Today’s tussle with Russian reminded me of the importance of suffixes, and more specifically, how prefixes often function like prepositions in separable verbs (e.g., пере “across” + ходить “to go” = переходить “to cross”, or literally, “to go across”). To mix things up, and take a short break from Кухня after some gruelling reviews in the morning, I tried my hand at reading six sample chapters taken from a Russian-English reader for beginners by Language Practice Publishing (suggested by vadimzn on HTLAL). It was quite motivating to understand most of what I read for a change, and this proved a welcome change to frustrating over opaque idioms in Кухня or throwing my flailing brain into the deep dark end of a poetic passage from Ночной Дозор. I was also delighted to hear from my wife that my last short email to her didn’t bear a single mistake, all the more so because i. I composed it in a hurry without any assistance, and ii. any Russian sentence written by me without a grammatical error is indeed a rare celebration.
Фраза дня: под краватью (“under the bed” – where I found a quivering flock of my language resources hiding today).
Study today: 4 hours, 1,300 words studied (First Russian Reader), 20 phrases learned.
Project total: 30 hours, 4,300 words studied, 532 phrases learned.
Oh, that crazy business of the “-ixes”… стрелять, выстрелять прострелять, застрелять, подстрелить, дострелить, пострелять, перестрелять, недострелить, отстрелить [bang head against wall]…
By the way, what’s the difference for you between “studied” and “learned” in your totals? Or rather, how do you know when you’ve learned it?
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Haha…I know just what you mean! But do you know what particularly drives me insane? When I learn a new word and try to apply it in conversation with wide-eyed high hopes, only to receive the response, “yes, it does mean that, but just not in this context”, or even the infamous, “it’s fine grammatically, and you could say that and be readily understood, but it’s just that we wouldn’t say it that way”…arghhh (bang, bang, bang)!!! 😉
When I write “words studied”, I’m simply referring to how many words I’ve intensively studied in any selected Russian text; whereas the “phrases learned” part refers to brand new phrases (some of them even quite long) that I’ve committed to memory and can produce correctly from English to Russian.
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Oh yes, that gets me too ; )
Thanks for the clarification!
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