Status Updates From Colloquial Russian

I'm really struggling with the questions on this chapter... and it's not the grammar (I'm supposed to already know the genitive plural case!) but the vocabulary, which is just too abstract and unmemorable. I keep looking things up and then immediately forgetting them.

What on *earth* did I mean by the helpful marginal note "adverbs like noble gases"?

Verbs of motion again, not in a single block this time!

On those questions for which answers are actually given I managed to make multiple errors, as opposed to just on those elements that were being specifically tested... :(

I do not at all remember that поезд идёт, but автобус едет!

And nowadays, of course, the whole *concept* of flowers being out of season doesn't even exist; we really do expect to get flowers from Africa, not just as a joke, and to have all flowers available to buy all year round..

So many... lists... to memorise...

I had totally forgotten that the present tense of the perfective forms of the verbs is the future tense (as it were!)
But it does vaguely sound 'right' as a construction, so it must ring some bells somewhere ...

These books really do expect you to memorise a colossal amount per lesson: for this one they are covering the past tense *and* perfective/imperfective verbs *and* expressions of time *and* days of the week *and* months of the year. All at once,
Luckily for me I actually do subconsciously remember the majority of this enormous list of verb-forms they just present the learner with...

The 'substitution drills' in this course are an excellent form of practice that gives the reader a good workout while requiring very little space in the text - but my major problem with all these exercises is that none of them save a single translation per chapter have correct answers supplied, so you never know where you made mistakes. I can see why, but it makes solo learning much harder.

All occurrences in this chapter of the word мастерство (as per the award received by Smekhov! ) have been amended in tiny writing to ремесло, presumably on my original teacher's instructions!

The 'pairs of words to fill in the model sentence' format is actually a very useful and effective drill, especially for the solo student. The trouble is that with no teacher and no key to those exercises there is no way to check if you actually got all the endings right...