Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

  In this video Steve from LingQ talks about applying the 80/20 rule to learning a language. He says that it can be a somewhat misleading goal to aim towards because the true meaning in any text or speech is only really understood with that last 20, 10, 5% or less of the vocabulary. According to Steve the reality is that you don't need kneed to know just a couple of thousands words you need to know tens of thousands of words. We're talking 20, 30, 40k at least. But what do we mean by 'need'. Need for what purpose? What I've been thinking about as I've undergone this language learning / acquisition journey is which words do I need and for what purpose Because different people have different goals for learning a language.  Steve often mentions how we wants to be able to read literature in the native language. Obviously that requires a different and much larger vocabulary than someone who wants to be able to order a meal in a restaurant.  Many people advocate read...

Here's a list of YouTube channels that I've watched since starting to learn Russian or have subscribed to with the intent of watching later.  This isn't an exhaustive list of what you can find. These are channels that either explicitly feature content made with Comprehensible Input or TPRS  principles in mind ( Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) or feature content that can be used for that purpose. 1420 - Sreet Interviews About Russian in Russian Boost Your Russian Comprehensible Russian Easy Languages Easy Russian Fluent Forever: Russian LingQ: Russian Podcast Real Russian Club Russian From Afar Russian With Max Your Russian Вечерние Кости (Dungeons & Dragons streams) If you have any other suggestions please leave a comment below.

I started learning Russian in the Summer of 2020. It's been surreal to watch the invasion of Ukraine unfold over the past year. Up until then I was watching YouTubers from both Russia and Ukraine going about their normal day to day life and now many of them have left their home country. When I read about the atrocities being committed against Ukrainian people it feels like I'm learning German in the 1940s. What's kept me going initially was the momentum I had built up in actually successfully acquiring a new language. Now I'm actually starting to have simple conversations with people and I've spoke to people from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. Anyway, I wanted to unequivocally state again that I'm against the war. Donate to Ukraine here: www.defendukraine.org www.dec.org.uk www.redcross.org.uk/get-involved/donate/donation-questions/emergency-appeals/ukraine-crisis-appeal-faqs

Last week and today I randomly met some Russian speakers and had the opportunity to practice speaking. Although the conversations are short I definitely get the feeling I'm activating recognised vocabulary.  When I'm listening in to other people speaking I recognise a lot of words but the overall meaning is something I can't easily track because of the speed. It's providing me with a nice boost of motivation. I'm not tracking this time towards my study time because it's so hard to track, maybe it only lasted 2 or 3 minutes. When I start consciously seeking out speaking practice time I'll track it as best I can, although eventually I aim to be in a situation where I can start having simple conversations in social setting. Achieving that will be a significant milestone and I'll have to explicitly make note of that to indicate that speaking practice is happening outside of my formal study time.

I just discovered this new app which is simply focussed on teaching the top 5000 words. All it does is provide a short sentence with a word left out, then it gives you four Russian words to choose from. It let's you know whether you are right or wrong and then you continue on to the next sentence. In the background a spaced repetition system works to serve you sentences at the optimal time for creating strong memories. Another great feature is that you can create your own lists, you just enter words you want to learn and it will automatically look up a translation and then find example sentences using those words. This is an amazing feature I didn't even know I wanted. The creator of the app made it for themselves to help them learn Russian and because of this an effort was made not to inflate the word count with all the different cases: "The dictionary form of the word is used, so learning all the grammatical forms of a word counts as one word. For example, “eat”, “eats”,...

  October '22 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 20:35 hours Active watching or listening: 0:53 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 2:36 hours Reading with Audio: 2:01 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:55 hours Active Study: 3:01 hours Personal Lessons: 0 hours Conversation: 0 hours Total: 29:00 hours Daily Average: 0:58 hours Activities breakdown: Passive watching and listening: Speakly stories. Active watching or listening: I've been watching a Russian film called the Stroll which is a slice of life film with a lot of naturalistic dialogue. I'm watching with subtitles but I can follow quite a bit of the dialogue. It's not the most interesting story but I might be able to bring myself to watch it again without subtitles. Vocabulary and Sentences: The Roots of the Russian Language. I'm using Anki for the roots and I'm currently at 150 out of 333 roots. I add 3 new roots per day. Active Study: Speakly and LingQ