The Month of Writing (sort of)

Table of Contents

1. Monthly Stats
2. Highlights
3. C1 Exam
4. Anki
5. Grammar
6. Speaking and Writing
7. Listening and Reading
8. Watching
9. 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

Motivation generally lagged (or should I say self-discipline?) this month. I only had 4 days of >=4 hours of Russian, which used to be the norm. Mostly just wasting time on things that I shouldn't be wasting my time on (e.g. the dreaded English YouTube).

My wife also convinced me to read a book in ENGLISH, so at least part of my reading time was devoted to that last month and this upcoming month. I am, of course, exaggerating for the red word (translation: for effect).

I also wrote way less than I planned/needed to, but more on that later.

C1 Exam

As I wrote in my last blog post, I had planned for this month to be the month of writing. And if you'll kindly glance at my toggl, you'll see that I got just over an hour of writing done across the whole month. This came out to exactly three essays, two of which smelled of dog shit. I have a longer way to go than I initially thought, and my overconfidence might end up being my downfall. For some reason, the word допиздеться comes to mind.

Either way, I'm re-taking the writing portion of the exam on Oct 26th of this month. Ready or not, here I come!

Anki

Paradoxically, this was a great Anki month. I have unwittingly found myself in a 75 day Anki streak and, as all Anki devotees know, the program is 10x more effective if you actually do the thing every day. Make it a part of your everyday routine!

Grammar

Might as well delete this section, ведь I don't make grammar mistakes anymore. Except, of course, when I recently tried to say the sentence "I still make mistakes on basic things" (я по-прежнему ошибаюсь в базовых вещах) and made a grammar mistake (с базовыми вещами). I wish I were joking.

Speaking and Writing

Didn't feel great about my speaking output this month. Constantly felt like I started sentences without knowing where I'm headed, which is one of the cardinal sins of speaking in human languages, as often the grammar at the beginning of a sentence is heavily influenced by what the entire thought strives to become. We all know the feeling of changing phrasing of a sentence midway through it because you realize you dropped a crucial word earlier.

Otherwise, though, I started a new phonetics course with an American teacher of Russian who, according to my friend, "sounds 99% native and she seems to be very knowledgeable." It's a 5 week course focusing on proper pronunciation but built around you being an American English native speaker. As all things I do in Russian are purely for fun, I'll mostly interested in how the course progresses, but I've already had daily homework for the course which I've kept up with.

Her website if you're curious. She has a book and YouTube channel and a few other things too

On writing: I'm making many fewer silly mistakes (things like "He like" instead of "likes") but still pretty far from where I need to be.

Listening and Reading

I listened to 1 audiobook(s) in this month:

1. Одним пальцем by Agatha Christie (The Moving Finger)

I also read a few books:

1. Парус для писателя by Ursula K Le Guin (Steering the Craft)
2. Драгун, на кавказ! by Андрей булычев (Dragoon, To the Caucuses!)

The Драгун, на кавказ! book has a really interesting setup that didn't deliver whatsoever. It's the story of a modern teenager who accidentally gets sent back in time to The Patriotic War (The Napoleonic Invasion of Russia in the early 1800s). However, after the kid gets transported back, almost none of his "modernness" has any relevance to or influence on the plot, so it ended up just being like "some random recruit gets tossed around between different units, also he talks funny". I didn't even finish the book (read ~75%) because still nothing had happened that deep into the book. Also because the book takes place so long ago, the author intentionally uses a lot of old/strange words, or archaic spellings of words, so it wasn't the easiest read either. Definitely don't recommend.

Парус для писателя is a book by Ursula Le Guin, one of my two favorite writers, and it's her first non-fiction that I've read. The thing is that this book is about how to be a better fiction writer in English. So reading passages about the specifics of English grammar, but in Russian, was quite a trip. This is an excellent book that I'd recommend to anyone wanting to read about the "toolkit" of writers.

Watching

Watched a LOT of Кухня this month. Now that I'm ~50 episodes into the show, I've noticed that I'm able to understand some characters a lot easier than others. In particular, there are three characters who mumble EVERY word that they say (Ксеня, Федя, Дмитрий). Unfortunately, Dmitri is a main character who drives a lot of the plot, so I miss more than I'd like due to his unique way of speaking. There is even a character with a stutter who I'm able to understand easier than these other дебилов.

Overall and Next Month

Gotta get those numbers up! I only have one weekend trip this month, so this should be fully doable. I also found a writing prompt book that I might make use of to just get more writing hours in. Writing formal academic essays gets old real quick when you don't really "need" to.

We'll see what happens this month!

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!