Tai otoshi

Watched a little bit of the Olympic Judo on iPlayer yesterday; the commentator mentioned a Tai otoshi.  I haven't heard anyone mention that throw since I stopped my very brief experiment with Judo 30 years ago.  Odd to think that I used to have a vocabulary of Japanese Judo terms in my head, almost all of which I've now forgotten.

Pictures from China, and Russian books

Listening to this programme featuring Robert Bickers whose Empire Made Me is a fascinating look at Shanghai in the 20s and 30s.  It's a very BBC thing to do, to make a radio programme about old photographs, but it works very well.  I'll have to have another proper crack at Chinese some time, but at the moment I've got distracted with reading Russian again.  Having returned to it after a long break I find that I'm much more confident at ploughing through texts and trying to guess meanings from context.  I've been looking at this archive of inter-war emigré magazines and journals, some of which is in the pre-1918 spelling (not at all difficult once you get used to it).  On the Russian Wikisource site there's this nice old encyclopaedia (transliterated into the new spelling, but there are links to page images in the old spelling on the Russian State Library website).  I'm not short of stuff to read.  Plan for the near future: keep reading, keep flicking through lists of vocabulary too (particularly verbs, which have always been my weak point: I'll remember one aspect and not the other), and try to get fluent.  I'll still listen to Russian radio occasionally but it's good reading comprehension that I most want.