Glossika Is Doing... Something

I signed up for Glossika a week ago and it's having some kind of effect on me. I'm not sure if this is actually contributing to my acquisition of Russian though. I guess I'll have to wait and see.

At the moment I'm only using it read and listen to, then repeat, the provided phrases. I'm not writing or translating from English to Russian. I'm noticing some of these sentences popping into my head throughout the day. Which makes sense because I'm saying them out loud over and over.

As I've mentioned before the Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion / Refold method usually advocates to wait with output. One of the reasons is that the speaker might ingrain bad habits such as poor grammar or a bad pronunciation.

With Glossika I'm repeating what I hope are grammatically correct sentences and as far as I can tell I'm now good enough at pronunciation from listening to hours and hours of native Russian. So at the very least I don't think I'm doing any damage by using the platform. 

I'm also learning new words outside my daily work with Anki. For these words I use an SRS website (Monument.nyc) which is specifically created for Russian. I can copy and paste a set of words into the Explore section and quickly create cards because it looks up a translation for you, which you an edit if you want.

On the topic of vocabulary, I'm definitely recognising a lot more word when I hear Russian but most of the time I can't immediately remember the meaning. I definitely need to keep Google Translate open in order to quickly remind myself of the meanings. The goal is to get these word meanings into my long term memory getting repeatedly exposed to them in the context of content that I'm watching and listening to. Matt from Refold.la says you may need to be exposed to it once or twice before it sticks, but I'm finding it's taking a bit more than that. Perhaps this will change as my mental network of Russian vocabulary grows.

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