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 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-26 03:19 pm (UTC)To be fair, I would have been seventeen or eighteen at the time and the children in the class I attended ten or twelve ;-p
(What I mainly remember is being powerfully struck by how physically *attractive* the children appeared in contrast to English pupils... by which with hindsight I suspect I meant that they resembled my own type: slender, active, pale-faced, dark-haired and dark-eyed, as opposed to the lumpen louts and pasty, over-made-up teenage girls. The Russian women were not attractive; the children were startlingly so. Which of course is an observation, however innocent the onlooker, that it would be absolutely impossible to carry out in today's world...)