Russian Boot Camp: Intermission

Having reached a halfway point in this project, I took a few days out to resolve a work issue that couldn’t simply be put off till the end of the week. This meant having to drop the ball in my Russian studies, but I intend to do some serious catch-up now to get back into the flow. But before I embark on the second half of my journey, I’d like to present some initial observations regarding my studies so far in the first half. Here are emerging patterns regarding the time and effort I’ve put in to learn and review new Russian phrases…

Pattern 1: It takes me about 30 minutes to intensively study 100 words of a transcript for Кухня. This subdivides into 20 minutes for selecting, translating, and writing down 10-20 new phrases for each 100 word section. It then takes a further 10 minutes to learn all these new phrases off in 4 consecutive cycles (1 cycle of learning, and 3 for testing and review).

Pattern 2: After 24 hours, it takes me about half my original study time to test and review a 100 word section again. The time it takes to complete a review continues to decrease by a factor of approximately 50% for each graduated interval (e.g., it takes me around 15 minutes after an interval of 24 hours, 8 minutes after 3 days, and 4 minutes after 1 week).

Pattern 3: In line with diminishing times needed for review, my errors after each graduated interval also seem to decrease by a factor of 50%. For example, I manage to get about 50% of the phrases wrong for each section during my first cycle following 24 hours, but this then falls to a 25% error rate at the start of my 3 day review, and ends up much closer to a 12% error rate by the end of the week.

In general, it’s reassuring to find predictable patterns emerging that also fall in line with studies I’ve read on spaced learning and forgetting more complex chunks of language. The next step will be to analyse the results from the encoding experiments I set up on Day 5, and see if there’s any way to enhance my initial learning experience to facilitate long-term recall…
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 7

I finished mining a barrelful of new phrases from the second episode of Кухня today. And I intend to learn them all off tomorrow, once my 300 odd phrases that are up for review are out of the way first. To make sure I consolidate these phrases, i) I’ve checked they repeat at least 11 or more times in my first intensive wave of study through episodes 1-40 of Кухня, and ii) I employ an 8-step geometrically spaced recall and review schedule that approximately spreads itself across the length of an academic semester (i.e., I learn new phrases on day 0, and then test and review them after 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, and finally 4 months). After 4 months, I’m reasonably confident that most of these phrases will stick in my head for a good while or pop up again in a new novel, tv series, or conversation.

Incidentally, at the end of the day, we went to buy my wife some new flip-flops (or in Pidgin, “slippahs”). Out of random curiosity, I asked her what you call “flip-flops” in Russian, but at the time, she couldn’t quite recall the word, so I ventured a half-hearted guess and said I bet its something like “шлепки–шлёпки”. Imagine then my surprise, having never read or heard this rather unusual word before (at least as far as I’m aware), to fall almost right on the mark: шлёпки!! Maybe I’m developing a genuine feel for Russian words after all…? 😉

Фраза дня: Мы один раз в акуле обезьяну нашли…живую! (“We once found a monkey in a shark…аlive!” – these golden words of wisdom from Кухня had me in absolute stitches. I never thought learning new grammatical patterns could be so much fun!)

Study today: 6.5 hours, 1,100 words studied (Кухня 1.2, phrase mining).
Project total: 36.5 hours, 5,400 words studied, 532 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 6

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.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 5

Whilst Кухня offers a wealth of contemporary Russian dialogue, all this mention of food makes me exceedingly peckish whilst studying, which is probably not doing my waistline any favours. Oh well, I guess my next project will be to work off the bonus Russian calories down the gym! 😉 To boost motivation, I tried out an experiment today to see if changing the size of the study window for phrases makes any difference in terms of encoding efficiency and later recall. I look forward to recording the results tomorrow, and trying out several more experiments along the way in search of a more effective methodology.

Фраза дня: Ушастик, что ты тут делаешь? (“Ushastik, what are you doing here?” – this underlined term of endearment is a good example of how the Internet, in all its colourful shapes and forms, can provide enlightening media beyond the shadow of dictionary translation).

Study today: 5 hours, 600 words studied (Кухня 1.2), 80 phrases learned.
Project total: 26 hours, 3,000 words studied, 512 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 4

Having learned to produce around 432 new phrases so far, some even exceeding a dozen words in length, I thought I’d return to my hardback copy of Ночной Дозор (the novel I use for short reading tests) to see if I’d made any minute improvement over the last few days. And although I didn’t notice any new words or phrases popping up, especially given the radically different genres and it being early days, I did find it considerably easier to read the text and induce the partial meaning of unknown portions. It was a strange feeling overall, which I put down to a possible leap forward in understanding Russian grammar through first learning example phrases in context.

Фраза дня: у меня просто шнурок развязался (“my shoelace just came undone” – aware of the heated arguments that can fly between polyglots over the word “shoelace”, I feel I’ve crossed a boundary today! *lol* Besides, this phrase from Кухня foxed me at first, until I realised it was in the passive voice).

Study today: 4 hours, 400 words studied (Кухня 1.2), 59 phrases learned.
Project total: 21 hours, 2,400 words studied, 432 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 3

I awoke this morning to Russian words and phrases dancing around my head, with Игорь Борисович’s “Комарово” playing as accompaniment in the back of my mind. And seeing as I went to bed sober, I take this to be a good sign overall. Speaking Russian now feels a touch easier, and I notice that my ears have become attuned to several more words in dialogue that I would have otherwise missed before. The main news of the day, however, is that I’ve finally completed my first episode of Кухня (Ура!!!). It was fun to watch it again in the evening with the missus and share more than a vague understanding of what was going on this time; очень прикольно было!

Фраза дня: Ну давай (“well, go on…” – I recall Prof. Schmidt saying there’s a handy phrase in Portuguese that indicates you’d like to finish a conversation on the telephone. Today I found its Russian equivalent!)

Study today: 7 hours, 600 words studied (Кухня 1.1), 93 phrases learned.
Project total: 17 hours, 2,000 words studied, 373 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 2

After reviewing half an episode of Кухня from yestereday, I became a little distracted and started surfing the Internet, oblivious to the dangers of certain procrastination. Catching up on a host of emails and other posts of course led me down a rocky road and straight into a thorny thicket of “What happened to learning Russian?”. The end result was that I was unable to complete episode 1 as originally planned, and watched an episode of the comedy series Сваты with my wife instead in the evening (recommended by johnbnine on the Polydog forum). It was also quite exciting to hear some of the new words I’d only just committed to memory already popping up on the Big Podcast today (e.g., “очень прикольно”, “придурак”), and I’ve further noticed how moving the front of my tongue towards the mid-palate helps improve overall pronunciation.

Фраза дня: Я тебя́ ненави́жу (“I hate you” – certainly not a nice thing to say to anyone, but it offers an amusing literal translation: “I don’t look at you!”).

Study today: 4 hours, 400 words studied (Кухня 1.1), 64 phrases learned.
Project total: 10 hours, 1,400 words, 280 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day 1 (project restarted here)

I was called away to deal with some important personal matters over the last fortnight, so I’ve reset the start date of this project to begin afresh today. After an exceptionally busy weekend, I was dog tired this morning, and set off at an even more leisurely snail’s pace than usual once out of the gates. I managed to study half of episode 1 of Кухня again (which is where I got up to last time), listen to a couple of episodes of Vasily Strelnikov’s Big Podcast in the background, and spoke mostly in my own inimitable form of pidgin Russian throughout the day. I won’t deny it’s hard work progressing through the first transcript, especially in the beginning, but the one thing that keeps me pointing the right direction is that I absolutely love this funny sexy series!

Фраза дня: “Моей душе покоя нет” (taken from one of my all-time favourite films, it means “there’s no peace for my soul”).

Study today: 6 hours, 1,000 words studied (Кухня 1.1), 216 phrases learned.
Project total: 6 hours, 1,000 words studied, 216 phrases learned.
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day -1 (false start)

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!
 

Read Full Post »

Russian Boot Camp: Day -2 (false start)

I began by chatting ineptly in Russian with my wife before she headed off to work in the morning, and then just tried to think in Russian throughout the rest of the day, be it whilst out taking my morning walk, shopping, or indulging in introspective reflection back at home.

Being surrounded by English, I found thinking in Russian quite a challenge, but did my level best to maintain a small cosy Russian microclimate around me at all times. One technique I came up with is to sing (and I must confess, beatbox), when I feel a strong urge to start thinking in English again. Keeping my mouth busy with other sounds helps me from reverting back to internal English monologue, and every now and again, I even throw in some rhyming Russian lyrics for good measure. It’s a fun technique to use at home or whilst performing one’s morning’s ablutions in the shower, but I’d advise a modicum of caution whilst out shopping in the vegetable section at Safeway.

Sadly, I didn’t get to hear any Russian on the street today (which sometimes happens, Hawai’i being so full of tourists), but I did get to overhear a couple of shop assistants chatting away in a Chinese language I couldn’t initially recognise. When I asked them which language they were speaking, they informed me it was Hakka, and I took the opportunity to learn a new phrase (and my only phrase so far) in Hakka, “多謝” (thank you), which, with my new Russian head firmly screwed on tight, reminded me of “доч(к)а” at the time.

The shop assistants also wanted to know where I was from, as they guessed I wasn’t quite “loco” (Pidgin: local, not Spanish: crazy) or from the US mainland. In fact, I learnt that they had on a previous occasion made a bet on this, and were sure I was either Italian or Spanish. Sorry to say, all bets were off this time. Despite looking considerably non-Italian, I find that locals often mistake me for being Australian or from any other country in Europe but England! Perhaps they they just don’t see many Brits this side of the Pacific, and I guess my largely Irish demeanour (my mother is Irish and my father part Welsh) probably doesn’t quite fit the English Holywood “baddie or bashful” stereotype abroad.

Finally, with regards to my Russian studies today, I fell short of the mark by a long shot. The first minute of Кухня was a baptism of words, spoken at breakneck speed, and the following dialogue was full of idiomatic language as expected. Tripping over the first few high hurdles, and after a brief flirtation with the transcripts for the series, I resorted to other lighter activities. I felt exhausted by the end of the day, but I’ll endeavour to do better tomorrow!

Фраза дня: Белый друг (slang for “toilet”). 😉
 

Read Full Post »