Acquiring Russian: December 2023 Report and 2023 Review
It was a fairly good month, I spent a lot of time on what I call Active Study which for me consists of using the Speakly App, writing out its dialogues, studying Russian Accelerator and reading LingQ.
That last one could arguably be counted as simply Reading (with or without audio) but I usually count it as Active Studying because most of the time I'm doing it intensively (looking up words, trying to notice grammar). Other times I read LingQ without too many lookups. In those cases I count it as Reading.
At the moment most of my Reading With Audio is from using Glossika and Reading With No Audio is mostly Olly Richard's 101 Conversations in Simple Russian.
There was some Free Conversation Practice (Speaking or messaging with Russian speakers) which is hard to count so I put 30 minutes. I aim to spend more time on this real world usage of language and it's going to be hard to measure that activity accurately.
I'm leaning towards not counting it as part of my statistics. If it's not going to be accurate then it's not going to be useful. And if anyone wants to follow in my foot-steps, take inspiration or avoid my mistakes I think it's better to just tell them that after about 850 hours of exposure to Russian I tentatively started practice speaking it (which in my case happened after 2 years and 2 month).
December 2023 Statistics
So how was 2023? One of my goals last year was to increase my average time with Russian to 1:30 per day. Unfortunately I failed and my average was 1:03 per day. It's not bad as an achievement in itself to average 1 hour a day for almost 3 and a half year but I really believe that with my current knowledge and skill level I would greatly benefit from increasing my time reading and speaking.
Of course it's always beneficial to spend more time with a language but it should be taken in context. When you're first starting out even 15 minutes can be exhausting and I have other obligations and interests (I would say Russian comes number 3 after my day job and my main hobby). But it's now easier for me to spend more time with the language and I should take the opportunity to double down. Quantity is now a quality of its own.
As mentioned earlier this was the year of consistent conversation (and messaging) practice with a tutor and occasionally in real life. I've had sessions where I've spent 50 minutes out of 60 speaking with my tutor in Russian (with lots of mistakes, corrections and gestures) which is great. And when I meet Russian speakers in real life I'm able to have short conversations where the other person quickly realises that I haven't just memorised a couple of phrases.
Once again my goal is to spend on average 1:30 hours per day with the Russian language in 2024.
Some other stats / achievements:
- 1161 learned words in Speakly
- 27955 reps of 1272 sentences (21.8 rep per sentence)
- 2506 known 'words' in LingQ
- Attending a social event where I spoke to people from multiple countries in Russian: Milestone: Russian language social event
Charts and Tables
Click the images for a closer look.
Totals Since August 2020 (3 years and 5 month / 1246 days / 1260 hours)
2023 Statistics
2022 Statistics
2021 Statistics
2020 Statistics
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