Roots of the Russian Language by Patrick. I eagerly await their arrival towards the end of June. Both at a reasonable price, total £16 + £11 for postage. I prefer not to think of that in A$ terms.

One thing that I did notice the other day while on the lunch-time flight from Mt Isa to Brisbane was that I managed to absorb so much more vocabulary and grammar on the flight than I ever could in an evening after work. I guess we all know that's generally the case but it was particularly noticeable on that occasion.

Lastly, I've deleted my Russources typelist which I originally put up as an idea to be able to access stuff while I was away at work. It was too hard to update so henceforth I shall carry all my written stuff around on my memory stick.

Until next time, or whatever that is in Russian, до свидания,  I guess ?

Progress Report

To be honest, progress has been slow. In spare moments I continue to peruse bits of printed stuff from webpages and endeavour to try and digest chapters from my cheap Penguin Russian Course. The book is actually quite frustrating because it very quickly sheds the transliterated equivalents and only gives them in cases of peculiar pronunciation. Very soon I will need to access something with an aural component and something in print in a slightly more legible font ! As I keep telling my dear wife, ' No, I do not need glasses !'

I've made a start of sorts on present tense verb conjugation and must comment that the endings are eminently retainable - the roots are another matter. Once again, the similarity in basic sounds of person endings between Latin, for example, and Russian is quite striking: second person singular, s and ш for example and the T ending of the third person singular.

I'd have to say that the conjugations don't seem complex yet (compared to Latin anyway) and the relative lack of tenses is encouraging but (and I've resisted the temptation to read ahead) hints of complexity with this aspect issue and a couple of terms I've never come across before - perfective and imperfective - suggest it's going to get a lot harder.

Progress is nowhere near as fast as I suspect it would be if I was learning, say, Spanish and building on a reasonably firm romance language background but I'm persevering and still enjoying the challenge !

Slow Progress

Where do the days go ? Working on a remote mine site has serious disadvantages for the learning process. I get up at 5.15, or thereabouts, start work at 5.50 and then work through to 6.10 in the evening which makes for pretty big days and I normally do 14 of those in a row - and then go home for a week. At work, by the time I've had some tea and unwound for a bit I'm generally too stuffed to study. Worse, the light in my room is simply not bright enough for this pair of 50 year old eyes to read the fine print - i.e. pretty much everything in the book. If it's in English I can guess and generally be right but, in the somewhat bolder, more closely spaced Russian characters, I simply can't read some of them and guessing is pointless. In bright daylight it's not an issue, it's all crystal clear but then I'm supposed to be working...

So, the upshot is I'm not really able to make a great deal of progress while I'm at work but I can still reinforce previously digested stuff. I've still got plenty to do on cardinal numbers because they're certainly not second nature yet and I've also made a bit of a start on the personal pronouns.

Aren't the pronouns magnificent ? The initial sounds of the second and third person singular and plural show such strong similarities with the corresponding pronouns in the Romance languages e.g. French and Latin. Surely that's not a coincidence and it certainly made the nominative case very easy to remember. Having done first year Latin at UNE not so long back, the other cases all make a lot of sense and even the instrumental relates closely to the Latin ablative of instrument. All I've got to do is memorise them !

Actually, one of the obvious flaws in my topic by topic approach is starting to show already. I can already see that the learning process is really enhanced by acquiring vocabulary from context and examples, something which is certainly not happening at the moment. I suspect it's not long before I'll be buying some sort of package to assist the learning process so any suggestions there will be gratefully appreciated. Audio tapes or CDs would be very useful when I'm out on my evening walks which I do at least twice a week.

Dogs in Space

One of the side benefits to learning the Cyrillic alphabet is that I can finally understand (well, read anyway, let's not get carried away) the words written on all those stamps (марки) that my dear late Uncle John sent me in the 1960s. Here's a celebration of one of Russia's pioneering space dogs, 'звездочка' - zvezdochka. Two Kopecs, I bet it costs a bit more to send a letter now.

John was an engineer with ICI in England (Англия) and was seconded to a place called Mogilev (Могилев) in Byelorussia (Беларусь) to help build a terylene plant producing synthetic fibres. He was there for some time, on and off, and used to tell us quite hilarious tales of government intervention. One of the few I've remembered is his tale of coming out of a theatre late one night and looking for a taxi. Apparently, a policeman sauntered out into the road and pulled up some private citizen in his car and told him to take the guests to their hotel. John became fairly friendly with a couple of the technicians at the plant and, on his return from breaks in the UK, used to give them exotic treats like bananas (бананы) which were basically otherwise unavailable. I seem to remember John learning quite a bit of Russian during his involvement with the project.

Russia (Россия) (rather than the more strictly correct Soviet Union аs it then was - CCCP on the stamp) was a bit of a mystery in those days, (the illegible stamps didn't help much) but it still used to impact on my life from time to time. For part of that time (1966-68) we lived on a British Air Force base in West Germany (Германия). Sirens wailing in the middle of the night were commonplace and Dad would disappear for a few days at a time while some massive defence exercise was conducted. All this was aimed at protecting 'free' Germany (and the rest of NATO) from the ever present threat of rampaging red army troops and their East European mates. How times have changed.