Acquiring Russian: Yearly Report

I'm still alive and I'm still acquiring Russian. Although I've only spent 21 minutes per day on the language a big life change is happening soon that will positively impact my Russian acquisition journey. More on that in a moment.

The main activities I did over the past year were: using the Speakly App (Active Study), listening to the Speakly stories (Passive Immersion), listening and reading along with Glossika (Reading with Audio) and using the Taalhammer app (Vocabulary/Sentences). 

I did not get as much conversations practice with people or AI (Free Conversation Practice) as I would have liked but that will all change because this year I'm moving to a country that is home to some native Russian speakers (no, not Russia). This will mean that I will more often encounter Russian speakers in my day to day life. For tracking purposes this means I will no longer track real life conversations under 'Free Conversation Practice' reserving that for time spent in formal 1 on 1 language exchanges or conversation practice sessions with a tutor. Of course I'll share any notable instances of speaking Russian in real life situations.

One regret I have for 2025 is that I stopped using the Speakly app for many months. I could have made a lot of progress towards learning all 4000 words (I'm currently at 1817). It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to use it so that's a shame. I want to get back into the habit of using it every day. My other focus will be on using Taalhammer to learn lots of useful phrases. You might have read in previous posts last year that I think learning lots of phrases will have a big impact on my conversational ability.

Going forwards I'm going to stop tracking my activities in Google Analytics and just use LingoTrack (I reviewed it on my YouTube channel: LingoTrack Review). This will be a good time saver.

Finally I will be learning the language of my new home country. Unfortunately it is not related to Russian so I will be starting from zero. I will be posting my progress on my other blog and YouTube channel so make sure to subscribe to follow my language learning journey.

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