Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

  I've 'learned' (a differing mixture of recognition and recall) another 100 words (or more accurately  lemmas ) in Speakly. As you can see I've only been using the app for five days after a break that lasted more than a month. Something that I might have mentioned in other posts about Speakly is that I'm learning some of the words more easily than other because I have come across them before. That could be in other apps like Glossika, from importing the Speakly monologues into LingQ or perhaps when reading memes.  I can't exactly say what proportion of the words are somewhat familiar to me and how many are completely new. It feels like the split is 20 / 80 (familiar/unfamiliar), but I'm just guessing. Because I import the Speakly monologues into LingQ I'm in effect working ahead of the main vocabulary acquisition exercises. For a while I completely stopped doing the main vocabulary exercises and just read and listened to the first 15 or so monologues ov

I've signed up to this great service that sends out a summary of international news in your target language. You can choose from 30 different languages and set the difficulty level of summaries. Since I've set it to beginner level it's usually just a sentence or two. It's free to sign up: https://noospeak.com/

I visited another Baltic country at the start of May and had a couple of opportunities to practice speaking Russian. It was great to have short conversations with people and feel that I was being taken seriously as a learner. I have no visited Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and have had the opportunity to speak Russian in each country.  However since returning from my trip I have spent (practically) no time studying the language at all. My only exposure to the language has been when stumbling upon the occasional meme or lesson on Instagram. This has been my longest break from the language since I started. I'm not sure what the reason is. It's not really a lack of time since I've had plenty of opportunities to jump on the Speakly app. Until today I haven't even been listening to the Speakly monologues at the gym. I've also not had any conversation classes since January. I needed to take a break because I was moving house but that has turned into a permanent hiatus.  A