Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

December Statistics Passive watching and listening: 37:25 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching: 3:46 hours (Mostly comprehensible input) Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 13:42 hours (Anki) Active Study: 1:14 minutes (Grammar) Total: 56:09 hours December was a good month for me although my routine was interrupted. On the 23rd of December I finished my work contract and wasn't behind the laptop as much, which meant that my passive immersions was almost reduced to zero. The one thing that stayed consistent was studying the Anki decks.  Initially I was adding 10 new words per day but I found that I was struggling with retention and had to repeat words over and over again to get them to stick. Since then I've dropped down to 7 new words which seems more manageable. I wouldn't mind spending more time with Anki but I want to be efficient. I'm still revising Xefjord's  200 words and phrases  which is now down to less than 2 minutes a day.   I randomly found ...

I'm watching one of Inna's comprehensible Russian videos and had a couple of thoughts that I want to share. 1. Working my way through the 1000 most common words Anki deck is really useful. I sometimes hear words that I would never be able to pick up through context alone and it really aids my understanding of the content. I'd say on average I know the meaning of the 'new' word 50% of the time, the other 50% I recognise it and have to remind myself of its meaning with the Google translate app. Most of the time it helps me to find the meaning but occasionally I can't seem to pronounce it correctly or get translations that I don't recognise. I don't worry about it and just move on. 2. Occasionally I'm still trying to mentally translate words from Russian to English as I hear them. It's partly to confirm to myself that I know the meaning of each word and partly to more accurately understand the meaning of utterances and sentences. While this might fe...

While I was researching how to learn Russian a couple of months ago I stumbled upon the Latin learning community. It turns out that there are people learning it as a living, spoken language. Not only that, there are in fact comprehensible input resources to help people learn it.  Specifically there is a book series called Lingua Latina which teaches the reader Latin without using any other languages. Everything is written in Latin, starting with very simple sentences and working up to authentic Roman texts. Many people believe that it is not only the best book that's ever been written to teach people Latin, it's the best book for that purpose for any language. Now prior to this I was aware that Latin like Russian uses a case system. Although until recently I only had a vague idea of what that means. That words have different forms depending on the context they are presenting. So I decided to look up how Latin grammar works and I stumbled up on a page which explains some of the...

I dusted off the copy of  the New Penguin Russian Course  I bought a couple of years ago and decided to start reading up on Russian grammar, a full 4 months after my decision to acquire Russian with a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion Approach. I quickly skipped the first two chapters which cover how to read the Cyrillic script and encountered the first grammar lesson in chapter 3. 1. There is no present tense of 'to be' ('am', 'is', 'are') 2. No equivalent of the articles 'a' and 'the' 3. The word это has multiple meanings, including 'this', 'that' and sometimes 'it' 4. All Russian nouns are either masculine (он), feminine (она) it (оно)   or neuter. 5. Masculine nouns normally end with a consonant or й. 6. Feminine nouns normally end with a or я. Although words that specifically denote men are masculine.  7. Neuter nouns end with o or e. 8. Most nouns ending with ь are feminine but there are masculine words w...