Igenlode Wordsmith > Recent Status Updates

"Рукавицы - gloves, like a child's, with all four fingers in one piece, and a thumb"... in other words, *mittens*?

I don't know if this material is arranged thematically/chronologically, or if Russian children's fiction is just obsessed with winter...
(Glancing ahead, it looks as if the stories are simply grouped according to the seasons!)

This is extremely colloquial - and probably unusably dated colloquial, at that...!
But worth acquiring a passive understanding of.

The vocabulary and grammar in this is just ridiculously beyond beginner learner level - these are stories for young native-speaking Russian children, with suitable moral messages, but also stylised fairy-tale/colloquial constructions and obscure verbs and nouns ("moisten", "barge", "buds", "splash", "flowerbed", "groan", "nests" - these are not the terms most people acquire in their first few lessons...)

The vocabulary and idiom of this is ridiculously advanced for a "first reader"; in the initial few pages we have already got past passive participles, plus such words as 'flower stalk', 'streamlet', and 'cling', none of which were in my A-level course and all of which I'd expect to be far too obscure for the reader "at a very early stage in the study of the Russian language"...

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

I'm sure I'm not imagining things; the exercises in this chapter are *much* easier than the exercises in the previous chapter were!

Apparently дождавшись (не дождавшись дня) was actually a gerund and not the past participle I had assumed from the previous chapter - which would have been дождавшися!

I've worked through Ch22 three times, and I don't think it's going to get any better - let's try Ch23...

And so he falls, by inexorable foredestined stages :-(

"The Lich King. He's not Arthas, not anymore."

Ouch, that's a jolt - one perhaps trailed by the book's title, but certainly not by anything we've seen from Arthas's own childhood perspective so far.

Probably readers are assumed to know the lore, but just as in the case of Jander Sunstar ("Vampire of the Mists") I've never played the game, and I'm relating to the protagonists as people in a story...

More like 60 hours than 20 hours, with the number of repeats I had to do- but I've finished!
And I did enjoy it; looked at a couple of Smekhov's other audio books immediately afterwards, but sadly I really need to know the plot in advance in order to be able to manage.