Classes as usual. I have the impression that more students than normal are suffering from diarrhea.

I sat in today on a class for someone outside our group. Nadya is a grad student from Illinois. Quite bright. Her teacher was competent.

The class I sat in on was a grammar class where they were going over complex sentences with subordinate clauses. And here I observed something that I have observed more than once. The exercises themselves were not particularly complex, but the sample sentences on which the exercises were based has fairly complex vocabulary, so much so that Nadya had difficulty understanding them. To be frank, that also precisely describes my third-year Russian grammar class. It was the 3rd-4th-5th year when the acquisition of vocabulary became the major issue.

If we use Russian produced textbooks, I'm not sure that is avoidable. The Russians forget that the educated vocabulary they have was developed through years of high school and college, and the higher level vocabulary for these exercises that they have put together is uncommon in a fourth year student. To overcome this, though, you have to produce a textbook where the grammar exercises use only previously introduced vocabulary. That's kind of tricky.

It may be the case that we just have to accept that there are years where the student has to do a massive vocabulary infusion and experience the frustration of doing all that catch-up.