The weather forecast promises several more days of rain. I guess that’s what it’s like everywhere in autumn, so I shouldn’t complain too much. I’m using these bleak days for more progress on my journey towards mastering Russian, since I have quite enough pictures of umbrellas already. Speaking of Russian: After almost 2 months I have finished the first 70 lessons of the excellent series Russian World on Youtube, reached the 2nd checkpoint (of 5) on the shiny new Russian Duolingo course and have memorised almost 1000 words. Believe me, it was a lot of work. Is it paying off? Well, I’d say so! The other day I was watching some short videos in Russian on Youtube and although I was still missing quite a lot, I understood bits and pieces and could roughly get the gist of the parts that I didn’t quite understand completely. I definitely managed to figure out what was going on. I also tried reading parts of a movie script and I got about 1/3 of the part I was reading. I think that’s excellent progress after only 2 months, especially considering that I started from scratch and that Russian grammar must have been invented by the devil himself.
After all this good progress I will definitely continue with my efforts along the same lines and try to tackle the more complicated grammatical structures now. Next up for me is Russian World 2, more Duolingo and a chopped down frequency list of Russian words, avoiding those words that are hard to learn without context and all the verbs. Why am I avoiding the verbs? Well, they are one of the beastly parts of Russian grammar and I will rather try to learn them more systematically when I know exactly what the pitfalls are. Otherwise I might just be wasting my time. So far I’m only learning those verbs and forms that are part of the grammar material I’m studying and ignore all the rest on the frequency lists. I can fill in the blanks later once I’m finished with most of the grammar material. By the way, if you’ve ever considered learning Russian yourself, then I can highly recommend it … well, if you have masochist tendencies, that is! What a language …! Some 5 years ago after about 3 months of learning Spanish I could start to read books. After 3 months of learning Russian I expect to be nowhere near a comparable level yet. The grammar is just too beastly and the words too hard to memorise. I probably knew more than double the amount of words in Spanish after 2 months because the sounds are way easier to remember. I’d be glad to reach a similar level after about 6 months of learning Russian. It’s just so much more complicated!
All pictures taken with: Rolleicord V, Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 75mm f/3.5.
Kodak Portra 400 developed in Fuji Hunt C41 Kit, Jobo CPE-2.
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015
© Lilly Schwartz 2015