Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

While researching how to learn / acquire the Russian language I saw recommendations for a book called  Roots of the Russian Language . It lists a couple of hundred word root components that make up many Russian words, along with examples: For example: Parents: родители (raditeli) Motherlands: Родина (radina) Folk / people: народный (narodni) I've owned the book for a while but have only occasionally had a look at it because the typography is old fashioned and not easily legible. But I recently saw someone on a forum explaining how important it was for them in expanding their vocabulary. So I had a look around and found an Anki deck that seems to be based on the book:  Anki Deck: Roots of the Russian Language . While I really don't enjoy using Anki (or any simple Spaced Repetition System) I'll have a go at working through this deck. I'll start with adding 10 new words a day but will lower it if my revision time goes over 20 - 30 minutes. There are 333 cards in th...

This month I've started using Speakly and Glossika again after taking a break from both. In each case I prefer to focus as much as I can on the input that they provide. So for Glossika I only listen and repeat, no typing practice. I aim to do 50 repetitions of old material using the 'Weakest Memories' setting and 5 new sentences every day. For me Glossika is purely for reading, listening and speaking practice. I'm not trying to memorise the sentences and I'm not using the typing or speach recording functions. The reason I review using the 'Weakest Memories' setting is because it shows sentences from oldest to newest. I took a break from Speakly because for me the main value is the narrated stories which include a transcript in Russian and English. I import those stories into LingQ and listen to them almost every day. I'm getting back into reading them in LingQ. As you use the Speakly and learn more words you unlock more Live Situations (short dialogues) ...

So like last month my total time spent studying was quite low. The pattern seems to be that during the summer I spend less time indoors and hence less time studying. On the plus side I spent two weeks in one of the Baltic countries and had the opportunity to listen to and speak with native Russian speakers. As soon as I exited the airport I encountered a group of Russian men waiting for a taxi. I wasn't able to understand the exact topics of conversation but it was great to understand snippets of dialogue: "I want... " "He said...".  I had similar experiences in a supermarket with some staff, and in a bar where I overheard a conversation amongst a group of guys at the next table. I had no idea what the context was but they were talking about a particular number and why it was important at one point one of them typed it into his phone to show the others. I was hearing things like: "It's 35." "Believe me. I'll show you".  While I didn...