The importance of listening

I started listening to native Russian content right from the start of this language acquisition project. Specifically videos of people playing Dungeons & Dragons on YouTube like this one Форт Рузда | Вечерние Кости | ЭНОА | Глава 1. 

This is before I discovered Glossika and Speakly and I wanted to expose myself to Russian in order to get used to how it's spoken. The tones, the rhythms, where the gaps are between words etc. It seemed like a natural bottle neck for being able to have conversations in Russian, and being able to speak in the language has always been my number one goal.

Sometimes I wonder if all that listening was not an efficient use of time. But I didn't know about those other resources yet, so I was doing the best I could.

On Reddit I saw a thread where people talk about what they would have done differently to learn their target language. A lot of people are mentioning that they should have started listening more sooner. It seems that many people place a lot of emphasis on learning through reading but that this does not prepare them for understanding language as it's actually spoken. Thread: If you had to start learning your target language from scratch all over again, what would you do differently? 

So perhaps it was a good thing that I prioritised listening as much as I did when I first started.