Russian progress
4 April 2026 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI am currently on Lesson 18 of the second 'tele-course', which provides the comforting experience of understanding practically every word on the screen; this lesson was about winter sports, which added 'going by sledge' (на санках) to my existing portfolio of 'going by skis', 'going by skates' and 'going by rowing-boat', all over which use the same idiom ;-p I also learned that the Russian for 'ski-jump' is apparently 'trampoline', presumably due to a historical misunderstanding :-D) The interesting thing about this episode was the way in which all the anticipated disasters were unexpectedly avoided: the plot kept appearing to set up for something dire and/or embarrassing to happen, and then surprising us with the fact that in fact it doesn't, so that the visit of the child's somewhat socially awkward parents ends up by coming off quite happily overall!
In my parallel progress through the two different course-books, I am currently in Lesson 9 (of 28) of "Colloquial Russian" from 1990 and Lesson 13 (of 30) of "The Penguin Russian АБВ" of 1965 -- the latter having not yet reached the verbs of motion and the former having not yet covered all the cases of the nouns! I'm still unclear as to the distinction between the concept of imperfective and perfective verbs and verbs of single and repeated motion, even though I can get my head around both concepts individually -- and so far one book has tackled one in isolation and the other book the other, so I have yet to find out how they plan to explain it ;-p
I have finished listening to all the nine episodes of the Ali-Baba podcast, concluding with such pressing questions as 'is the concept racist' [eye-roll] and 'what can we learn from Ali-Baba' (possibly the 'dissidents' who were involved in creating it sought to convey some slightly subversive messages -- although I had to sympathise with the listener who left a comment basically saying 'keep your political reinterpretations away from my beloved childhood entertainment'; whatever Smekhov's personal political views, which have never been a secret, the work itself clearly has cross-cultural appeal, and that is how it should be.)
The podcast presenters were not great fans of the subsequent TV adaptation which was made (with the original cast) as a follow-up to the success of the audio recording, which is some comfort to me as I wasn't terribly enthused by what I've come across from it on YouTube either... But my main problem with "Ali-Baba" is that I simply can't understand the lyrics, let alone appreciate the word-play that is going on; where the presenters discussed favourite individual lines and their musical setting I could begin to get an idea of the clever things that were being done, but in general it's just dense and incomprehensible sound, which is hard to focus on :-(
I am 50 minutes into the filmed stage version of "Elsa's Land" -- which of course doesn't come with convenient English film-festival subtitles! -- and 7 hours 53 minutes (Chapter 26 -- "The Dissertation of Aramis") into Smekhov's reading of "The Three Musketeers", which if nothing else is helping to teach me my ordinal numerals thanks to repeatedly paging through the chapter numbers ;-)
I stumbled across a second upload of "Smok & Malish" and re-watched it straight through up to the point that I had previously 'been over' with the dictionary; somewhat disappointingly I really wasn't able to pick out any more of the dialogue by ear than I had been on my initial 'run', even though I did at least now know more or less what the various scenes were supposed to *mean*. It still sounds to me as if Joy is talking about oversetting a stove in her tent... but I did get the real name of Malish, though: it's Jack Carson ("Five foot two, and so they call me Shorty" -- although he was nourished on [rich] buffalo milk as a child ;-)
I took a very brief look at the Internet Archive version of "Smoke Bellew" in Russian (translated 1928) and was surprised to find that the name Kit/Christopher Bellew is literally translated there as 'Kotik', i.e. a cat :-D
In my parallel progress through the two different course-books, I am currently in Lesson 9 (of 28) of "Colloquial Russian" from 1990 and Lesson 13 (of 30) of "The Penguin Russian АБВ" of 1965 -- the latter having not yet reached the verbs of motion and the former having not yet covered all the cases of the nouns! I'm still unclear as to the distinction between the concept of imperfective and perfective verbs and verbs of single and repeated motion, even though I can get my head around both concepts individually -- and so far one book has tackled one in isolation and the other book the other, so I have yet to find out how they plan to explain it ;-p
I have finished listening to all the nine episodes of the Ali-Baba podcast, concluding with such pressing questions as 'is the concept racist' [eye-roll] and 'what can we learn from Ali-Baba' (possibly the 'dissidents' who were involved in creating it sought to convey some slightly subversive messages -- although I had to sympathise with the listener who left a comment basically saying 'keep your political reinterpretations away from my beloved childhood entertainment'; whatever Smekhov's personal political views, which have never been a secret, the work itself clearly has cross-cultural appeal, and that is how it should be.)
The podcast presenters were not great fans of the subsequent TV adaptation which was made (with the original cast) as a follow-up to the success of the audio recording, which is some comfort to me as I wasn't terribly enthused by what I've come across from it on YouTube either... But my main problem with "Ali-Baba" is that I simply can't understand the lyrics, let alone appreciate the word-play that is going on; where the presenters discussed favourite individual lines and their musical setting I could begin to get an idea of the clever things that were being done, but in general it's just dense and incomprehensible sound, which is hard to focus on :-(
I am 50 minutes into the filmed stage version of "Elsa's Land" -- which of course doesn't come with convenient English film-festival subtitles! -- and 7 hours 53 minutes (Chapter 26 -- "The Dissertation of Aramis") into Smekhov's reading of "The Three Musketeers", which if nothing else is helping to teach me my ordinal numerals thanks to repeatedly paging through the chapter numbers ;-)
I stumbled across a second upload of "Smok & Malish" and re-watched it straight through up to the point that I had previously 'been over' with the dictionary; somewhat disappointingly I really wasn't able to pick out any more of the dialogue by ear than I had been on my initial 'run', even though I did at least now know more or less what the various scenes were supposed to *mean*. It still sounds to me as if Joy is talking about oversetting a stove in her tent... but I did get the real name of Malish, though: it's Jack Carson ("Five foot two, and so they call me Shorty" -- although he was nourished on [rich] buffalo milk as a child ;-)
I took a very brief look at the Internet Archive version of "Smoke Bellew" in Russian (translated 1928) and was surprised to find that the name Kit/Christopher Bellew is literally translated there as 'Kotik', i.e. a cat :-D