Acquiring Russian: January Report 2023

 

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 word roots are not all firmly in my long term memory, I've suspended 229 (68.77%) of them. But that was never the aim. Rather I'm trying to create that vague familiarity we have in our native language when we encounter new words that contain familiar roots. 

The usefulness of this exercise is obviously hard to measure but I've noticed a couple of times where I had a vague (and correct) sense of the theme or topic that an unknown word belonged to. I fell behind with reading each section in the book so that's something I will have to catch up with. I'll probably repeat this exercise again in the future and when I've finished reading through the book, which just consists of example words and sentences, I'll try to pick it up from time to time. Picking random entries to read through.

I've picked up a Rough Guides Russian Phrase Book. It's a small pocket book filled with phrases that are useful for tourists and travellers. It contains the topics you would expect. Transport, ordering food, social situations etc. At the moment I'm reading it from start to end, but as with the Roots book my intention is to have it handy to occasionally leaf through.

I've been using the ListLang app a lot. While it's just a simple multiple choice app I find it convenient to use whenever I have a spare moment, and those moments add up over time. As you can tell I'm reading more without audio, because I feel confident that my pronunciation (in my head) will be correct 90% of the time. Obviously it's better to have the audio there as well, but I'm not going to avoid reading just when it's not available.

Finally, I've started lessons with a tutor again. We are following the Comprehensible Input approach so the tutor tells me stories with accompanying images, she discusses the details of the images and I have the opportunity to ask questions for clarification. The aim is for me to understand 80 - 95% of what's being said and being able to learn new words and concepts through context. 

During the lessons I feel comfortable speaking when I feel like it but it's clear that my recall and ability to produce Russian in the moment is far behind my ability to recognise and understand Russian. It's going to be interesting to see how quickly that gap closes.

January 2023 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 19:35 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:16 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 6:33 hours
Reading with Audio: 2:04 hours
Reading with no Audio: 1:57 hours
Active Study: 1:53 hours
Personal Lessons: 3:15 hours
Total: 35:34 hours
Daily Average: 1:09 hours

December 2022 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


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