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 figured out what worked for me.
My main goal in fact was to just stick with it long enough to get to the point where my curiosity and enjoyment would provide motivation to keep going. That's something I've achieved.
What about more concrete results though? Well it's hard to quantify just how much I've acquired. My passive / recognised vocabulary is probably no more than 1200. According to the Speakly app I know 757 words but there are of course other words I've acquired through comprehensible input and Anki.
Practically speaking this means that depending on the content I can understand quite a bit. Sometimes I think I should have acquired a much larger passive / recognised vocabulary after one year but as I said I wasn't working in an optimal way right from the start.
As far as speaking Russian goes I have not set myself any definite goal for when I want to do that. But funnily enough I had a dream early this morning in which I was using some of my limited Russian. I wonder how often I have dreams in which I speak Russian?
My first big 'failure' is that my understanding of Russian grammar is still almost non existent. I have the New Penguin Russian Course on my desk but I never open it. I've noticed that the Speakly app has expanded the articles about Russian grammar, so maybe that will be useful to me.
The second is that I didn't achieve "Mass Immersion" as advocated by the Refold communities. Although that wasn't an explicit goal of mine when I started I thought it would be something I would naturally achieve.
Here are my statistics for the year.
August 2020 to July 2021 Statistics
Passive watching and listening: 245:06 hours
Active watching and Listening: 27:53 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 64:00 hours
Reading with Audio: 49:55 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0 hours
Active Study: 41:40 hours
1 on 1 Lessons: 0 hours
Total: 428:33 hours
Daily Average: 1:10 hours
Passive watching and listening: Watching TV shows just trying to enjoy them without looking things up. Listening to D&D streams and Speakly stories in the background while I do other things.
Active watching and listening: Same content as above but I make an effort to understand what's going on and will stop to look up words, rewind and watch or listen to sections again.
Vocabulary and Sentences: Anki (recognition only)
Reading with Audio: Glossika
Active Study: Speakly, LingQ, the New Penguin Russian Course
While on average I spend just over an hour a day with Russian this dropped to just half an hour a day over the past couple of months as various life things got in the way.
Finally let me outline how I would go about acquiring Russian with the benefit of hindsight.
Bear in mind that I'm not yet able to speak Russian. But if I look at what I can currently understand or comprehend it's attributable to a particular set of activities while others did not seem to contribute much or anything at all (Duolingo, Anki for recall of vocabulary).
In reality I mostly followed the plan outlined below but in a different order and with some detours and experiments. My approach somewhat matches the
Refold.la method but adjusted to take advantage of resources available to Russian learners.
Phase 1
Start doing all these from day 1 or stagger them in over the course of a week or two.
1. Learn the Cyrillic Script.
2. Work through the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer for a couple of weeks.
3. Start passively listening to Russian.
4. Start actively watching Russian comprehensible input videos.
5. Work through the Anki deck for the 1000 most common words. Recognition only and don't stress about learning everything. The point is just to load your brain with a basic vocabulary to help you when you're watching or listening to Russian content.
6. Work through the Fluent Forever 625 Important Words book. There will be overlap with the Anki deck. Optional: Create an Anki deck for these words.
7. Optional: Xefjord's Complete Language Series Anki Deck. This is just to get you to feel like you're actually learning to speak Russian by giving you some basic phrases.
I think this phase will last 3 to 5 months depending on how much time you put in. For me it took longer because I only discovered certain resources later on and I 'wasted' time on various apps and practicing 'recall' of vocabulary rather than recognition only.
Phase 2 (which I'm in now)
Once you've worked through the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer for a couple of weeks and made good progress through the Anki deck and the 625 words (say 50% to 75% of the way through) it's time to switch to the second phase.
1. Continue with the Anki deck and the 625 words.
2. Sign up for Glossika. I aim to do 50 reps per day and introduce 5 new sentences. I use this as reading and shadowing practice. Any other supposed benefits such getting a feel for the word order or grammar is a bonus in my opinion.
3. Get the Speakly app and choose to learn vocabulary through Multiple Chose Answers. Yes it's nice to be able to spell correctly but in my opinion this takes too much time. The most valuable thing about this app is being introduced to new words in context and the stories. Yes you should have a look at the Live Situations (Dialogues) as well but don't stress about memorising the sentences. Stop learning new words if the stories start becoming too incomprehensible. Concentrate on a deeper understanding using LingQ.
4. Sign up for LingQ or a similar app that allows you to collect text and easily look up their meanings. Load the Speakly stories into LingQ and work through them.
5. Continue passively listening to the Speakly stories as much as you can as well as more natural content like the D&D streams. Eventually I would like to switch to podcasts or interviews.
6. Watch YouTube channels like Comprehensible Russian, Easy Russian (eventually Russian with Max and other such channels). Alternate between passive and active approaches. Sometimes just sitting back and taking it in, other times paying close attention, looking up words and rewatching parts.
The above activities are now the core of my approach to acquiring Russian. Supplemented with music and occasional native content if it grabs my attention.
The main difference compared to the Refold method is that I'm not consuming as much 'entertainment' content. I don't usually watch shows and films in my spare time and I believe other content is much more language dense.
The Speakly stories and YouTube channels mentioned earlier are ideal in that they present me with everyday language, interviews and dialogues. I'm sure I will watch films and shows again in the future, but I want to get to a higher level in my understanding before I get back to doing that.
So that's my plan. Let's see how the next year goes.!
July Statistics
Passive watching and listening: 10:49 hours
Active watching or Listening: 0 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 0 hours
Reading with Audio: 0 hours
Active Study: 3:20 hours
Total: 14:09 hours
Daily Average: 0:27 hours
June Statistics
Passive watching and listening: 11:23 hours
Active watching or Listening: 0 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 6:44 hours
Reading with Audio: 0 hours
Active Study: 2:20 hours
Total: 13:50 hours
Daily Average: 0:27 hours
May Statistics
Passive watching and listening: 22:54 hours (Mostly listening to Speakly stories)
Active watching or Listening: 0:6 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:37 hours (Anki)
Reading with Audio: 1:42 hours
Active Study: 1:20 hours
Music: Stopped counting, have been listening to Russian music when I can.
Total: 26:40 hours
Daily Average: 0:51 hours
April Statistics
Passive watching and listening: 4:49 hours (Mostly listening)
Active watching or Listening: 3:27 hours (Comprehensible Input, YouTube but mostly Speakly)
Vocabulary and Sentences: 1:03 hours (Anki)
Reading with Audio: 10:48 hours (Speakly and Glossika, 9943 reps, 604 sentences)
Active Study: 12:40 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 757 words)
Music: 4:08 (Singing and listening)
Total: 36:55 hours
Daily Average: 1:05 hours
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)
Music: 2:47 (Singing and listening)
Total: 50:03 hours
Daily Average: 1:31 hours
February StatisticsPassive 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
Daily Average: 1:22 hours
January StatisticsPassive 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
Daily Average: 1:13 hours
December StatisticsPassive 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
Daily Average: 1:48 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 StatisticsPassive 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
Daily Average: 2:21 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
Daily Average: 1:23 hours
September
Passive watching and listening: 11:27 hours
Active watching: 1:14 hours
Vocabulary: 3:56 hours
Total: 16:37 hours
Daily Average: 0:33 hours
August
Passive watching and listening: 31:28 hours
Active watching: 2:32 hours
Vocabulary: 1:38 hours
Total: 35:38 hours
Daily Average: 1:09 hours
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