Category: All Levels

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Museums in St. Petersburg

If you’re planning a trip to Russia soon or hoping to go there eventually, museums are a great way to learn about a city’s history and culture. Of course there’s the Hermitage in St. Petersburg: Peter the Great’s old palace that is now one of the largest art museums in the world. If you go to Russia’s cultural capital, you’ll have to stop by that one, but here are a few others that you can’t miss.

The Russian Museum

Established by Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Museum is the first and largest collection of Russian art in the world. It is housed in the Mikhailovsky Palace right off of Nevsky Prospect by the Gostini Dvor metro stop. The collection features Russian art from the 10th to the 21st centuries, along with a sizable amount of modern art from other countries. You can find names from Rublev to Picasso, and the layout is much less intimidating than that of a big museum like the Hermitage.

The Menshikov Palace

Built for Alexander Menshikov, a royal official and one of Peter the Great’s closest friends, Menshikov palace was the first palace in St. Petersburg, and the only one to survive from the beginning of the 18th century. The admission is free for students, and inside you’ll see rooms and furniture both from the time period of the palace and after. It’s located right on the Neva river, and is beautiful to walk around inside and outside.

Dostoevky’s House

Though only one of many house museums, this is perhaps the most famous, as it is for one of Russia’s most iconic writers. Dostoevsky was a known wanderer, drifting from house to house. This is partially his childhood building, and the last apartment he and his family lived in until his death. The museum is only a few rooms and features his own furniture and pictures from his family and daily life. After seeing this museum, be sure to check out the other house museums such as that of Nabokov and Akhmatova!

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Elite! Your Next Netflix-Binge

Much of the cast during a scene. Courtesy of Netflix.

Looking for a new Spanish tv show filled with dramatic teenagers and a series of incredibly unlikely but intriguing events? Elite has you covered. 

Netflix released season 1 of Elite in 2018, and although being a Spanish show, it gained popularity around the world. Elite follows 3 scholarship students from a working-class part of town as they begin attending Las Encinas, a rich private high school, for Spain’s most elite. This parallels flashforwards to the main character’s mysterious murder. Throughout the series, viewers are watching the events that led up to the killing along with police interrogations following the murder. This leads a viewer to constantly ponder who was killed, who was the killer, and what was their motive. 

Elite has also been recognized for the diversity of its characters and storylines, taking on tough subjects especially for a dramatic teen tv show. There’s an inclusion of a gay storyline between two male characters, and their struggle to be accepted by one boy’s Muslim family. Additionally, one girl struggles with her religious identity when her school requires her not to wear a hijab to school. One main character even deals with the trials of being HIV-positive for the rest of their life. 

Elite tries to cover a large variety of themes, from those mentioned above, to class and race struggles. The show has been criticized for often glossing over these themes in order to focus on flashy drama. However, in comparison to other shows of the same genre, it still introduces many issues relevant to young people of this time. 

Elite does a good job of developing its characters as well. Many tropes are used at the beginning of the show, but it soon becomes clear that each character has a rich and interesting backstory explaining their actions as the show progresses.

Samuel during the murder scene that the show is focused on. Courtesy of Netflix.

For Spanish-language learners, Elite offers great practice. The show is meant for native Spanish speakers and uses Spain-centric Spanish. Characters give beautiful dialogues, some slow and some fast. For any level of Spanish learner, Elite offers a learning opportunity. Beginners may opt to listen in Spanish but use English subtitles, intermediates may rely on Spanish subtitles, and expert speakers can face a challenge by watching the show completely subtitle-free. 

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The Bell Jar, as Read by Voyant

Voyant is a web-based text analysis tool that summarizes and visualizes multiple trends and patterns in a text entered by users. I passed the entire corpus of the 1961 novel, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath into Voyant tosee what would happen. The results were telling of both the strength and limits off educational technology tools built on the potential of machine learning.

Wordcloud view of the most frequently occurring words in The Bell Jar

While Voyant provides many visualizations of its results, the majority of its tools seems to build on the analysis of the most frequently occurring words in the text. As I explored Voyant’s analysis of The Bell Jar, it occurred to me that using word frequency as the sole analytical foundation of reading text is a particularly narrow interpretive lens. Moreover, it does not come near to capturing the scope, depth, or arc of the book. Nevertheless, I was surprised at how much more the results could actually reflect about a work’s central themes, characters, and motifs and its capacity to serve as a helpful supplement to the reader and user’s more nuanced and personal interpretation.

Line graph of relative frequencies of most frequent words from the beginning to end of The Bell Jar: Pink = “thought,” Purple = “buddy,” Light Blue = “doctor,” Green = “like,” Dark Blue = “said”

The figure above maps the frequencies of the most common words in the text across the entire novel. I was especially struck by the appearance of characters that were particularly meaningful to the main character, Esther. Moreover, the fluctuating frequencies of the characters’ mentions are particularly insightful indicators of how and when these characters were meaningful in Esther’s perception and narrative. For example, the light blue trend traces the consistent mention of “doctor,” and corresponds to Esther’s constant wrestling with her mental health and various treatments. The spike in the “doctor” mentions represents Esther finally finding some safety and sense of recovery in the psychiatric institution in the last moments of the book. The fluctuations in the mention of “Buddy,” her former love interest, are also particularly interesting in allowing me, as the user and reader, to identify, and further reflect on, moments when he haunted her thoughts or self-perception and moments when his irrelevance may have indicated something else about her sense of healing or growth. The word frequency of “thought” also guided me towards thinking about how the majority of the novel is narrated through self-introspection and the way in which that served as a mode of storytelling.

In a way, the limitations of the word frequency trends and relationships visualized by Voyant also facilitate and emphasize the software’s potential for enabling the analytical process of its users. Given diverse visualizations of a limited word-frequency analysis, I was compelled to use the visualizations to think more creatively about the content before me and trace these ideas through specific points in the text.

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SpanishDict: The Best Online Spanish-English Dictionary

SpanishDict is a super helpful English-Spanish Translator website, specializing in helping English speakers learn Spanish. The app is very comprehenisze with its definitions, offering examples, pronounciation help, a conjugation chart, popular phrases, a thesaurus section, and examples from the web. 

The website also has hundreds of articles explaining each type of conjugation, common grammar mistakes, and a range of other issues faced by native English speakers while learning the language. A new section of the website now also offers vocabulary practice.

A screenshot of a popular article detailing the difference between “ser” and “estar”.

Unlike Google Translate, SpanishDict can translate words and entire phrases. When translating a word, the site will pull up a dictionary-styled page explaining each definition for the word and when to use each one. This prevents beginner speakers from making mistakes when translating a word such as “fly,” which has very distinct meanings between the noun and verb form. Additionally, when translating entire phrases, SpanishDict gives you the results of Microsoft, SDL, and PROMT. In my experience, SpanishDict has yet to mistranslate any word or phrase I’ve entered, and it’s my go to for looking up a Spanish word I don’t know. 

The newest addition to the SpanishDict website offers basic vocabulary exercises. The majority of “flashcards” are grouped by topic, such as ‘animals’ or ‘foods’, but may be useful for an introductory Spanish learner.

To access, go to https://www.spanishdict.com/. 

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Feminism in China: “Cell Block Tango” Reinterpreted

cw: violence, abuse, misogyny

“天朝渣男图鉴” or “The Scumbags of China” is a parodic rendition of “Cell Block Tango” posted on Weibo in November, 2018.

There is a good chance that you’ve heard of the infamous “Cell Block Tango” song from the 1975 musical Chicago. In the scene, six women in jail recount the vengeful murders they committed, describing their mistreatment at the hands of their former partners. Loosely translated as “The Scumbags of China,” “天朝渣男图鉴” is a parodic rendition of “Cell Block Tango” by Tú Yǒuqín (徒有琴), a student at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. In the video Tú Yǒuqín plays six different women from six different cities in China, Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan, Hunan, Guangdong, and Shandong. For each character, she slips into different dialects and recounts their acts of revenge against their abusive and misogynistic partners. While one woman recalls stumbling upon her husband’s notebook detailing his sexual exploits, another recalls being beaten by her husband.

“Cell Block Tango” from the 1975 musical Chicago

Posted on the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, in November 2018, the video roused conversation and debate about women’s rights and sexual and domestic abuse in China, contributing to a movement that has been gaining momentum in the past few years. The video was blocked and removed from the site not long after it was posted, speaking to how censorship has worked to silence and minimize the visibility of feminism in China. Nevertheless, the cultural and political impact of the music video cannot be undervalued.

I have been thinking about the significance of language, translation, and reinterpretation to the cultural and political impact of the music video. Representing six different regions of China, the six different dialects Tú Yǒuqín uses include Dongbei, Shanghai, Chonqing, Changsha, Shandong, and Cantonese. In re-appropriating an English song from an American musical, Tú Yǒuqín highlights the global phenomena of misogyny and barriers confronted by women everywhere. At the same time, her translation and reinterpretation of the song in multiple Chinese dialects serves to illuminate the distinctive lived experiences, oppression, and positioning of Chinese women in different regions of China. In this way, the “Chinese Cell Block Tango” is a testament and glimpse into the manifold languages of resistance and feminism across the world.

Full transcription and English translation for the song can be found here: https://supchina.com/2018/11/05/watch-tu-youqin-cell-block-tango-chinese-style/

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Drops – App for Learning Vocabulary

Drops is a language learning app designed to help you learn new vocabulary. It includes an introduction to the word (both vocal and visual), and some exercises to help you remember it. You can use the app in 5 minutes sessions, so it’s meant to let you quickly include some language learning in your day.

The word “drops down,” and you can choose to continue learning it, or get a different word if you already know it.

Next, it will give you several games, such as picking from two images the one that corresponds to the word.

Or pairing several images and words, so you can distinguish them between each other.

The app doesn’t help with forming sentences, so you’ll have to work on that either in a language class or with other tutoring. If you just want to increase your vocabulary in a more interesting way than flashcards, this will be great!

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Film Recommendation: La Jetée

La Jetée (1962) is a 28-minute “photo-roman” (photo-novel) by French New-Wave director Chris Marker. It is composed entirely of still photographs which are arranged into a montage and, as a result, come to acquire a special movement of their own.

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic Paris where all surviving humans live together in tunnels underneath the city. Scientists are researching time travel in the hopes that they can send for help from the past or future.

After many failed attempts at sending test subjects into the past, an unnamed prisoner with vivid childhood recollections is selected and succeeds. After painful conditioning and several deep dives into his own memories, he is eventually sent to the future where he encounters a new kind of human race.

Pushing against genre conventions, La Jetée is science fiction stripped down to its bare essentials- the result is a beautiful interrogation of time, memory, and the power of the image.

This is a great, and short, film for beginner or intermediate learners to practice comprehension; the audio is very clear because it is a stream of overlaid narration, and the nature of the still frames makes the subtitles more accessible.

For those interested in learning more about French film history, La Jetée is a great example of pioneering techniques in montage used by directors of La Nouvelle Vague to disrupt traditional cinematic forms.

La Jetée is available to stream on Kanopy by using your Reed login https://www.kanopy.com/product/la-jetee

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Modern Russian Writers

We’re all familiar with, or at least have heard of, the classic novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but modern writers are sometimes left out when studying Russian. Here is a short introductory guide to some contemporary works you may want to check out!

Vera Polozkova is a Moscow-based poet, who often puts her poems to music. She started writing by posting poems on her blog, and was later discovered and published by the writer Alexander Zhitinsky. Her poems cover many facets of daily life, and are often characterized as nontraditional and without a particular form. She believes that performance is a crucial part of poetry, and you can find many of her videos on YouTube. Her collection of poems “Nepoemanie” is also available in Russian on Amazon.

Dividing her time between Moscow and Israel, Lyudmila Ulitskaya writes novels mostly pertaining to religious tolerance and inclusion. As an ethnically Jewish woman who is religiously Christian, her writing deals with these struggles and others during the Soviet Union. Her books, including her newest titled The Green Tent, can be purchased on Amazon. She is also a well-known activist, most recently appearing as a speaker in an anti-war protest in Moscow.

With her relatives including Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, Tatyana Tolstaya was born into a family of writers. Her works mostly take place during, towards the end of, or as speculation after the Soviet Union, and her writing style is thought to be characteristic of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Several of her novels are available at the Reed library, including her most famous, The Slynx, a dystopian novel about a forgotten post-Soviet Moscow.

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Russian Food in Portland

Right here in Portland, Oregon we have a huge community of Russian people and culture. From grocery stores to music, there are plenty of opportunities to be found here. This is just a guide to some restaurants you may want to check out.

You guessed it, the first on my list is Kachka. Located at 960 SE 11th Ave, their new location, they serve any meat you might want, anything pickled you might want, and Russian delicacies such as “Herring Under a Fur Coat” or a selection of caviar. For those of you of age, their drink menu is full of creative cocktails and beer and wine from all over eastern and central Europe. If you don’t feel like spending this much money, they still house their old location with Kachinka, a cheaper, more casual version with similar style food and drink.

Next is Pelmeni Pelmeni, a Russian food cart located in the Hawthorne Asylum Food Carts. The menu is pretty basic: they offer chicken, cheese, or potato dumplings in a small or large order. For a drink you can have water, kvas, or apple or lime juice. It’s not a sit-down place, but you can get a fun bite to eat while your out!

Last is Roman Russian Food Store, a Russian grocery store on 10918 SE Division. You can purchase Russian desserts, meats, and prepared meals. A favorite of many in the Russian community here, it’s definitely worth stopping by!

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Film Recommendation: Russian Ark

Russian Ark (2002) follows the 300-year history of St. Petersburg. Directed by Alexander Sokurov, this 96-minute film was completed in one shot, entirely taking place in the Winter Palace of the Hermitage Museum.

The narrator, a ghost of the city, follows an unnamed “European” through the museum, witnessing actors with beautiful costumes portraying historical figures such as Peter the Great, Tsar Nicolas II and his family, or Leningrad citizens during Soviet times. A lot of the Russian is quiet and muffled, so it may be hard for beginners to get everything. Either way, it’s still an interesting cinematographic piece!

This film is perfect if you want to learn something about past and presents notions of St. Petersburg and see a new use of cinematography. If you want to learn more about the making of the film, you can watch In One Breath (2003), a documentary that follows the making of Russian Ark.