Milestone: An hour* of unprepared conversation in Russian

Yesterday I had another conversation practice session with my tutor and I'm tentatively guessing that 50 minutes of the full hour was conducted in Russian. I should record my next session to see whether my estimation is accurate.

Most importantly the topics of conversation were completely unprepared. Normally I practice answering questions around a particular topic in advance of the session. I don't try to memorise and repeat my answers verbatim but it helps me to learn some new relevant words so I'm not going in to the session completely blind. We'll talk about the prepared topic but allow ourselves to go on tangents.

However this time we never got around to speaking about the topic. I told my tutor about a funny incident that had happened to me in the morning, then we spoke about the types of houses and apartments where people live in different countries. Finally we talked about the economic situation in the countries we live in.

Of course it was a broken conversation with terrible grammar (which was corrected often) and I had to talk around my lack of topic specific vocabulary or ask for a specific word.

For example in Russian I'd ask "What is the word for a person that helps old people?" Through the context of the conversation my tutor realised I was looking for a word like "social worker" or "carer".

In no way am I pretending to be having a fluent conversation and it requires effort and patience from my tutor, not something I can expect from native speakers in every day situations.

But I feel like I'm a couple of months away from being able to conduct the majority of this particular learning activity completely in Russian.

I also had another practice session with a language exchange partner whom I hadn't spoke to in a few weeks and she also commented on my improvement since our last catchup. So it's good to be getting positive feedback from someone who is more objective.

Having conversations is great for highlighting where I need to focus my attention because particular topics or ideas keep coming back and it's all directly relevant to my life.



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