Russian progress
26 December 2025 12:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finished working my way through the entire course of thirty 1970s Russian adult learner broadcasts: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL40OiiJw6-gdhFSbnnq4V8Lu_iBu5L7TF
It was an enjoyable exercise (less so perhaps for the last set of programmes) and I was constantly struck by the contrast between the very simple elements that were actually picked out of each lesson for the learner to memorise and repeat, and the sophistication of the stories and presentation woven around such dialogue elements.
The final programme, "Farewell to Moscow", was apparently commissioned to feature 'airport vocabulary' like "What time does boarding for this flight begin?" But this has almost nothing to do with the *story* being told, in which aeroplanes scarcely feature; it's the tale of a middle-aged couple on holiday in Moscow who have just learned of the birth of their first grandchild, and are spending the hours before the next scheduled flight home to Archangelsk in driving around Moscow in the hopes of coming across something that will give them an idea for the name of the newborn boy, which they have been promised the privilege of deciding. After passing various landmarks (the Pushkin Memorial -- should we call him Alexander, after Alexander Sergeyevich?) they come to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers in memory of the wife's brother Ivan, who died in WW2. And when, at the end of the programme, they are sitting in the airport cafe, the husband proposes, to her pleasure, that the baby should be named Ivan -- and the final wish is that he should grow up in a world without war...
This message of the film, along with the vividly portrayed fond/exasperated relationship between the long-married couple, is one that as so often has nothing to do with the brief 'learn and repeat' exercises that follow (at which, yet again, I hopelessly struggle; they might as well be tongue-twisters. Через тридцать минут начнётся посадка...) It's as if the scenarists/directors of each episode were given a brief list of three phrases that needed to be said by somebody in the script at some point, and thereafter proceeded to compose a short artistic endeavour about something that they found far more interesting and creatively rewarding, while nominally working in the necessary challenge requirements around the edges in order to get paid :-p
At any rate it was very interesting to watch, and more or less within my comprehension level -- though since I continued to find the exercises difficult even to pronounce I don't think I was making very much tangible progress. Presumably there was supposed to be some accompanying formal textbook...
Out of curiosity I then did a couple of 'CEFR Level' tests online, which concurred in assessing my ability in Russian, as determined by the proportion of correct test responses, at "A1 beginner"-- the lowest possible rating on that scale. Supposedly you can reach A1 in 20–30 hours of study... I've put in hundreds, but on a purely passive level.
(Ironic and a bit depressing, given that what I've actually been *doing* with my Russian over the last ten months has been on an attempted level far above that -- listening to unfiltered native-language broadcasts, reading reminiscences aimed at adult native speakers, and engaging in literary translation!)
The problem is that I have basically forgotten all the grammar I once knew and can't identify or correct errors, other than by guessing at what 'sounds right' out of the suggested answers to the question, with no conscious way to justify that response. (Which is of course how native speakers do it, but my feelings about what 'sounds right' turn out to be wrong about 35% of the time!)
So I can't answer *any* of the questions that hinge on niceties of verb form (present participle, past participle, perfective or imperfective) or on using the correct case or preposition, because my processing relies almost entirely on recognising the roots of the words involved, identifying their meaning, and deriving the implications of the sentence from the likely result of such a combination. I can locate the imperfective form in the dictionary if I encounter the word in its perfective form, but not derive any additional meaning from whether perfective or imperfective had been used :-(
Basically, having acquired a somewhat improved vocabulary and considerably sharpened listening skills I appear to have got to the point where I really need to go back to my old coursebook and repeat the formal study that meant, at one heady point in the 1990s, that I was capable of taking a Russian school grammar test and getting higher marks than any of the Russian children in the class who hadn't actually had to sit down and learn this stuff :-P
It was an enjoyable exercise (less so perhaps for the last set of programmes) and I was constantly struck by the contrast between the very simple elements that were actually picked out of each lesson for the learner to memorise and repeat, and the sophistication of the stories and presentation woven around such dialogue elements.
The final programme, "Farewell to Moscow", was apparently commissioned to feature 'airport vocabulary' like "What time does boarding for this flight begin?" But this has almost nothing to do with the *story* being told, in which aeroplanes scarcely feature; it's the tale of a middle-aged couple on holiday in Moscow who have just learned of the birth of their first grandchild, and are spending the hours before the next scheduled flight home to Archangelsk in driving around Moscow in the hopes of coming across something that will give them an idea for the name of the newborn boy, which they have been promised the privilege of deciding. After passing various landmarks (the Pushkin Memorial -- should we call him Alexander, after Alexander Sergeyevich?) they come to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to lay flowers in memory of the wife's brother Ivan, who died in WW2. And when, at the end of the programme, they are sitting in the airport cafe, the husband proposes, to her pleasure, that the baby should be named Ivan -- and the final wish is that he should grow up in a world without war...
This message of the film, along with the vividly portrayed fond/exasperated relationship between the long-married couple, is one that as so often has nothing to do with the brief 'learn and repeat' exercises that follow (at which, yet again, I hopelessly struggle; they might as well be tongue-twisters. Через тридцать минут начнётся посадка...) It's as if the scenarists/directors of each episode were given a brief list of three phrases that needed to be said by somebody in the script at some point, and thereafter proceeded to compose a short artistic endeavour about something that they found far more interesting and creatively rewarding, while nominally working in the necessary challenge requirements around the edges in order to get paid :-p
At any rate it was very interesting to watch, and more or less within my comprehension level -- though since I continued to find the exercises difficult even to pronounce I don't think I was making very much tangible progress. Presumably there was supposed to be some accompanying formal textbook...
Out of curiosity I then did a couple of 'CEFR Level' tests online, which concurred in assessing my ability in Russian, as determined by the proportion of correct test responses, at "A1 beginner"-- the lowest possible rating on that scale. Supposedly you can reach A1 in 20–30 hours of study... I've put in hundreds, but on a purely passive level.
(Ironic and a bit depressing, given that what I've actually been *doing* with my Russian over the last ten months has been on an attempted level far above that -- listening to unfiltered native-language broadcasts, reading reminiscences aimed at adult native speakers, and engaging in literary translation!)
The problem is that I have basically forgotten all the grammar I once knew and can't identify or correct errors, other than by guessing at what 'sounds right' out of the suggested answers to the question, with no conscious way to justify that response. (Which is of course how native speakers do it, but my feelings about what 'sounds right' turn out to be wrong about 35% of the time!)
So I can't answer *any* of the questions that hinge on niceties of verb form (present participle, past participle, perfective or imperfective) or on using the correct case or preposition, because my processing relies almost entirely on recognising the roots of the words involved, identifying their meaning, and deriving the implications of the sentence from the likely result of such a combination. I can locate the imperfective form in the dictionary if I encounter the word in its perfective form, but not derive any additional meaning from whether perfective or imperfective had been used :-(
Basically, having acquired a somewhat improved vocabulary and considerably sharpened listening skills I appear to have got to the point where I really need to go back to my old coursebook and repeat the formal study that meant, at one heady point in the 1990s, that I was capable of taking a Russian school grammar test and getting higher marks than any of the Russian children in the class who hadn't actually had to sit down and learn this stuff :-P
no subject
Date: 2025-12-26 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-26 05:17 pm (UTC)https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL40OiiJw6-ge4tLrtnPnAXOO2_moDCb3Q
The playlist order is a bit mixed up (Lesson 1, which as a result I've just discovered for the first time, is No. 28 on the playlist), but it starts at a much more basic level, aimed at beginners who really only have a few starter words and phrases under their belt.
"Who is that?"
"That is Alla."
"Where is Alla?"
"She is over there."
(Although in Russian all this is conveyed in two-word utterances :-)
In this case the framing device is that of an inventor who has created a robot and is trying to get it to talk, thus neatly explaining why everyone is conversing on the "Me Tarzan. You Jane" level!
The robot escapes and encounters a bewildered neighbour returning from walking her dog.
Robot: Where is the Metro?
Terrified woman, babbling: Metro? No... no, I don't know. I don't know where the Metro is...
Robot, pointing at dog: Who is that?
Terrified woman: It's a dog...
Robot: Does it know where the Metro is?
Woman: No, she doesn't know! *slams door*
Robot: Sorry.
:-D
It really is very cleverly done, managing to entertain an adult audience via dialogue on the level of a child's first reader without making the characters appear completely moronic (more sophisticated conversations are implied to be taking place either through body language in the background inaudible to the viewer, or immediately offscreen as the characters walk away). And the robot's deadpan delivery provides a lot of comedy potential.
Inventor, wearing his wife's hat and mincing towards the robot: Who is this? Is it Alla?
Robot, removing the hat: No. This is not Alla :-p
I find these programmes creatively and intellectually fascinating (e.g. the characters are depicted as realistically monosyllabic due to panic or sleepiness) -- and often very charmingly done. Someone clearly put a *lot* of work into projects such as these: I suppose they were 'outward-facing' propaganda that would by their nature be seen by viewers outside the Soviet Union, and were thus worth funding and providing with talent at a reasonably high level in order to make a favourable impression...
But it is a powerful contrast to the 'level B1/B2' Russian-language conversation session that YouTube decided to show me yesterday in response to my researches into this whole 'level' thing. I managed to watch about 5 minutes of that, confirming that I could understand every word of what they were saying --and thus that my passive *comprehension* level is indeed far above 'A1', as it jolly well should be!-- before giving up because it was late at night and I was frankly bored by the content. (As opposed to finding myself compulsively watching archive TV interviews or segments of the Soviet "Twenty Years After" at 3am :-p)
It's the big difference between watching a couple of amateur YouTubers making deliberately simplified conversation ("This is level B2, so we will speak a little more slowly"), and watching professional actors and behind-the-camera talent put all their accumlated experience into turning a minimalist script into genuine entertainment. A real artist is often inspired by the constraints of working within limits, and I think this was the case here.