Increasing my Active Immersion

So far the amount of time I've been spending on Active Immersion has been proportionally quite low. I think this was somewhat compensated for by watching Comprehensible Input videos that are easy for me to grasp.

Initially I wasn't employing the correct vocabulary strategy so I might not have been able to make the most of Active Immersion anyway. But for the past two months I've been working through an Anki deck (1000 most frequent words) in recognition mode only (I'm prompted with the Russian word and have to remember what it means in English). Since I'm nearing the half-way point I thought it would be a good idea to rebalance my various studying activities.

I've found a great free website which hosts various TV shows with full native subtitles (3ears.com) on which I've been watching the sitcom кухня.

I approach it as follows. First I watch a full episode in so called free-flow mode. I just watch it without reading the subtitles and do my best to follow along. I don't pause the show or look up any words. Then I watch this show and read along with the subtitles. Finally I watch the show but read through and translate every sentence. If there are sentences I think are useful to learn I add them to a list which I intend to turn into an Anki deck.

The Refold.la / Mass Immersion method recommends watching two different shows, one intensively (translating and understanding every single word) and another in 'free flow mode', just watching it without any additional work. I don't think there's any harm in focussing on one show. But if I discover another sitcom I'll give it a try. If you have any recommendations for Russian sitcoms, let me know.

I intend to rewatch episodes of кухня as many times as I can stand, cycling through 'intensive' and 'free-flow' sessions. At the moment I'm spending 30 minutes in each mode but supposedly I should eventually be watching in 'free-flow' mode for a minimum of 1.5 hours per day. That's a tall order for me since I don't normally watch shows. 

I think for now, 30 minutes (1 episode) in free-flow is enough for me. The rest of the time I'll watch the Comprehensible Russian channel, and eventually the longer videos on Patreon. Although I'm mostly following the Refold.la method it's important to remember that it's a generic method that doesn't take into account the resources available for any particular language. I'm lucky that there is quite a lot of Comprehensible Input available so I should take advantage of that.

Meanwhile I've also signed up to Glossika since it was available for a discount. Glossika is supposedly good for ingraining sentence structures. I definitely wouldn't have been able to use it without the vocabulary that I currently possess and it's a good half-way point towards reading without subtitles, which I'm excited to do but will put off for a little while longer.

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