Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I thought I'd just write a quick update to say that my motivation has returned. I don't want to give readers and fellow Russian learners the impression that I'm giving up.  It's normal to have ups and downs with any long term project and it's understandable to have conflicting feelings due to the invasion of Ukraine. I had to reconnect with some of the core motivations; learning to speak another language and pursuing an intellectual challenge. I've been focussing on the absolute core activities which is passively listening to the Speakly stories and reading and listening to them with LingQ. I also spent 10 minutes in the Speakly App for the first time in months. I'm not a big fan of the fill-in-the-blank speaking exercises but it's a necessary evil in order to unlock more monologues. I've noticed that Speakly now allows me to skip those sections, I need to think about whether they are useful to do or not. I've unlocked 14 stories and I've rea...

I've been lacking in the motivation to keep learning Russian over the past couple of months due to the invasion of Ukraine. When I started I was excited at the prospect of one day visiting Russia and Ukraine. In fact I would have liked to have gone this summer. It makes me question whether to even continue. What is my relation going to be with the language going forward? At the moment I feel I've come so far that I might as well keep going. I'm not sure if that's a sunk cost fallacy or not. I do want to learn to speak another language and I don't have any particular interest in any other language so right now it's mostly an intellectual challenge. Perhaps that will be enough for now. As you can see the time spent on activities (and the variety) has dipped considerably. My aim is to at least increase the variety if not the absolute times. BTW here are some links in case you want to donate towards charities that help Ukraine: www.defendukraine.org www.dec.org.uk w...