Catching up...
Jul. 27th, 2006 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpThe latest wrinkle in movie piracy in Russia is the sale of DVDs containing something like 8-10 movies. I saw one being played the other day, and the video quality was pretty bad (some kind of extreme compression that degrades the image any time anything moves on the screen), not to mention the interpretation was laid on top of the English soundtrack, which made the whole thing unintelligble for the brief period I stopped to watch. The cost of these disks is somewhere around 180 rubles, or about $7, which works out to less than a buck a feature.
I picked up an interesting book in Moscow during the stopover en route here. It's a copy of Camus' L'étranger prepared using "Ilya Frank's Reading Method."
The essence of the method is the presentation of text a paragraph at a time with the entire text translated, clause by clause, with a spare set of notes on idioms at the end of each translated segment. The paragraph is then repeated, without the "interruptions."
The theory behind this presentation is that the reader never has to refer to a dictionary (unless, in my case, it's a word unknown to me in both French and Russian!). There's a certain logic about this that makes sense, as the ability to deduce the meanings of words from context alone only develops as does one's facility in reading. Over the past couple of weeks, reading snippets here and there, I've noticed it's become easier to read the original (and I've even begun to skip the Russian or to look at it to find out what the proper Russian word might be for an expression).
Speaking of French, my stock appears to have improved with the French team after my performance at the Gagarin museum. Stock aside, I've noticed over the past few days that my comprehension has taken a leap (meaning I don't have to ask people to repeat themselves as often), as has my ability to express myself. There are still some humps, though, as when today I didn't know the term for "insect bite" (piqûre) and "scratch" (gratter) when someone complained of a rash on his back.
On the mundane side of life, the bag for the day - besides having worked on assignment here in Baikonur - is about 2500 words, which represents work made up for yesterday's zero production, so that my average for the past three days is back where it ought to be, with a slight leg up on tomorrow's quota.
Time to get some shuteye.
Cheers...
I picked up an interesting book in Moscow during the stopover en route here. It's a copy of Camus' L'étranger prepared using "Ilya Frank's Reading Method."
The essence of the method is the presentation of text a paragraph at a time with the entire text translated, clause by clause, with a spare set of notes on idioms at the end of each translated segment. The paragraph is then repeated, without the "interruptions."
The theory behind this presentation is that the reader never has to refer to a dictionary (unless, in my case, it's a word unknown to me in both French and Russian!). There's a certain logic about this that makes sense, as the ability to deduce the meanings of words from context alone only develops as does one's facility in reading. Over the past couple of weeks, reading snippets here and there, I've noticed it's become easier to read the original (and I've even begun to skip the Russian or to look at it to find out what the proper Russian word might be for an expression).
Speaking of French, my stock appears to have improved with the French team after my performance at the Gagarin museum. Stock aside, I've noticed over the past few days that my comprehension has taken a leap (meaning I don't have to ask people to repeat themselves as often), as has my ability to express myself. There are still some humps, though, as when today I didn't know the term for "insect bite" (piqûre) and "scratch" (gratter) when someone complained of a rash on his back.
On the mundane side of life, the bag for the day - besides having worked on assignment here in Baikonur - is about 2500 words, which represents work made up for yesterday's zero production, so that my average for the past three days is back where it ought to be, with a slight leg up on tomorrow's quota.
Time to get some shuteye.
Cheers...
