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igenlodeLesson 23 of "Let's get to know one another", set at a health resort on the Black Sea, is a welcome return to form after Lessons 20, 21 and 22 all variously turned out to be less than satisfactory -- and in the case of Lesson 22, the blame could be laid, I'm afraid, pretty squarely on the script by one "V. Smekhov": oops!
The dialogue for the episode varies between unnecessarily and incomprehensibly over-complex (there were significant chunks I could only get by replaying it with the subtitles, like the business about the 'Middle Ages fortress walls'(?) [*looks it up*: yes, that's a very obscure adjective]) and the wooden and uninspiring phrases ("Do you play volleyball? No, I don't play volleyball") that were presumably part of the brief for this lesson, but which are not worked into any sort of actual story :-( It was just a whole load of tourist shots of Tallinn and random footage of the protagonists watching people playing sport, and the character development that *does* take place (the girl who says she is no good at sport suddenly starts participating) apparently has no significance in terms of plot; nothing is ever said.
(I'm pretty sure I did recognise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Margaret as the prison tower in which d'Artagnan and Porthos are shut up for eighty-three days in the film of "Twenty Years After"!)
Smekhov's involvement this time was not quite as unexpected as when he turned up uncredited as the main protagonist in Lesson 10, since (a) he gets a visible on-screen credit, and (b) we already know from the earlier appearance that he was around and participating at the time that they were filming these. But it does, however, I suspect, demonstrate that writing within the constraints of educational TV is every bit as specialised an ability as one might imagine :-p
Lesson 23, on the other hand, is immediately very much better; it embraces its limits and manages to provide both entertainment and educational content at the same time, while supplying what feels like a great deal more dialogue for learning purposes. As is so often done in these tele-courses, they use the device of involving children to justify the simplification and repetition that is needed for effective learning-- in this case, we have the little girl 'playing doctor' and reciting her script to fellow-guests at the health resort, while their initial incomprehension of the role she requires of her 'patients' allows for further repetition of these key phrases, withut having to depict the complexities of a realistic medical consultation :-p Likewise, the little boy writing home to his mother is describing his holiday activities in just such stilted terms as one might expect in that context ;-)
And the non-dialogue shots here are actively advancing the story/characterisation (the pedalo race, the father learning to swim -- a game piece of (presumably?) acting by the performer who was tasked with portraying an adult struggling with doggy-paddle!) as opposed to just coming across as padding/filler as they tended to do in the previous episode. I mean, I know this is the sort of thing we *expect* to see from this series, but it makes for a pleasant return to form after recent episodes; you don't appreciate things half so well as when you have been deprived of them for a while.
To be fair, I'm not sure I actually learnt anything to speak of from this episode, because its vocabulary and constructions are almost all well within my existing knowledge ("I have a sore throat" was covered early on in one of my two textbooks). But then I didn't learn anything useful from Lessons 20 and 22 either, because in those cases the stuff that I *didn't* know wasn't presented in a manner allowing me to acquire it :-p
The dialogue for the episode varies between unnecessarily and incomprehensibly over-complex (there were significant chunks I could only get by replaying it with the subtitles, like the business about the 'Middle Ages fortress walls'(?) [*looks it up*: yes, that's a very obscure adjective]) and the wooden and uninspiring phrases ("Do you play volleyball? No, I don't play volleyball") that were presumably part of the brief for this lesson, but which are not worked into any sort of actual story :-( It was just a whole load of tourist shots of Tallinn and random footage of the protagonists watching people playing sport, and the character development that *does* take place (the girl who says she is no good at sport suddenly starts participating) apparently has no significance in terms of plot; nothing is ever said.
(I'm pretty sure I did recognise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Margaret as the prison tower in which d'Artagnan and Porthos are shut up for eighty-three days in the film of "Twenty Years After"!)
Smekhov's involvement this time was not quite as unexpected as when he turned up uncredited as the main protagonist in Lesson 10, since (a) he gets a visible on-screen credit, and (b) we already know from the earlier appearance that he was around and participating at the time that they were filming these. But it does, however, I suspect, demonstrate that writing within the constraints of educational TV is every bit as specialised an ability as one might imagine :-p
Lesson 23, on the other hand, is immediately very much better; it embraces its limits and manages to provide both entertainment and educational content at the same time, while supplying what feels like a great deal more dialogue for learning purposes. As is so often done in these tele-courses, they use the device of involving children to justify the simplification and repetition that is needed for effective learning-- in this case, we have the little girl 'playing doctor' and reciting her script to fellow-guests at the health resort, while their initial incomprehension of the role she requires of her 'patients' allows for further repetition of these key phrases, withut having to depict the complexities of a realistic medical consultation :-p Likewise, the little boy writing home to his mother is describing his holiday activities in just such stilted terms as one might expect in that context ;-)
And the non-dialogue shots here are actively advancing the story/characterisation (the pedalo race, the father learning to swim -- a game piece of (presumably?) acting by the performer who was tasked with portraying an adult struggling with doggy-paddle!) as opposed to just coming across as padding/filler as they tended to do in the previous episode. I mean, I know this is the sort of thing we *expect* to see from this series, but it makes for a pleasant return to form after recent episodes; you don't appreciate things half so well as when you have been deprived of them for a while.
To be fair, I'm not sure I actually learnt anything to speak of from this episode, because its vocabulary and constructions are almost all well within my existing knowledge ("I have a sore throat" was covered early on in one of my two textbooks). But then I didn't learn anything useful from Lessons 20 and 22 either, because in those cases the stuff that I *didn't* know wasn't presented in a manner allowing me to acquire it :-p