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- Topic: Russian >
- "У меня хорошая память."
19 Comments
Honestly, those - Portuguese in particular - were mostly intelligent guesswork. (And I mostly did them to look at the bonus skill sentences because the flirting ones are hilarious!)
French I studied up to first year of uni, eight years total, so while my grammar is appalling, I understand the written language fairly well.
Italian was a mix of stuff I knew (I'm a musician, and you can't help but pick up a lot if you play music for long enough, because almost all the directions are in Italian) plus attempting to turn my best guess in French into something more Italian (works surprisingly well in some cases, not at all in others!). I can understand a lot more Italian than I can produce.
Spanish I did study a little, once upon a time, which added to the tricks I used for Italian did help out. Portuguese was entirely guesswork and luck.
It's at least partly a matter of pure luck; I have a dummy account in which I do test outs on the trees to see how many skills I'd skip now, as compared to when I started, and when I did the placement tests in the Romance languages I got level 6 in Portuguese on luck and guesswork alone, which made me laugh aloud, but only like level two in Italian?
Seriously, don't be too impressed on the Romance languages. I could say hello and wish you a good day in Spanish and Italian, probably, on a good day, but I can't produce either with any reliability (even on the most simple stuff), and I think the only thing from Portuguese that's stuck in any kind of productive way is menina which I believe means girl. If you gave me some (very, very) simple Portuguese (I mean the girl eats, the cat eats, this is a boy simple) to read I might get the gist; understanding spoken Portuguese I'd be hopeless. And I couldn't even say hello!
I kind of wish I could keep the trees (to amuse myself with bonus skill sentences!) but remove them from my flair, because they're really absurdly misleading. It would be so much more accurate to keep it down to the languages where the level at least somewhat reflects my skills or where I am actively learning.
(Though I'm sort of being hypocritical in fairness because I really want the Catalan flag on my flair purely because I like it, and am actually throttling my brain by attempting to learn a language in which I know nothing via a language in which I know hardly anything. Oh my. That's some serious brain gymnastics. I went to do the placement test, as I do pretty much every time I start a new tree, and realises when the first question came up that even on the off chance I could take a wild guess at the Catalan, it didn't matter, because I didn't have the first clue how to translate it into Spanish..)
Pretty much the only ones you should pay any heed to are Slavic languages, German, Esperanto, and I am trying to pick up a little Norwegian and did have a good go at Dutch (eventually decided it really needed to wait until I had some decent grasp on German). And also be aware that German, for instance, is mostly high because it was the first language I ever studied on Duolingo and I've revised it a lot because it kicks my butt LOL ;) because the levels refer only to time spent/XP gained, not to actual competence. (I cannot overemphasise how badly Turkish kicked my butt. I'm not sure I can remember anything except possibly how to say Alex is an owl...)
.(As most of my progress test scores would attest... ;) I recently got over 2 in a German progress test and I practically threw a party!)
(The English flag is from me doing English-from-Russian. Which again, I studied pretty intensively once upon a long ago.)
ETA: this got really long. Sorry! I just feel like taking credit for all the apparent skills on my flair is highly misleading!
Even without the Romance languages, to have got that far on the Germanic and Slavic languages, Turkish and Esperanto must have taken some pretty serious work.
My French is about like yours, probably. I can read it OK but not really speak it. Especially since now whenever I want French I can only think of the Russian... Between French, the Latin I was made to study years ago, and what I've picked up from classical piano, I can understand a bit of Italian and the odd word of Spanish, but I can't speak them at all. Portuguese I would be totally dependent on guessing and luck.
What is ETA? To me that means Estimated Time of Arrival.
555
Yes, you are correct. "A memory of something" is воспомина́ние (note that the root is the same, even though the vowel is different: пам-/пом-).
826
It is funny because I forget the word "memory" in this sentence, it is like a contradiction LOL