Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I've signed up to this great service that sends out a summary of international news in your target language. You can choose from 30 different languages and set the difficulty level of summaries. Since I've set it to beginner level it's usually just a sentence or two. It's free to sign up: https://noospeak.com/

I visited another Baltic country at the start of May and had a couple of opportunities to practice speaking Russian. It was great to have short conversations with people and feel that I was being taken seriously as a learner. I have no visited Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and have had the opportunity to speak Russian in each country.  However since returning from my trip I have spent (practically) no time studying the language at all. My only exposure to the language has been when stumbling upon the occasional meme or lesson on Instagram. This has been my longest break from the language since I started. I'm not sure what the reason is. It's not really a lack of time since I've had plenty of opportunities to jump on the Speakly app. Until today I haven't even been listening to the Speakly monologues at the gym. I've also not had any conversation classes since January. I needed to take a break because I was moving house but that has turned into a permanent hiatus.  A

  April 2024 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 10:19 hours Active watching or listening: 0:00 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:00 minutes Reading with Audio: 0:24 hours Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours Active Study: 02:56 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:00 minutes Games: 0:00 Total: 13:39 hours Daily Average: 0:26 hours March 2024 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 13:51 hours Active watching or listening: 0:00 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:00 minutes Reading with Audio: 0:50 hours Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours Active Study: 11:29 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:00 minutes Games: 0:30 Total: 26:12 hours Daily Average: 0:54 hours February 2024 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 2:41 hours Active watching or listening: 0:00 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:00 minutes Reading with Audio: 0:00 hours Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours Active St

After two months of minimal study time (due to a move) I've managed to get back into some good habits, almost reaching an average of 1 hour per day. I haven't yet started lessons with my tutor again but would like to do that soon. In the mean time I've been on Tandem to practice with other people, I'm definitely a bit rusty.  I also had a real world interaction with a Russian speaker this month, with a girl from Tajikistan. I always get a boost of motivation after having a real world conversation. It's good to be taken seriously as a learner and not someone who has just memorised a few phrases. This month I also spent 30 minutes playing the game Civilization VI in Russian. I'm very familiar with the game series so it was interesting that I could pick up the meaning of several new words through context. While it was fun I'm going to struggle to justify spending time on a game when I could be doing other activities. Especially as we enter the Spring and Summer

  According to Speakly I've learned another 100 words (or lemmas) between the 7th of March to the 19th of March. That's 7.69 lemmas per day. As I wrote before I seem to be 'learning' (recognising, not producing) words faster.  I won't go into further detail today. You can read previous posts where I discuss whether this pace will be sustained and what it really means. Short answer: While it should get easier to learn vocabulary over time, the speed at which I do so will most likely ebb and flow. Milestone: 1300 words in Speakly Milestone: 1200 words in Speakly .  Do you use Speakly? What do you think of it?

  According to Speakly I've learned another 119 words (or lemmas) between January the 19th and March the 6th. Over 47 days that comes to 2.53 new words per day. As predicted in my last Speakly post I seem to be learning words faster  Milestone: 1200 words in Speakly . I don't know if that is something that will sustain, some of the words I already knew before, but I wonder if it gets easier to learn vocabulary the more words you already know. There are 2681 words left to learn in Speakly. At 2.53 words per day it will take = 1,059.68 days to finish 1,059.68 / 365 = 2.9 years. From the previous post: If I were to continue at the current rate it would take almost 6 years to learn all 4000 words in the Speakly app. 2,800 / 1.34 = 2,089 days 2,089 / 365 = 5.72 years I think I will progress faster than that though. I've found that int the past couple of weeks I'm able to use the app for longer periods of time compared to when I first started. Sometimes I can be using Speakly