Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

While listening to a Dungeons & Dragons stream I experienced my best moment of understanding real spoken Russian.  The game master was describing a magician who was wearing a tall turban made out of some notable material. His magic was derived from astronomical knowledge involving the sun and stars.  It was just two or three sentences but my comprehension was high with almost no translating happening in my mind. I heard the words and I saw the image in my mind. I understood some words like   тюрбан , because they are similar to English. Others were words that I acquired from the 625 words list or from watching comprehensible input videos.

It seems that the consensus is that native English speakers have the worst Russian accent. Have a look at some of the comments I found on a Reddit thread.  I wonder if this is to English speakers in general? I'd like to think I have a better ear than average for the nuances of languages but I may be wrong!  Anyway, this is one of the reasons I'm spending so much time listening to native speakers. It's not that I would feel self-conscious with a strong accent. I want to make myself understood as clearly as possible and make the experiences painless as I can for the listener. "English accent, though,  ugh. Especially the Judoon-grade chunkiness. Can. Someone? Figure! Out. Intonation? Already! Might be biased because that's the kind of Russian our crappy Hollywood representations tend to speak. The analogy I like to use is, English is like a pulsating spectrum analyzer (the thing with the bars for different frequencies); whereas Russian is like a rollercoaster — with ...

I found a great set of Anki decks posted on Reddit aimed at getting people to 'survival level' in 50 different languages. Here's a direct link to the Russian deck:  Xefjord's Complete Russian Anki Deck .  I'll experiment with spending a couple of minutes a day on this deck. I haven't had good experiences with previous attempts at rote memorisation of stock phrases. But perhaps it will be easier now that I'm spending time on immersion and comprehensible input. I'm not looking to speak (force output) for a number of months so this will be a very low priority for me. But if I bump into any Russian speakers over the next few months (I live in London so it does happen) it would be nice to be able to say something. From the reddit post: "Xefjord's Complete Language Series  is a project I started a little over a year ago to teach every known living language to a "survival" level. Survival level being a term I created to refer to the ability t...

I'm working through the Fluent Forever pronunciation trainer and I'm struggling to hear the difference between Ш and Щ. I've found some videos that try to explain the difference but it really depends on who is speaking. I can hear a difference in Fedor's video. To me Ш sounds like "shuh" and Щ sounds like "sheh". But with Alina I can't hear any difference. However I'm not sure if the difference I'm picking up in Fedor's video is the important one because I'm not sure how that would work if it's followed by a vowel.