![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I bought myself a present -- the matching volume to the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary that I purchased from new at the start of the 1990s :-)
At the time they were extremely expensive, and I made do in the Russian-English direction with a couple of free dictionaries that turned up as jumble-sale discards: the invaluable 1970s miniature Pocket Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, a reduced version of the full-size edition containing 'nearly 30,000 words', and an ancient Moscow-printed Русско-английский словарь (presumably brought back by one of my parents' peace-activist friends) of 34,000 words, "not primarily intended for the reader whose native language is English".
However, forty years later I was finally able to treat myself to the missing volume of the full Oxford dictionary at what turned out to be a ridiculously low price, now that all second-hand booksellers are online (no, I didn't buy it from Amazon). ( Read more... )
Meanwhile I have half an uncaptioned documentary remaining to decipher by ear :-)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTu6sH8P9w4
(The first half had auto-generated Russian subtitles, and offered an auto-translation of them at yet another remove of accuracy. But it cut out at the one-hour mark in the middle of the programme. I managed to find an alternative upload with the full broadcast in it, but that one is completely without AI subtitling whatsoever... which is the point at which I'm always grateful that I make a point of listening *without* the subtitles first, so that (a) it doesn't come as so much of a shock when whole sections drop out for technical reasons, and (b) I'm getting practice in Russian audio comprehension without any 'training wheels' at all, which is significantly useful in those (not infrequent) cases where there is no alternative!)
At the time they were extremely expensive, and I made do in the Russian-English direction with a couple of free dictionaries that turned up as jumble-sale discards: the invaluable 1970s miniature Pocket Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, a reduced version of the full-size edition containing 'nearly 30,000 words', and an ancient Moscow-printed Русско-английский словарь (presumably brought back by one of my parents' peace-activist friends) of 34,000 words, "not primarily intended for the reader whose native language is English".
However, forty years later I was finally able to treat myself to the missing volume of the full Oxford dictionary at what turned out to be a ridiculously low price, now that all second-hand booksellers are online (no, I didn't buy it from Amazon). ( Read more... )
Meanwhile I have half an uncaptioned documentary remaining to decipher by ear :-)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTu6sH8P9w4
(The first half had auto-generated Russian subtitles, and offered an auto-translation of them at yet another remove of accuracy. But it cut out at the one-hour mark in the middle of the programme. I managed to find an alternative upload with the full broadcast in it, but that one is completely without AI subtitling whatsoever... which is the point at which I'm always grateful that I make a point of listening *without* the subtitles first, so that (a) it doesn't come as so much of a shock when whole sections drop out for technical reasons, and (b) I'm getting practice in Russian audio comprehension without any 'training wheels' at all, which is significantly useful in those (not infrequent) cases where there is no alternative!)