Day: September 30, 2011

Just a few thoughts to round off the quarter

The title page to the 1611 first edition of th...
Happy 400th birthday to thee

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the end of another quarter, known in the mouth of the people as Q3 – 2011.  You can call me a typical accountant if you like, but I always tend to be aware of these quarter ends and I tend to have certain aims and goals for what I like to achieve both professionally and in my hobbies each quarter and so days like today are an opportunity to take stock of where I am.

Doing so generated just a couple of thoughts which I thought I’d like to share with you.

I had a nice long time in the UK, and was supposed to be taking time off, but in the event work kept me fairly involved even though at a distance, and I made little progress on the writing projects I had in mind, especially the Goldlist book and the workbook for the Huliganov Russian course. Hence these are not really ready to show yet, apologies to those of my viewers and readers whom I may have led to hope that they would be. Work has to come first, I have to be able to look after my family.

It’s also three quarters through the 400th anniversary year of the KJV and I also didn’t get far with the readings of the KJV I wanted to do – this is all in the last quarter now if I’m going to do it at all in this year.

In Japanese I made a slight breakthrough while discovering a way to adapt goldlist principles to working through the Heising book and getting the best of both worlds – more on that when I get further on with it. In any event I registered for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 5, which is on Decmber 4th in Warsaw, which is a target to work towards,

World events seem to be leaving something to be desired, with hurricanes in the UK, people defrauding UBS out of money that makes Nick Leeson look like a small timer, and the continuing threat of the EURO going down the tubes at the hands of defaults by Greece and other weaker countries, as well as a few nights of crazy behaviour in the UK by vandals and malcontents out for some fun at the expense of working people have made the last quarter a very strange time. We are edging nearer and nearer to a precipice. Winter will draw in soon, the nights will be longer, the days colder, and we are going to be in for a long and hard winter.

Last winter I wrote an article explaining to UK people and others from places where the winters are normally mild how to go about surviving a Siberian style winter. I recommend you read this once again and think about it.

http://huliganov.tv/2010/12/16/huliganovs-winter-hinters/ is the place to go for it.

Many thanks again to my loyal viewers and readers, which here on this blog currently number 96. Thanks especially to those of you who join in on discussions, I hope for more of that. If I am sometimes slow in getting to moderate them, sorry. I have to keep the mod thing on because otherwise a lot of spam will get on, which thanks to the new technology is not the case at the moment, and sometimes I don’t have the ability to go online every evening.

Every comment is valued, even if I don’t have anything to say back to some.

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To Elena – the woman I love

Playout date: 2 November 2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – heavy use
Location: Various
Other people featured: My wife, Elena
Genre: Gallery type (based on photographs)
Music used: Okoldovana, ocharovana’ by St Petersburg. Aka “Dragotsennaya ty moya zhenshchina”.
Languages used: Russian
Animals featured: None

This was my 100th video, and so I wanted to mark it out in a special way, and nothing is more special to me than my wife, and therefore it was a natural thing to do to dedicate this film to her, and to show my viewers a few of the photos I’ve taken of her over the years.

The music playing in the background is one of my wife’s favourite Russian songs, by the group Sankt Peterburg. The song’s title “Dragotsennaya Ty moya zhenshchina” . This means my precious woman, so I thought it was appropriate.

This is a gallery type video intended to showcase photography, but some of these shots were done by friends.

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Snow flurries

Playout date: 2 November 2006
Camera: Fuji Finepix
Post Production: None
Location: Home
Other people featured: my wife, Elena
Genre: Family, Song acapello, minimal intro
Music used: Acapello rendition of ‘Vdol’ po ulitse, aka “Snow flurries”
Languages used: Russian, English
Animals featured: None

This video was made as a response to Kenbank, one of my first subbers and a good YT friend.  Ken had made a video singing the Russian staple “snow flurries”, or “Vdol’ po ulitse metelitsa metyot”, and since on that particular morning, despite it being only 2nd November, we did indeed have snow flurries out on our terrace, I decided to sing the song a cappella, showing an example of snow flurrying, as it were, while I did it!

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Title: RL101-6 The next 5 – 2/3 of the way

Playout date: 27 October 2006
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: Windows Movie Maker – heavy use
Location: Home
Other people featured: None
Genre: Lesson
Music used: I can’t help falling in love, Elvis Presley, karaoke.
Languages used: English and Russian
Animals featured: None

We look at another five letters, which is enough to take us two thirds of the way through the Russian alphabet.  That won’t mean being able to read two thirds of the words, of course, as most words are five or more letters long, and it only takes one of the these letters to be in the third not yet learned for the whole word not be readable.  However from this point on, the volume of words that we can indeed understand in full begins to increase out of proportion to the remainder of the journey.
Today’s letters are still letters deriving from Greek and not looking the same as in Latin, however these letters are also not written the same as they were in the original Greek.  That’s basically the idea of the course – back at the beginning we took a look at the six letters which are the same in Cyrillics as in the Latin alphabet we are probably familiar with ( hint – you’re reading it now) after which we looked at letters whose form in Cyrillics look like Latin letters but which sound different, and in each case they were also in Greek, and the Greek sound is basically the same as the Russian one.  We then went on to look at letters which are pretty much the same in the Cyrillic alphabet as they are in Greek, but which don’t resemble Latin letters and are therefore less likely to cause confusion.  The natural progression here is to look at the letters which really derive from Greek, but which also look slightly different to the way they looked in Greek. This will be followed by letters which derived from Hebrew instead, and then the mop up of the few letters left over at the end.  That’s basically the approach we’ve taken in this course to the Russian alphabet.

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