Acquiring Russian: May 2025 Report

 

It was a quiet month although I'm doing much better in the past week. Something noteworthy to mention is that I had a short conversation with a Russian man and also separately with a Latvian woman. They were both very complementary of my ability. Although I believe I seem better than I actually am when I'm speaking about a narrow set of topics. Still, it's very motivating to get such feedback from native speakers.

The activities I'm focussing on currently are:

1. Learning new words with the Speakly App (I'm almost at 1800). I regret not being consistent with this because I could have easily 'learned' another 750 words with only 5 to 10 minutes a day. I didn't realise how long it's been since I was consistently using the app. It's a real shame because that should have been the minimum activity every day.

2. Using Taalhammer to learn useful phrases. I'm constantly adding to my useful phrases deck whenever I discover or think of a phrase that is useful in conversations. Phrases like: "That's great", "Tell me more", "What happened next" etc. From there I will expand to phrases that belong to particular topics that often come up in conversations. 

I should do a review of the Taalhammer website / app because it's the perfect tool for me. It's a combination of Anki and Glossika with a built in translator to easily create flashcards. It's really easy to create simple flashcards by uploading a 2 column CSV file. You can study these like you would in Anki (although it's not customisable like Anki) but on top of that you can listen to a playlist of all the words and phrases of a deck like Glossika. So first you hear the phrase in your native language and then you hear it in the target language. You can also type in a word and it will give you a choice of several example sentences that include the word.

There are also some AI features such as automatically adding pictures to your flashcards and a deck that consists of short conversations using the words that you are currently learning. These are just a paragraph long, perhaps 5 to 10 sentences but it's incredibly useful to listen to.

3. Glossika, when I'm too tired to do anything else. Often when I'm walking to the shops or at the gym.

4. Listening to the Speakly stories. Again, when I'm walking somewhere or at the gym.

On top of what I'm already doing I would like to add 30 minutes a day of conversation practice with Languatalk in order to cement the phrases I'm learning, and of course take opportunities to speak with people in real life.

May 2025 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 0:00 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 2:24 minutes
Reading with Audio: 01:00 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours
Active Study: 0:50 minutes
Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours
Free Conversation Practice (LinguaTalk): 0:00 hours
Games: 0:00
Total: 04:15 hours
Daily Average: 0:08 minutes

April 2025 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 3:13 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:00 hours
Reading with Audio: 2:46 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours
Active Study: 0:00 hours
Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours
Free Conversation Practice (LinguaTalk): 0:00 hours
Games: 0:00
Total: 6:00 hours
Daily Average: 0:11 hours

March 2025 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 9:40 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 3:47 hours
Reading with Audio: 3:59 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0:00 hours
Active Study: 0:06 hours
Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours
Free Conversation Practice (LinguaTalk): 0:00 hours
Games: 0:00
Total: 17:34 hours
Daily Average: 0:34 hours

February 2025 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 3:13 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:00 hours
Vocabulary and Sentences: 2:28 hours
Reading with Audio: 0:00 hours
Reading with no Audio:0:00 hours
Active Study: 2:24 hours
Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours
Free Conversation Practice (LinguaTalk): 0:28 hours
Games: 0:00
Total: 8:06 hours
Daily Average: 0:17 hours

January 2025 Statistics

Passive watching and listening: 8:04 hours
Active watching or listening: 0:09 minutes
Vocabulary and Sentences: 1:42 minutes
Reading with Audio: 05:42 hours
Reading with no Audio: 0:27 hours
Active Study: 6:22 hours
Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 0:00 hours
Free Conversation Practice (LinguaTalk): 0:15 minutes
Games: 0:00
Total: 22:40 hours
Daily Average: 0:44 hours

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