Starlight's posts

★★★★★ Trading ★★★★★

I only have one of most of the items I'm trading, so I'm only willing to trade them for items on the list of items that I want. I can also add volts or ohms for filler, and you may also use volts or ohms for filler. Check my buying post to see how many volts and ohms I currently have.

Items I Have
Astrologer
Lil Piggies
Punky Plasma
Virgo
Ancient Splendor
Bearboozled
Faerie Queen
Love Senshi
Magnificent Inspector
Samurai Shock Set
Sweet Cakes
Woodland Fae
Zaz La


Items I Want
Alice
Merlantis
Librarian
Frost Empress
Skunk Punk
Showstopper
Serene Royalty
Weather Witch
Porcelain Doll
Music Box Ballerina
Sticky Fingers
Too Hot
The Bayou

Finally back with another post for my log! For Korean, I haven't really switched up my methods at all. I've been reading extensively, reading intensively, sentence mining, reviewing Anki cards, watching videos, listening to songs, and so on. The amount of time I spend on these activities varies day to day, but reviewing Anki cards and doing at least a bit of reading and sentence mining is the bare minimum.

However, the reason I'm updating my log today isn't really because of Korean. I'd been wanting to start on another language for a while, and three months ago today I did just that. So, what language did I start learning? Well, I gave it some thought, and I was leaning toward Spanish. I had some previous experience with trying to learn it before, and it just seemed like a reasonable choice. So I started learning Russian on December 3rd, 2020. I started off with learning the alphabet, mostly using this Anki deck, this website, and this website. Reading was like pulling teeth for the first week or two. It was so slow and frustrating, and I felt like I was reading everything wrong. I also had to learn how to do an alveolar trill, which took about a week to accomplish. Also, to keep this organized, I'm just going to go talk about each resource I've used so far.


Drops
I only used this app for about 10 days, but it was a fun, short bit of study to do every day at the beginning of my Russian learning journey. I still remember a few of the words I learned from it, so I guess it worked fairly well. There wasn't really a reason I stopped using it. I just skipped using it one day and never used it again. Such is life.


The New Penguin Russian Course: A Complete Course for Beginners
When I started off learning Korean I worked through a series of books called Korean Grammar in Use, and I found that I really enjoyed studying grammar. I've seen some people say they don't enjoy this sort of study, but for me it's quite interesting. So, bearing this in mind, one of the first things I did was to look up good books for learning Russian. This one came up on all of the lists I looked at. At first the lack of audio was a bit of a turn off, but in the end I decided to give it a shot. I located a PDF of the book and began working through the first lesson on day one. Also, I've taken to checking Forvo for audio, and a good chunk of the example sentences from this book are actually on Forvo, so that's nice. I've also added some of the sentences without audio to Forvo, and so far the ones I've added have had their audio added to the site by a couple helpful Russian speakers. Seriously, all but one were done by the same person, so kudos to them!

As for what I've actually learned about from this book, I'll start by listing things from the titles of the lessons I've done: Alphabet and Pronunciation, Transliteration, Everyday Phrases, Naming Things, Basic Grammar, Gender, Verbs, Personal Pronouns, Present Tense, Conjugations, Word Stress, Nouns and Cases, Asking Questions, The Prepositional Case, Indeclinable Nouns, Possession, Going Places, The Accusative Case, Russian Personal Names, Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter Adjectives, 'What Kind of...?', 'This' and 'That', Prepositional and Accusative Cases of Adjectives, Adverbs, Plurals, Spelling Rule 1, 'Is there...?', Spelling Rule 2, 1-5,000, Genitive Singular and Plural, Quantities, Rubles and Dollars, Buying Things, Genitive Pronouns, 'There Isn't', Prepositions Taking the Genitive, Genitive of Adjectives, 'Whether', The Past, Reflexive Verbs, The Future, Imperfective and Perfective, 'To Want', Dative, 'To Give', 'To Please', Spelling Rules 3 and 4, Prepositional Plural, Aspect in the Past, Use of Tense, Aspect of the Infinitive, Reported Speech, More about 'Whether', Aspect in the Future, and Impersonal Constructions.

I'm currently at the end of lesson 14, and I'd say that I have varying degrees of understanding when it comes to the topics I've covered so far. My weakest point is probably case endings, but I'm making an effort to know those better! Also, one memorable thing I learned from this book aside from grammar is that apparently there were some Russian names from the revolution where the person's name would be formed from initials of unions, relevant individuals, and so on. I've never heard of someone being named using the initials of something before, so that was an interesting bit of history to learn.


Real Russian Club and Amazing Russian
To help me gain a better understanding of cases and their endings, I've taken to watching videos about the cases from these two YouTube channels. I feel like watching these videos is helping me a lot, and I try my best to follow along and guess the case endings of the nouns, adjectives, and such in the example sentences before they're revealed. Another channel that seems good is Boost Your Russian, but I haven't used it much yet.


Assimil
I wanted to give Assimil a try since I've heard it mentioned before. So far I've only done one lesson, and I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing another, but it seems like a good resource.


Duolingo
I've poked around a bit with Duolingo before, but from my understanding is isn't the best for Korean, so I didn't give it much more than a passing glance. I've decided to give it a shot for Russian though, and so far I've worked on the first two skills a bit. I'll probably keep doing a tiny bit of Duolingo each day for now.


Anki
I've been using Anki with Russian as well. With Korean I started off using the Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita deck and added to it as I went, so this time I'm using a similar deck for Russian grammar and sentences that I'm making as I go. I also have a vocabulary deck as well. The grammar deck currently has 1,208 cards, and the vocabulary deck is at 819 cards. I've mostly been using Forvo for audio to put on the cards, but I've also used AwesomeTTS and Wiktionary for a few cards.


To finish off this log post, it's time to talk about history, music, and other things that aren't specifically related to learning the Russian language itself.

It occurred to me pretty much from the start that I didn't actually know much about Russia. Of course we learned a bit about things like the Cold War in school, but I can't remember ever learning any in-depth Russian history. So I decided to head to YouTube, and these are some of the videos I watched involving Russian history: The Russian Revolution - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), WW1 - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), WW2 - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), The Cold War - OverSimplified (Part 1 and Part 2), and The Russian Civil War in Early 1919. I also watched some other videos such as Geography Now! RUSSIA, RUSSIAN REPUBLICS Explained (Geography Now!), Life in a small town in the far east of Russia / Spassk-Dalny VLOG, Visit Russia – ST. PETERSBURG by train – Russian trip vlog, Moscow Russia Aerial Drone 5K, and St. Petersburg 8K. I plan to watch more videos and continue learning about Russia.

As for music, one of the first things I did when I started learning Russian was to start my hunt for some Russian songs I'd like. Some of the songs I've found are: Ленинград и Глюк’oZa - Жу Жу, IC3PEAK - Плак-Плак (Boo-Hoo), Дора & Таня Волкова - Дорадура, SLAVA MARLOW - Ты говоришь как огонь, and Полина Гагарина - Колыбельная.

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Testing testing testing

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I have ~300 candy canes!

I have ~300 candy canes!

I have ~300 candy canes!

I have ~300 candy canes!