В отдаленных краях Сибири, среди степей, гор или непроходимых лесов, попадаются изредка маленькие города, с одной, много с двумя тысячами жителей, деревянные, невзрачные, с двумя церквами—одной в городе, другой на кладбище,—города, похожие более на хорошее подмосковное село, чем на город.
After revising grammatical explanations on the boring textbook 3 to 4 times, I still couldn’t finely grasp the essence of Russian grammar. For me it is quite extraordinary, that I can’t memorise something with this much revision done.
Am I discouraged by the unexpected difficulty? Fortunately not. It feels more interesting to challenge this kind of hardships from time to time.
Cyrillic alphabets play a large part of difficulty in learning the grammar, perhaps.
I could learn the alphabets in a day or two actually. Though my brain, I mean neurones, couldn’t establish firm connections enough to react instantly to the Cyrillic inputs in a day or week. It is unexpectedly much harder to learn everything by rote until the neurones are completely connected.
Take a word ‘неделя’ for instance. I’ve been forgetting it many times and still not so surely abstract the meaning from the input недел-.
Would it be the same when it was written in Roman alphabet, like Nedyelya?
I experimented about this today. The chosen specimens are…
It has become slightly easier to recite the meanings.
But it is just an experiment, we can’t use this method as a proper way of learning. I’ve just been curious.
Perhaps, we need to take much time for our brains to generate the neuronal circuits when we learn language systems which are completely different from our own tongues. And we also better to have a forgiving stance towards our struggling brains while learning new things.
Tonight I tried to do listening and reading “Записки из Мертвого Дома” and, of course, utterly failed to keep up the narrator.
My reading speed is still like a baby. No, even babies can read faster than I do, perhaps.
But the speed, I mean the proper adult’s reading speed, encouraged me to study from the start. From the textbook page 1.
This time I’m going to read aloud much faster than the last rap. Engrave the proper speed onto my brain cells.
——
I’ve checked the Ожегов as I happened to find the free online version.(Oh man, I thought I had to buy a physical copy or an app, but it’s not!)
I feel kind of disappointed. Academically, it isn’t as good as modern Oxford. I expected more thorough word explanations from a mighty USSR dictionary. Especially it lacks much of etymological information.
Then I thought Dal’s might be better.
And I found it. Then checked it.
It is better than Ozhegov but still not enough as a reference for the great language of the largest country.
…Well, it’s my bad habit. I can’t stop evaluating dictionaries.
Моя бабушка, хотя она выросла во время второй мировой войны, очень любила вещи из Америки. Для нее, Кока-Кола была самым освежающим напитком. Сильвестр Сталлоне был лучшим мужчиной всех времен. А она говорила «Ты похожа на Одри Хепберн», когда восхваляла женскую красоту.
…Я знаю, что Хепберн не Американский. Но похоже она не знала.
——
I don’t know why, but I just happened to remember her. So I wrote it as a practice.
And there were too, too many grammar mistakes contained in it. Thanks to the Gboard, he corrected me dramatically, exquisitely.
It’s kinda funny immediately after I write ‘она,’ my brain keeps telling me ‘Знает! Знает!’ or ‘Любит! Любит!’ when I actually want to write it in past tense. I did too much grammar-table reciting apparently. Conditioned Reflex it is.
What a fine specimen for Dr Pavlov.
なんか食べてこのサイトに書いたりもするが、そういう日は強迫観念の反動が恐ろしい。
