I gathered a little more speed today, and managed to complete my studies for half of episode 1 of Кухня by the end of the day. With the help of some kind members on the HTLAL forum, I also found a couple of useful browser apps for checking grammar, and to my absolute delight, placing stress marks on Russian words in a web page:
LanguageTool (grammar checker)
RussianGram (stress marker)
With only one day’s light immersion and study, I noticed that I spoke Russian considerably faster this morning, and could communicate more detail in conversation whilst out with my wife in the evening. I probably learnt well over 200 phrases (I haven’t counted yet), some of which are a couple of words in length, whilst others are full sentences. Here’s an example of a rather bizarre one: “Но ножом он тебе ноги побреет так, что ты даже не заметишь” (don’t ask!).
I hope to complete the second half of Кухня tomorrow, and am currently working on tweaking my learning strategy to make more efficient use of my time. I’d love to get it to the point where I can study the transcript for one episode a day, and then watch it in the evening, but this might be wildly overoptimistic. Мы узнаем!
Фраза дня: “С газом, без газа?” (with or without gas?). I chose this one to showcase how infuriating Russian can be to a simple-minded англичанин like me. You’d imagine the same case would follow the prepositions “with” and “without”, but that would be far too easy!
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