Status Updates From The Penguin Russian Course:...

Alas, this book is now almost totally disintegrated...

A far simpler version of gerunds than the 'Colloquial Russian' chapter... which doesn't drill you anything like so hard on the irregularities. Ideally one would probably have done this one first to get a grip on the basics, then the other one for all the myriad exceptions!
(Also, they are not including the passive but only the active gerunds- splitting them across multiple chapters really makes more sense.)

I thought I'd heard enough dates flying past to have a handle on this. Turns out that I haven't... and it doesn't help that I can rattle off тысяча девятьсот девяносто by rote, but struggle to construct dates in the 21st century :D

In Lesson 19 (of 30) we *finally* get an extremely cursory introduction to perfective and imperfective verbs, as opposed to the far more confusing verbs of motion, which were introduced back in Lesson 11...

Aarrgghh, numbers!

You can't help but admire a textbook that contains sample sentences like "He was killed by a tiger" or "My uncle is in hospital and my aunt is in prison. Unfortunately it is not possible to visit my aunt" - so much more entertaining than that dull Spanish course book about the type of souvenirs to be bought in South America!

I have zero recollection of this negative-genitive business, but there is a logic to it: one has a thing, but none OF a thing :-)
(And likewise много, which I do know and which they haven't mentioned yet...)

Pairs of prepositions: виз, нас, and кот :D

Oops! I found an obvious typo in the exercise: приятно ездить нам отоцикле... (на мотоцикле)

Irregular verbs of motion *groan*
I never did get the hang of these the first time round...

A nice easy chapter, as we'd already covered the prepositional case in the very first chapter of the other book!

Ironically, two of the words I had to learn for this chapter (смелый, courageous and горло болит, my throat hurts) both subsequently turned up in YouTube videos yesterday: virtue rewarded! (As, oddly enough, did представитель, министерство and торговля, albeit all in separate contexts - one phrase I *never* thought was going to be useful outside the context of the Soviet 1960s!)

"The stress tends to be capricious in the short form of many adjectives. The reader should not worry about this unduly at the present stage. He may even be comforted to know that in some cases Russians themselves fail to agree on the stress of the short form of the adjective" - always nice to see a textbook with a sense of humour!

This has become my warm up book. One lesson before Russian work

10 hoofdstukken op een klein jaar tijd. Ik ga even een pauze nemen en me beperken tot het herhalen van de woordenschat en vervoeging van werkwoorden. In het begin ging het vlot, maar het gaat nu heelwat trager vooruit.