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Exercise 2
I watched another 'graduated comprehension test' in four levels, which confirmed to me that I am indeed somewhere between 'B1' and 'B2' in terms of listening comprehension; I can understand everything up to the B1 level, and can follow the meaning of the B2 conversation without being able to understand every word of it, provided that I look at the subtitles. Which is an interesting brain-quirk, given that objectively speaking I have spent far more hours *listening* to Russian than reading Cyrillic over the last few months... but apparently words are still easier to recognise in their written form, even in a foreign script!
I subsequently did the exercises from Chapter 2 of Colloquial Russian and made a ridiculously large number of mistakes (at least where the answers were provided in the back of the book for comparison), to the degree that I felt I ought to go back and do the whole thing again an hour or so later. Which I successfully did without mistakes this time, but probably as much simply from memory of the corrections as from actually having mastered the material...
It turns out that my big problems are with identifying which words are spelt with и and which with ы when I actually have to spell them for myself, as opposed to just passively understanding them -- almost undoubtedly a result of acquiring vocabulary by ear! -- and, ironically, with completely failing to remember that the 'familiar' second-person verb form with ты is spelt шь, with an added soft sign, and not ш. Which is a result of not having used this form since I was at school and addressing other children... but since this course is for schools you are of course expected to use it all the time :-p
The other thing I got wrong multiple times was forgetting to separate my sub-clauses with commas, which is something I know to do in German but had completely failed to notice happening in Russian, despite having just finished reading an entire volume of Smekhov's memoirs (e.g. "такое кино, которое любят смотреть разные люди" -- "the sort of films that have a widespread appeal").
I'm not sure I can do much about the spelling issues, other than trying to memorize the ones I got wrong (it is now dinned into me that музыка is spelt with an ы!), but the other things I have at least now learned...
I subsequently did the exercises from Chapter 2 of Colloquial Russian and made a ridiculously large number of mistakes (at least where the answers were provided in the back of the book for comparison), to the degree that I felt I ought to go back and do the whole thing again an hour or so later. Which I successfully did without mistakes this time, but probably as much simply from memory of the corrections as from actually having mastered the material...
It turns out that my big problems are with identifying which words are spelt with и and which with ы when I actually have to spell them for myself, as opposed to just passively understanding them -- almost undoubtedly a result of acquiring vocabulary by ear! -- and, ironically, with completely failing to remember that the 'familiar' second-person verb form with ты is spelt шь, with an added soft sign, and not ш. Which is a result of not having used this form since I was at school and addressing other children... but since this course is for schools you are of course expected to use it all the time :-p
The other thing I got wrong multiple times was forgetting to separate my sub-clauses with commas, which is something I know to do in German but had completely failed to notice happening in Russian, despite having just finished reading an entire volume of Smekhov's memoirs (e.g. "такое кино, которое любят смотреть разные люди" -- "the sort of films that have a widespread appeal").
I'm not sure I can do much about the spelling issues, other than trying to memorize the ones I got wrong (it is now dinned into me that музыка is spelt with an ы!), but the other things I have at least now learned...