Acquiring Russian: March Report




March Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 6:22 hours (Mostly listening)
Active watching or Listening: 5:59 hours (Comprehensible Input, YouTube but mostly Speakly)
Vocabulary and Sentences: 7:05 hours (Anki)
Reading with Audio: 12:27 hours (Speakly and Glossika, 7748 reps, 464 sentences)
Active Study: 15:23 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 206 words)
Total: 47:16 hours

We're almost half way through April but I never got around to doing the March report. Here it is!

There's been a 38% increase in the amount of time I've been studying every day compared to February. From 1:13 hours per day to 1:41 hours per day. It's the most time I've dedicated to Russian this year and approaching the same amount of time as when I first started last year. 

The difference between now and then is that in the beginning I was spending a lot of time on passive immersion such as listening to Dungeons & Dragons streams, watching comprehensible input videos on YouTube and watching shows. Then I shifted towards expanding my vocabulary with the 1000 word Anki deck and tried to increase the time spent on active immersion. Now I'm spending a lot more time on what I call Active studying with the Speakly app. Most of my passive and active immersion is also with the stories and dialogues in the Speakly app.

As I mentioned in previous posts and in my review (App Review: My experience with Speakly) this app is very closely aligned with how I'm attempting to acquire Russian. It does require some output with exercises such as speaking to fill in the blanks, writing down what I hear or choosing the correct spelling from multiple options, but I opt out of the exercises which involve writing Russian translations of English sentences. As I've said before the main reason I like using Speakly is that as you learn new words you start to unlock new stories and dialogues that use the new vocabulary.

In theory I'm being provided with comprehensible input that closely matches my current ability. The only difference compared to comprehensible input videos or shows is of course that there is no visual component. I should make sure to keep getting visual input as well since it features real life language use.

My Anki time has dropped down to 2 or 3 minutes per day since I'm just maintaining what I've already learned. However I am adding in a couple of suspended words per day (around 50% of the deck was suspended because I wasn't able to remember them). I don't intend to start another Anki deck because I'm getting 10 new words a day by using Speakly.

I'm still spending around 20 minutes a day with Glossika. 50 reps of old sentences plus 25 reps of 5 new sentences per day. I know the people that claim big results with Glossika do hundreds of reps per day but that would be too boring for me. Perhaps that's why I'm unsure about the absolute benefit of Glossika. In any case it's good listening and reading practice and I often come across words that I'm also learning in Speakly.

I still haven't done much grammar studying, although Speakly recently added articles about Russian grammar to the app. While they're nothing special, at least they're easily accessible. I hope in the future they can embed this in the lessons. It would be great to be able to tap on a  word and see what grammar rules are being applied do it.

All in all I'm happy with my progress this month. I'm finding it easy to listen to the Speakly stories over and over when I go for walks and it seems I'm much more motivated to do that than to watch shows. As I said I think I shouldn't ignore shows or YouTube channels with comprehensible input or native level content because that's where I can immerse myself in real every day Russian language usage.



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

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

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



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