Acquiring Russian: December Report and 2022 Overview

 

First an overview of December, then a look back at 2022 as a whole.

December '22 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 10:15 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:54 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 5:24 hours
Reading with Audio: 0 hours
Reading with no Audio: 3:10 hours
Active Study: 13:57 hours
Personal Lessons: 0 hours
Conversation: 0 hours
Total: 33:40 hours
Daily Average: 1:07 hours

Activities breakdown: 

I wasn't working over the Christmas and New Years period so spent a lot less time than normal on Passive Listening and more on Active study; LingQ and Speakly.

I reached some milestones over the past month. On the 24th of December I finished Beginner 1 in LingQ with about 1800 words known. Today I'm at about 2000 known words. It should be noted that on that platform the different inflections of the same word are counted as separate words. I finished reading the 60 mini-stories on the 26th of December. I don't know 100% of all the words in those stories but I've read through them all at least once now. I will go back through them and work on noticing the grammar patterns.

On the 28th of December I finished Beginner 3 in the Speakly app, which takes me up to 900 words. I've changed how I use Speakly from the multiple choice method to the writing method after advice from someone on the Refold Russian Discord server. I don't particularly enjoy it but that person says it's much more beneficial that way. I still have the ListLang app for my multiple choice fix, which I enjoy. I estimate that my passive vocabulary is around 1500 words.

I haven't done the Anki deck for the Roots of Russian Language for the past week, but I'm not far from finishing. I've worked through 258 out of 333 roots which is 77% of the total. I should be done by the end of the month. I will take a break and then start again from the beginning. The aim is not to memorise every root, rather to build an unconscious sense of those roots to help me with future vocabulary acquisition. So I imagine I will return to the deck and book several times over the coming years.

2022

Overall I'm reasonably happy with my performance. Perhaps I'm not setting high enough standards for myself but I think an average of about 1 hour per day dedicated to something that is not my main hobby isn't too bad. I'm clearly not achieving the advised Mass Immersion / Refold numbers but I do feel like I'm making steady progress.

On the plus side I feel like I've definitely reached the point where my motivation now comes more from enjoying the language than from pure will power. This year I've had short conversations with Russian speakers, overheard and understood Russian people speaking, I've laughed at Russian jokes and memes and been able to understand content about the invasion of Ukraine. My motivation definitely took a hit because of the war and while it will always be a dark cloud over this hobby, it doesn't look like can extinguish my goal to become conversational in Russian.

In late Spring I will be visiting a country that has quite a few Russian speakers and I want to be able to have some more conversations with native speakers, so I will look into taking lessons again as well as organise conversation practice. My goal for 2023 is to achieve an average of 1:30 hours per day spent on Russian. I would like that extra time to be dedicated to reading with LingQ (mostly dialogues, monologues and content that would be useful in conversations), personal lessons and conversation practice. 

2022 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 252:11 hours
Active watching or listening: 19:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 16:40 hours
Reading with Audio: 7:57 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0 hours
Active Study: 35:20 hours
Personal Lessons: 5:15 hours
Conversation: 0 hours
Total:  336:27 hours
Daily Average: 0:55 hours

Statistics Since August 2020

Passive watching and listening: 617:25 hours
Active watching or listening: 55:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 80:39 hours
Reading with Audio: 70:46 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0 hours
Active Study: 94:53 hours
Personal Lessons: 5:15 hours
Conversation: 0 hours
Total:  924 hours
Daily Average: 1:03 hours


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