Michael commented on one of the Kalinovski Square posts, asking if I had seen the 6-part documentary, “A lesson of Belarusian,” that had been posted on YouTube by the same person. I hadn’t, but I just now watched the first part, even though I should really be working on other things.
Already it has helped fill in some gaps in my knowledge about Belorusia, such as the fact that there was a time of greater freedom before Lukashenko came to power. I’ll be watching the rest of it, even though I can’t kill two birds with one stone and learn some Russian while watching it. This documentary seems to be in the Belarusian language. I recognize some words that seem to be very similar in the two languages, and there are probably more that I miss because my Russian vocabulary is quite limited. But a lot of the Belarusian seems very different. (I had the same experience when listening to some Ukranian recently. It was more different from Russian than I had expected.) But it still is worth watching.
And I’d have to use the subtitles whether it was in Russian or Belarusian.