3 year overview of my Russian acquisition journey

For anyone interested here's an overview of my Russian acquisition journey over the past 3 years (I started in August 2020). Click on any of the charts to get a closer look.

I think this data is 98% accurate. However as time goes on I'm starting to encounter more and more Russian in day to day life which I don't count. For example, reading memes, seeing what friends post on social media, writing messages, meeting Russian speakers in real life.

In all my activities I try to focus on material that is of practical use. So I don't read fantasy books like Harry Potter or watch media like Anime. I very rarely watch series or shows but when I do it's usually contemporary drama. In the 5% of time that I'm not reading or listening to material from Speakly I will watch street interviews or dialogues aimed at beginners (Easy Russian, Russian With Max).

Activity Overview

Passive Immersion: Listening to audio in the background while I do other things (work, cleaning, walking, gym). Since March 2021 exclusively Speakly monologues. My attention comes and goes depending on what I'm doing. A percentage of this could technically be classified as Active Immersion because when I'm able to (for example between sets at the gym) I'll be fully focussed on trying to understand what I'm listening to. This used to take up 70% of my time but it's starting to come down.

Active Immersion: Fully concentrated watching or listening with no distractions.

Vocal + Sentences: Anki, or focussed acquisition of new words like reading the Roots of the Russian Language.

Reading with Audio: Mostly Glossika but also LingQ when I've worked through a Speakly monologue at least once. I don't think I've always been consistent with placing LingQ activity either in this category or under Active Study. 

I find myself usually categorising it as Active Studying because half the time I need to work to figure out the meaning of a sentence. Sometimes I will understand the individual meanings of words but not the meaning of the sentence as a whole. So I'm not always fluently reading with full understanding.

Reading with No Audio: Something I avoided for a long time but have consciously taken up in the past couple of months since I became more confident with my pronunciation. Although I still make mistakes of course, which I discover during my conversation practice.

Active Study: The broadest category. Includes using the Speakly app, reading up on grammar, reading through a text (usually Speakly monologues) in LingQ for the first time, but as noted earlier I probably added re-reading texts to this category occasionally. Transcribing Speakly dialogues. Various apps have come and gone. I've recently started Russian Accelerator.

Personal / Tutor Lessons: Lessons started using comprehensible input but are now conversation practice sessions avoiding English as much as possible unless it helps to explain a grammar point, new vocabulary, idioms etc. Topics are prepared in advance but we often go on tangents.

*Free Conversation Practice (Speaking Practice): Practicing with people in real life or on apps like Tandem. About 3 hours in total but not included in the charts below. This is hard to keep track of precisely but I'll try going forward.

Total Passive Immersion	745:20:26	65.03%
Total Active Immersion	56:58:12	4.97%
Total Vocab + Sentences	94:54:58	8.28%
Total Reading With Audio	85:29:09	7.46%
Total Reading With No Audio	6:32:17	0.57%
Total Active Study	123:22:27	10.76%
Total Tutor Lessons	33:30:00	2.92%
Total	1146:07:29
Avg Per day	1:01:31	7

A cumulative chart

Cumulative but broken down by activity.

A month by month overview. You can see there are throughs during the summer months. You can also see how I stopped explicitly memorising vocabulary (yellow) with Anki but later took some other activities to learn new words (e.g. Roots of the Russian language). I'm of course acquiring new vocabulary by using LingQ, Speakly, reading and conversation practice.

The above chart but expressed in percentages.

If you have any questions, leave a comment.