My motivation has returned

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 read through 13 of them. For 2 stories I have less than 30 words that are still not fully known, 6 have between 50 and 100 words that are not yet fully know and 6 have more than 100 words that are not yet known.

My aim is to get all of the stories below 50 unknown words before I really start putting sustained effort into Speakly in order to unlock more monologues. In the mean time I will use the app occasionally. 

It might get boring to work through the same monologues over and over again but I believe that by doing so I can get a good understanding of the core vocabulary in various contexts (probably 1000 to 1500 words) which will make it much easier to understand and acquire future vocabulary.