Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

In the beginning of my Russian acquisition journey I discovered Gabriel Wyner from Fluent Forever who created very useful courses for learning to distinguish the different phonemes in various languages, as well as a book that helps you learn 625 useful beginner words. My attention drifted away from that list as I put more time into using apps like LingQ and Speakly but today I had a look through the full list to see how many of those words I still don't recognise. I counted 244 unrecognised words, 39% of the total in the book. I might create an Anki deck for them or load them into ListLang (probably the latter) because they are useful words that cover everyday topics and situations.

  January has been an interesting month for my Russian acquisition journey. While my average daily time with Russian hasn't changed much compared to December, there's been a shift in the type of activities I've been doing. More passive listening (probably due to getting back to the gym), a big drop in active studying which is due to not spending as much time in LingQ and Speakly and starting lessons with a new tutor.  Also, I took a trip abroad for a week which meant the hours were accumulated across around 25 days. It wasn't my intention to avoid active studying  (LingQ and Speakly), it just worked out that way. It's my intention to spend more time on those activities again. Someone on the Refold Discord channel highly recommends forging ahead with Speakly. Up until now I've been holding back somewhat, only using it to unlock new monologues / stories when I need them. I've finished working through the Anki deck for  Roots of the Russian Language . These 333...