Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

Exactly one year ago I decided to 'Acquire' Russian! I had several aborted attempts over the years with apps like Duolingo and courses like Michel Thomas. When the world plunged into COVID related lockdowns I decided I was going to make the most of the extra time I had and finally get to grips with this language.  You can read my plan in my first post here:  An experiment in acquiring Russian the natural way . In short: I discovered various methods that emphasised Input first and set up this blog to track my plan to acquire Russian. The first thing I'd like to say is that I feel happy about the time I spent with Russian over the past year. Overall I've enjoyed myself and I feel motivated to continue exposing myself to the language. I think this is really important because whatever you do in life, you have to be motivated! While I thought I'd be further along and would have achieved more by now I have to remember that spent time trying different approaches before I f

Although I felt like I was getting back into Russian properly this month it seems the stats don't bear this out. My daily average was the exact same and the type of activities I did were reduced. My passive listening consisted of listening to D&D streams and Speakly stories. I feel like listening to the Speakly stories (even if passively), is the most beneficial for me at this point because I'm also spending my active study time on them. However the streams are good to break up the monotony of listening to the same voices over and over. The conversation in streams is also completely natural which is important to get to grips with.  When I was actively studying the Speakly stories I picked out particular words (not all) that I didn't know and would note them in spreadsheet and would look up the translation. I realised this was taking up valuable time and it's precisely the type of activity that LingQ was made for. So I signed up for it and imported the first Speakly