Milestone: 1700 Words in Speakly

I've 'learned' another 200 words (or more accurately lemmas) with Speakly over the past couple of months. 'Learned' is a broad category ranging from 'I can use this in conversation' to 'I might recognise it in certain contexts'.  I've been more consistent with Speakly since the start of the new year and overall enjoying what it provides in my Russian acquisition journey. 

I have mentioned before that I'm learning some of the words more easily than others because I have encountered them in other situations. That could be in other apps like Glossika, from importing the Speakly monologues into LingQ or perhaps when reading memes. This means that some days I 'learn' three new words easily, other times I can struggle for a week to get a word into my memory (an even then I will only recognise it in a particular context).

I'm not sure what proportion of the words are somewhat familiar to me and how many are completely new. Before it felt like 20 / 80 (familiar/unfamiliar), now it's perhaps 15 / 85. But it fluctuates.

According to the app I've learned 78% of the words that I will encounter in real life situations. Of course it's debatable how accurate such a statement can be.

But I just take this as a very rough estimate (that doesn't take into account words that I've learned outside the app) and the I'm getting close to the famous 80/20 Pareto Principle number. Of course any language learner will tell you that all the important meanings in language are in those last percentage points. But perhaps this is where being strategic about what I focus on next will provide me with the best return on investment.

As I mentioned in my last post my focus is shifting towards more deliberate memorisation of particular words and phrases that are useful in day to day conversations. I'm mining sentences from the Speakly monologues and dialogues as well as phrases I think will be useful and putting them into an Anki deck. See my previous post for why I'm returning to Active recall to memorise important phrases.

Since that post I've been creating a simple deck with the English phrase on one side and the Russian translation on the other. Perhaps this is not as good as recalling phrases without a prompt but for now it will do.