Igenlode Wordsmith

Lesson 20 is a rare misfire from the "Let's get to know one another" course; these shows usually have an excellent balance between the simplified vocabulary required by the learner and the level of creativity put into making the story-telling/info-dump sound natural and entertaining. Unfortunately this one involves illustrating the life-story of Pushkin with chunks of Pushkin's actual verse, which is on a comprehension/vocabulary level well above the surrounding dialogue -- the result being that a significant portion of the broadcast is effectively inaccessible :-(( Read more... )

Having just counted up the number of 'pending' Russian videos that I had acquired, I ended up jumping straight into a forty-third when YouTube suddenly presented me with "Старший Сын", the film that gets cited in the documentaries as Boyarsky's 'breakout' picture. It was only an hour long (it turns out that this was in fact an opening episode!), and I thought I'd take a look at the start at least without bothering with subtitles or anything, as I was no more than mildly curious about it. The start (a) has nice music and (b) is practically wordless and was thus undemanding to follow, so I was ten minutes in or so before things started getting complicated, and by that time it had grabbed me emotionally...
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Of course, as it happens, this sort of thing -- a conflict of loyalties, assumed identity, and emotional betrayal -- is very much more up my street than the standard romantic drama of will-they-won't-they with lashings of sexual action... But it's *not* Boyarsky, because he's really barely in it -- frankly, I'm not sure how this was a break-out role of any sort -- it's simply the film itself. ( Read more... )

I realised while listening to Chapter 26 of the Russian audiobook of "The Three Musketeers" that the chapter had almost certainly been abridged, because we don't get the entire scene where the two churchmen and Aramis have a long and Latin-laced argument as to the suitability of the proposed subject-matter of his dissertation, and where d'Artagnan fails to understand a word of the Latin :-P In fact, on glancing at my French copy to check that the missing scene *was* located in this chapter and not on d'Artagnan's subsequent return, I noticed that the scene in the previous chapter where Mousqueton tells the story of how his father brought his two sons up as a Huguenot and Catholic respectively during the Wars of Religion is also missing, as is the entire narrative of how the excellent breakfast (which *is* described) has been obtained despite Porthos' lack of funds.

So I would guess that the translation and/or audiobook version has been extensively shortened. Given that the reading lasts for over 20 hours as it is, this really isn't unreasonable... ;-)

we shall see how the 1990s book introduces the subject when it arrives in that course.

Well, in my next lesson in *that* book I now have to memorise the declension of eleven pronouns† across six cases :-p
Fortunately I actually have more or less subliminally absorbed/remembered those already, to the degree that I can simply ask myself 'what sounds right' when I can't remember the answer and mostly come up with the correct result. Mostly.

† First person singular and plural, second person singular and plural, third person masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, 'who', 'what', and 'itself' (also masculine, feminine, neuter and plural, so I suppose it's fourteen rather than eleven...)

I have spent what feels like a week (certainly multiple days) in trying to memorise the Russian verbs of motion, going so far as to write them out and carry them around with me to study in spare moments, and when I finally ventured on the exercises at the end of the chapter I still managed to get almost 50% of them wrong -- just as often via simply mistaking the (irregular) verb form as via picking the wrong version of the verb! I seem to remember that I never really mastered verbs of motion the first time round ( Read more... )

So far I have made it to Chapter 15 -- 4:26 hours out of 9:30 -- in my Smekhov-narrated "Three Musketeers" audiobook, although admittedly I tend to predictably fall asleep within the first ten minutes or so every night (or at least realise that I have mentally 'tuned out' and haven't understood a word of what has just been said, and get up to turn it off). "Brave New World" to the contrary, having mellifluous Russian administered to my sleeping ear doesn't seem to result in any subconscious acquisition of knowledge :-p
(And to be fair, some of the recent chapters do appear to have been very much shorter than the others!)

I fell asleep while listening to Smekhov read Chapter 1 of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (the audiobook is on YouTube), and dreamt first that he was reading an anomalous version of Chapter 27 (La femme d'Athos), thanks to having listened to a heavy metal version of the Soviet film's 'Ballad of Athos' immediately beforehand, and then that he was reading Jack London -- this is what you get for mixing your canons :-D

The Russian audiobook is surprisingly comprehensible, given that I only understand about a quarter of the vocabulary -- it of course helps enormously that I already know the story, and can sometimes recognise bits of it word for word! I have a certain suspicion that the unexpectedly raucous voice Smekhov gives to his young d'Artagnan may be a take-off of his friend Boyarsky, although it's not inappropriate to the young man's exasperated and combative disposition ;-)

(I tried listening to an 'intermediate level' modern educational clip featuring two girls discussing the subject of 'why it is important to keep a diary' very slowly and with illustrative graphics and gestures, and although I could indeed understand every word, it was rather less enjoyable than Dumas grasped at in passing, and -- unsurprisingly -- very much less creative than the 1970s educational programmes, where there was clearly some serious talent enlisted...)

I wrote a long post, but the browser crashed while I was looking for images :-(

Summarised version:

( BBC Radio Lord of the Rings )
Waiting for the Out: continues very good -- Guardian review

(  Marie Antoinette )


And also *two* Russian Smekhov-adjacent serials: an in-depth nine-part podcast on the 'musical spectacular' "Ali-Baba" (which I had vaguely heard of but hadn't realised he actually wrote all the lyrics for -- apparently it was another beloved Soviet children's classic, at least according to the possibly-not-impartial makers of the podcast!) and a pre-Musketeers adventure serial that was referred to in several recent interviews, "Smok and Malish", in which he plays the lead. Again, I had vaguely heard of this: it is clearly the prior production briefly alluded to in "When I Was Athos" which had involved falling off roofs, out of canoes, and into snowdrifts :-D
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I don't know -- I'm beginning to feel that *maybe* I've crossed some sort of threshold since Christmas, and that I'm actually starting to understand Russian freely at last...? ( Improved listening comprehension )

( Fast-talking historian )

I found myself yet again consulting Mrs Molokhovets in an attempt to work out how to make dough for pirozhki when you don't have any butter (due to having used almost all of it up on Peach & White Chocolate Failure -- I'm still eating the crunchy little greasy twice-cooked portions, although two of the remaining last three appear to have welded themselves together in the freezer and may have to be eaten as a single large lump). What had not dawned on me, of course, is that the butter-free Lenten recipes are also egg-free, so not really what I was hoping for in terms of proportions of oil to flour and egg!( Read more... )

Anyway, I gave up on Mrs Molokhovets, which I couldn't really read and which didn't seem likely to have anything along the lines that I was looking for, and resorted to the Internet instead and a query for "Russian+dough+yeast+oil+egg". Which gave me a recipe for Russian Stuffed Rolls with a dough that seemed to have the right sort of proportions ( Read more... )

To my surprise there are fat green bulb-tips -- at least three of them -- emerging in the wildflower trough alongside the garlic. So evidently the tulips are actually coming up, having survived the winter; we shall see if they do any better than the narcissi, which were last seen in March 2024 at the end of a steady decline, and never did flower at all.

To my surprise, the mystery bulb also appears to be showing a tiny shoot, though I had more or less assumed that had rotted away.... The grape hyacinths are currently fine, having at one point last year been very overcrowded, at which point either a lot of them died off or else I thinned them out manually -- I forget which :-p

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Whoever composed the translation exercise for Lesson 6 of the Penguin Russian Course evidently had a sense of humour, or was busy channelling my mental reactions ;-p ( I don't know how to learn words )

I have been a bit surprised that YouTube, despite having decided that I am a Russian-speaker when it comes to displaying comments, nonethless continues to show me English-language advertisments in the middle of Russian-language programming -- presumably this aspect of the site is based on your ISP's geographical location rather than viewing habits. I have had a couple of solitary occurrences of "Please donate to our brave Ukrainian boys" featuring young men in tanks, possibly aimed at soliciting donations from the Ukrainians who fled to Britain; today I was very amused to get for the first time an advert that was clearly aimed at the Russian population, from a company claiming to offer you European citizenship and corresponding visa privileges. They will sell you spurious *Bulgarian* nationality -- no need to speak the language, no need ever to have set foot in the country, no need to alter your life at all: it is a purely nominal transaction. As if by magic, you are no longer a Russian, but a 'European'... evidently a highly-saleable aspiration!

(To be fair, this does remind me of the desperate scramble amongst certain of my acquaintance to claim to be 'Irish' with zero links to the country, in order to acquire privileged access to the EU; the Irish government was very generously offering to offer succour to all those with distant relatives in the past who might wish to disclaim their embarrassing English existence. Which, as it happens, applies to me personally and to my cousins, even though our ancestors actually come from the Unionist side of the border and would presumably have been horrified by any such idea :-p)