The Prep Month

Table of Contents

1. Monthly Stats
2. Highlights
3. Grammar
4. C1 Exam
5. Speaking
6. Listening and Reading
7. Watching
8. Overall and Next Month

First, as always, before I get into the meat of the update, here are my Anki and Toggl stats.

My Anki

My Toggl

Highlights

I actually studied a respectable amount of grammar this month. With almost 3 hours studied, it means I likely did about 10 lessons from the textbook I'm working through.

I also signed up for the C1 exam again, but I'll talk about that a bit more later.

Also total time spent on Russian almost hit my informal goal of 100 hours a month, so that's nice.

Grammar

Grammar is pretty fun. For particular topics this month, I tackled a few different things.

1. Time, space, and the reasons for doing things
2. Participles

Reasons for doing things is interesting in Russian, as they have 4 or 5 words that directly translate to the English "for". I went out for breakfast. I sacrificed my life for you. I'm getting this for Christmas. I'm fighting for the cause! This language is hard for me.

All of these "for"s are translated differently in Russian, and so as an English speaker, it can be hard to choose between them (which was precisely the assignment). It can feel like a cruel practical joke at times, but I found that my 6th sense was able to detect incorrectness more often than not. Reading through the explanations also made a lot of stuff click into place. For example, I had a sense that ради was more of a literary word, used in places where some great purpose was expressed. That was partly right, so not bad!

Participles are a whole other beast in Russian. I'm going to shamelessly steal these examples to help my English audience understand the difficulty here. In English we have present and past participles:

• Present Participle Example: The crying baby had a wet diaper.
• Past Participle Example: The wrecked car was totaled.

Russian likes to brag about it's low number of tenses (it's just past, present, future!), but behind that facade a surprise lies in wait. In order to express the order of actions, the concurrency of actions, the "inherentness/permanence" of adjectives, Russian makes use of participles. There are a bunch of different types, grouped into when the action takes place, and whether the noun is doing the thing or having the thing done to it, and a whole other host of fun things. This is further complicated by the fact that these participles are vanishingly rare in conversational speech outside of professional orators (or highly educated YouTubers). As a result, the best (and/or only) way to acclimate yourself to their meaning is by reading a lot. This in itself isn't a problem for me.

The issue arises when I'm presented with 4 options to choose from, all of which blend together in my head. I've no problem understanding the sentence when I read the correct participle, but the warning light in my mind doesn't activate if the participle is grammatically incorrect. As a result, these questions are currently hard for me. Working through it though!

C1 Exam

For those who have been following along, my main goal of 2023 was to pass the C1 exam. Here is my post where I discuss my first (blind) attempt at the exam.

Because I passed all but the grammar section, I only need to (and in fact am only allowed to) retake this section in particular. The exam is currently set for Aug 26th, so we'll see if I'm able to get those precious 66 points this time around. However, I'm also going on a nearly two week vacation in the middle of this month, and am only getting back a few days prior to the exam. So will be an interesting journey trying to get my grammar study in each day while on vacation.

Speaking

Not a whole lot to share here other than a general decline in my language exchanges due to travel. Still trying to figure out how to talk like Pushkin.

Listening and Reading

My pure listening was down quite a bit this month. Just shy of 30 minutes a day on average, and that was mostly podcasts. The primary cause of this decrease was the downfall of my morning routine. Getting my morning walks and commute back in order will help restore my listening time to it's former glory.

I also read a few books:

1. Покорение Огня (final book in the series, "Conquering the Fire")
2. Завтра, Завтра, Завтра (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin)

"Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" took me quite a while to read (about 20 hours) partly because the book is just longer than most books I read and partly because there were an insane number of idioms crammed into this sucker. I had heard from my friends who read the book in English that the prose was needlessly (perhaps uselessly) verbose, so I was curious what my experience would be in Russian.

Notably, I've not yet reached the point in my Russian career where I have a strong intuitive feel between an individual word being bookish/high style vs conversational vs просторечный (simple speech? I'm not sure how to translate this word accurately). Generally I'm able to detect tonal shifts as a whole, but any individual word rarely strikes me as either out of place or particularly notable. As a result, reading this book in Russian was mostly just me meeting new words, bright eyed and curious, rather than stumbling over a word and knowing that it's some highfalutin nonsense known only by those who pour over dictionaries in their free time.

Watching

I watched about 10 hours of Тайны госпожи Кирсановой (The Mysteries of Madam Kirsanova, but the English title is apparently "Smalltown Mysteries" which is a damn shame). Getting back to this show was one of my goals from last month and I nailed it. I'll go ahead and pat myself on the back for my ability to watch TV! :D

The back half of this series is actually far better than the front half. I'm not sure if this is a general pattern with this producer, but episodes 31-40 have actually been so funny. If you want to watch, here is the YouTube link to the whole series (there are no subs in any language).

Otherwise, just scattered YouTube stuff again, not much to share there.

Overall and Next Month

Overall feel pleased with the month, in particular the grammar study. A bit upset about the random 3 day Anki lapse, but it happens to the best of us. Very excited for the C1 exam retake and my vacation, but we'll see how those two polar opposite goals clash with each other. Would be a shame if I failed the grammar section again just because I had a long vacation immediately leading up to the exam. But I'll just try again if I find myself failing again. If at first you don't succeed and all that.

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!