Acquiring Russian: February Report

February Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 4:29 hours (Mostly listening)

Active watching: 3:15 hours (Comprehensible input and shows)

Vocabulary and Sentences: 9:02 hours (Anki)

Reading with Audio: 10:36 hours (Glossika, 5522 reps, 314 sentences)

Active Study: 6:52 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 206 words)

Total: 34:15 hours

So in January, after 6 months of acquiring Russian, I experienced my first dip in motivation. I was not enjoying myself as much as I had been before and I think this was mostly because I had some other things going on in my life rather than anything specifically to do with this project. Despite my lack of motivation I did not miss a single day of Anki and Glossika revisions. Towards the end of the month I started to feel better and I anticipated thing would be different in February.

Judging by the numbers alone things haven't really changed. But I am positive about my progress, and I'll discuss why later. 

I did half as much passive listening and slightly less active watching. Since my work pattern has changed compared to Autumn last year there isn't really the opportunity to passively listen to content for hours on end. Although to an extent I'm holding myself back because I haven't loaded content on to my phone or an MP3 player to listen to throughout the day.

As you can tell by now I'm obsessive about tracking stats to the point that if I can't accurately track time spent on an activity I'm less likely to do it. This isn't ideal of course and I need to find a solution to this. The simple answer is to stop obsessing over the number but perhaps I can get around this with some more planning.

At the moment I'm learning 7 new words a day with Anki. Out of the 1000 words in the deck 140 are New (not yet seen), 183 Young, 303 Mature and 374 suspended. It's quite a high rate of suspension but these are words in complete isolation and the aim is simply to load my brain with words to recognise when I watch or listen to Russian content. The time I'm spending on Anki is starting to come down and by the end of the month I will have worked my way through the entire deck. I think I'll start reactivating suspended cards so that I'm spending about 10 to 15 minutes a day on revision. I've seen people claim they've reached speaking ability by only using Anki 

With Glossika I do about 50 revisions per day and add 5 new sentences every day. I know there are people for whom Glossika is the main way they acquire a language. For example this guy who says he might be at A2 or B1 in Japanese after doing 101280 reps of 6218 sentences in 308 hours. Completed Glossika Japanese! | What now? | Power of Intuition | Reading Hiragana & Katakana dilemma. The creator of Glossika also mentioned that he aims to get 10,000 reps done within a month when he wants to learn a new language. Personally I don't feel confident to risk putting that much time and effort into just one platform. Perhaps I might try it if I ever decide to learn another language.

Over the past half year I've experimented with various language apps. Not so much as a main source of learning but rather to break up the monotony and to expose myself to Russian in different contexts. I quickly ditched Duolingo and Memrise, briefly experimented with Pollygot and have now found something that I can see myself sticking to in the long term because it most closely aligns with the Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion / Refold approach. The app is called Speakly and I learned about it through this review: Is This the Perfect Language Learning App? 

Of course there is no such thing as a perfect app but it certainly has a couple of very important features that I haven't seen in other apps. On the face of it is seems like most other apps, it teaches you words, shows them in sentences and if you want you can do speaking and fill in the blanks writing exercises (you can opt for multiple choice, writing or a combination of both). 

The words and sentences that it teaches are much better than Duolingo, stuff that is actually useful to know. Apparently they've chosen the 4000 most statistically relevant words. But what's really great is that as you progress you unlock scripted conversations and short narrated stories (so far they are 3 to 6 minutes in length) that feature the words that you've learned up to that point. 

Basically it provides you with Comprehensible Input that matches your current level. Another fun feature is that it unlocks Russian music recommendations, again featuring words that match your current progress. 

After about 3 weeks I've 'learned' 206 words. I'm still in level 1 out of 9 so there is a lot of material still to cover. Even though there is a placement test I decided to start from the very beginning because I wanted to reinforce everything I've learned so far with other resources. 

So the big increase in my Active Study time is down to Speakly. With other apps I counted that time as Vocabulary time but because I'm using this app to practice writing as well I've decided to put it under that column. But when passively listening to a story or reading along I place that time under the appropriate Passive and Reading With Audio columns.

Filling in the blanks (writing or speaking) is output and is something I'm enjoying at the moment. But it's great that I can switch off the writing mode when I want to and still continue learning by listening and speaking.

As I said earlier I realise I should be listening to or watching more Russian and the narrated stories are great for this. I've unlocked 3 out of 5 in level 1 so far. If there are 5 in each level that would mean 45 stories in total for me to listen to as I progress and I can easily track how often I listen to them as well as the times I'm reading along with the audio.

I want to be able to silently read native content and while it's tempting to dive into something like LingQ I don't want to hold myself back with a poor pronunciation. The stories in Speakly seem like a great feature that will help me reach that goal. As I've mentioned before, ideally I should be doing Active Immersion with Russian content for 2 to 3 hours a day. That's something I still want to improve on but I hope that the next best thing is consuming content that is more along the lines of Comprehensible Input. Content that is at the edge or just beyond my current ability. Hopefully I can make up for quantity with quality. 

Note: While the Speakly app is supposed to be able to be used by complete beginners, I personally think it would have been too hard for me. It doesn't explain how to pronounce or read Russian and a lot of the audio is quite fast. I think I've started using the app at the right time. I don't know if this applies to the other languages which use the Latin alphabet.

You could say that I'm following much more of a Comprehensible Input focused approach than the Mass Immersion / Refold method at this point. But at the end of the day the most important thing is that I'm spending time with Russian every single day. And the longer I stick with it the easier it will be to enjoy Russian content and increase those immersion numbers.

That's it for now. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback please leave a comment. How is your Russian acquisition going?

You can find my study log here: Google Doc: Russian Study Log

January Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 8:56 hours (Mostly listening)

Active watching: 3:24 hours (Comprehensible input and shows)

Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 10:44 hours (Anki)

Reading with Audio: 12:52 hours (Glossika, 2958 reps, 164 sentences)

Active Study: 15 minutes (Grammar)

Total: 36:12 hours

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

Anki 1000 Words

New: 575, 57.5%

Young: 185, 18.5%

Mature: 81, 8.1%

Suspended: 159, 15.9% (I deliberately suspend words that are too easy, my guess a third to half of these)

November Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 58:58 hours (Mostly listening)

Active watching: 3:07 hours (Mostly comprehensible input)

Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 8:01 hours (Anki)

Reading with audio: 0:30 minutes (Dialogue)

Total: 70:36 hours

October

Passive watching and listening: 35:53 hours

Active watching: 1:47  hours

Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 8:03 hours

Reading with audio: 7:29 minutes

Total: 42:51 hours

September

Passive watching and listening: 11:27 hours

Active watching: 1:14 hours

Vocabulary: 3:56 hours

Total: 16:37 hours

August

Passive watching and listening: 31:28 hours

Active watching: 2:32 hours

Vocabulary: 1:38 hours

Total: 35:38 hours