Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I found a list of 750 Russian / English cognates to quickly boost your vocabulary. I probably know a lot of these already but it will be useful to have a quick look over these for any I wasn't aware of. In order to get the words list you need to sign up to newsletter but you don't have to buy anything. 750 Russian / English Cognates This list was created by Ari who has a YouTube channel dedicated to learning Russian:  Learn The Russian Language

I spent a week in a country that has quite a few Russian speakers and managed to have a few short conversations with people from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Azerbaijan. I also overheard several Russian conversations in public places. While the conversations weren't in depth it was great to converse with 'native' speakers. I was complemented on my accent and was taken seriously as a learner, not someone who has just learned to say привет and cпасибо. Just some more positive feedback and motivational fuel to keep me going.

March Statistics Passive watching and listening: 6:22 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching or Listening: 5:59 hours (Comprehensible Input, YouTube but mostly Speakly) Vocabulary and Sentences: 7:05 hours (Anki) Reading with Audio: 12:27 hours (Speakly and Glossika, 7748 reps, 464 sentences) Active Study: 15:23 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 206 words) Total: 47:16 hours We're almost half way through April but I never got around to doing the March report. Here it is! There's been a 38% increase in the amount of time I've been studying every day compared to February. From 1:13 hours per day to 1:41 hours per day. It's the most time I've dedicated to Russian this year and approaching the same amount of time as when I first started last year.  The difference between now and then is that in the beginning I was spending a lot of time on passive immersion such as listening to Dungeons & Dragons streams, watching comprehensible input videos on YouTube and watching s...

There are many different websites, YouTube channels, podcasts and FaceBook groups and pages about learning Russian but here's one that looks particularly interesting to me because it's all about Russian memes, jokes, idioms and everyday culture. They have quite detailed breakdowns of the language used. Absolute Russian

February Statistics Passive watching and listening: 4:29 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching: 3:15 hours (Comprehensible input and shows) Vocabulary and Sentences: 9:02 hours (Anki) Reading with Audio: 10:36 hours (Glossika, 5522 reps, 314 sentences) Active Study: 6:52 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 206 words) Total: 34:15 hours So in January, after 6 months of acquiring Russian, I experienced my first dip in motivation. I was not enjoying myself as much as I had been before and I think this was mostly because I had some other things going on in my life rather than anything specifically to do with this project. Despite my lack of motivation I did not miss a single day of Anki and Glossika revisions. Towards the end of the month I started to feel better and I anticipated thing would be different in February. Judging by the numbers alone things haven't really changed. But I am positive about my progress, and I'll discuss why later.  I did half as much passive listening and s...

Because I wasn't not working much in January (I'm a freelancer) my passive listening hours declined a lot. My other hobbies and interests require my full attention so when I'm not working I can't listen to Russian.  I was also struggling to watch Russian content. Because I normally I don't spend much time watching shows. If I do watch something it's YouTube about very specific topics. I'm not yet at the point where I can watch that kind of content in Russian so I have to make do with what is within my grasp. The challenge however is that I feel restless when watching sitcoms and such things. In the background I also had a lot of other stuff on my mind and I was really focused on trying to get my general wellbeing back to where it was. Simple things like making sure I was sleeping enough, eating right and exercising. But I did continue with studying my Anki deck and Glossika reps every single day. It would have been great if I could have consolidated that eff...

I haven't felt very motivated with my Russian studies this past two weeks. I wanted to increase the amount of time spent on passive and active immersion but it hasn't been happening. The last time I watched an episode of  кухня was on the 9th of January and I haven't done any passive immersion since the 8th. I'm not working at the moment which explains why I haven't been passively immersing. So that's not really concerning to me. As I've mentioned before I rarely watch shows or films in my free time so it's not necessarily enjoyable to me even if it's contributing to my Russian. I also haven't been doing so called 'intensive active immersion' either (reading along with a TV show and trying to understand every single sentence). I've been watching Comprehensible Russian videos but only in short bursts. I have been keeping up with my Anki deck and Glossika so that's a positive. However I'm aware that learning to recognise words ...

So far the amount of time I've been spending on Active Immersion has been proportionally quite low. I think this was somewhat compensated for by watching Comprehensible Input videos that are easy for me to grasp. Initially I wasn't employing the correct vocabulary strategy so I might not have been able to make the most of Active Immersion anyway. But for the past two months I've been working through an Anki deck (1000 most frequent words) in recognition mode only (I'm prompted with the Russian word and have to remember what it means in English). Since I'm nearing the half-way point I thought it would be a good idea to rebalance my various studying activities. I've found a great free website which hosts various TV shows with full native subtitles ( 3ears.com ) on which I've been watching the sitcom  кухня . I approach it as follows. First I watch a full episode in so called free-flow mode. I just watch it without reading the subtitles and do my best to follow...

December Statistics Passive watching and listening: 37:25 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching: 3:46 hours (Mostly comprehensible input) Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 13:42 hours (Anki) Active Study: 1:14 minutes (Grammar) Total: 56:09 hours December was a good month for me although my routine was interrupted. On the 23rd of December I finished my work contract and wasn't behind the laptop as much, which meant that my passive immersions was almost reduced to zero. The one thing that stayed consistent was studying the Anki decks.  Initially I was adding 10 new words per day but I found that I was struggling with retention and had to repeat words over and over again to get them to stick. Since then I've dropped down to 7 new words which seems more manageable. I wouldn't mind spending more time with Anki but I want to be efficient. I'm still revising Xefjord's  200 words and phrases  which is now down to less than 2 minutes a day.   I randomly found ...

I'm watching one of Inna's comprehensible Russian videos and had a couple of thoughts that I want to share. 1. Working my way through the 1000 most common words Anki deck is really useful. I sometimes hear words that I would never be able to pick up through context alone and it really aids my understanding of the content. I'd say on average I know the meaning of the 'new' word 50% of the time, the other 50% I recognise it and have to remind myself of its meaning with the Google translate app. Most of the time it helps me to find the meaning but occasionally I can't seem to pronounce it correctly or get translations that I don't recognise. I don't worry about it and just move on. 2. Occasionally I'm still trying to mentally translate words from Russian to English as I hear them. It's partly to confirm to myself that I know the meaning of each word and partly to more accurately understand the meaning of utterances and sentences. While this might fe...

I dusted off the copy of  the New Penguin Russian Course  I bought a couple of years ago and decided to start reading up on Russian grammar, a full 4 months after my decision to acquire Russian with a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion Approach. I quickly skipped the first two chapters which cover how to read the Cyrillic script and encountered the first grammar lesson in chapter 3. 1. There is no present tense of 'to be' ('am', 'is', 'are') 2. No equivalent of the articles 'a' and 'the' 3. The word это has multiple meanings, including 'this', 'that' and sometimes 'it' 4. All Russian nouns are either masculine (он), feminine (она) it (оно)   or neuter. 5. Masculine nouns normally end with a consonant or й. 6. Feminine nouns normally end with a or я. Although words that specifically denote men are masculine.  7. Neuter nouns end with o or e. 8. Most nouns ending with ь are feminine but there are masculine words w...

November Statistics Passive watching and listening: 58:58 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching: 3:07 hours (Mostly comprehensible input) Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 8:01 hours (Anki) Reading with audio: 0:30 minutes (Dialogue) Total: 70:36 hours November was another lockdown month here in London which meant I was able to spend more time on my  Russian acquisition mission. As I mentioned in previous posts I reassessed how I was spending my time  half way through the month. I stopped using the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer  because I had reached the point of diminishing returns and I refocused my attention on increasing my passive vocabulary. Although I said I would spend more time on Fluent Forever's  The Most Awesome Word List You Have Ever Seen , that didn't end up happening.  Instead I spent roughly 10 minutes a day on Xefjord's  200 words and phrases  and 10 minutes on a frequency deck of the 1000 most used Russian words...

Last week I wrote about reassessing my approach to language learning and how I realised that I was spending time on output without realising it. In effect I had strayed away from a strict input first / mass immersion approach. Since that post I no longer practice producing Russian when prompted by English. So when I'm working through Xefjord's Anki deck for example, I suspend the English to Russian cards. I'm aiming to understand spoken Russian only, not speak it. I've also found a set of frequency decks from 1000 to 10,000 words . These decks are for recognition of Russian only. My work with the first deck has somewhat overtaken my efforts with the 625 words although it is not my intention to stop with that book.  The types of words that I'm learning with the frequency deck are especially useful because it contains a lot of conjunctions, words such as 'and', 'or', 'but', 'so','for' etc. These contain a lot of meaning and allo...

 This video was in my YouTube feed and in my opinion it's a much clearer explanation of the difference between Ш and Щ. I'm saving it here in case anyone needs help with it.

This week I've finished studying the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer and I've also finished watching all the of the  Zero Beginners Comprehensible Russian  videos at least once (many several times). Other than that my activities include passively listening to  Dungeons & Dragons streams , memorising vocabulary using  The Fluent Forever 625 important words  and Xefjord's Basic Word and Phrases Deck  as well as a little bit of reading of real dialogue subtitles on YouTube. BTW, if you want to see a detailed breakdown of exactly what I've been spending my time on then have a look here:  Google Doc: Russian Study Log This week I found Matt vs Japan's new website  Refold.la  which has a roadmap detailing his method. In case you don't know Matt has attained a near native level of Japanese by basically combining mass immersion of input with vocabulary and phrase training (for recognition purposes) using Anki.  While it's not my aim t...

On the 23rd of September I started using the Anki Deck:  Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer  and I've spent almost exactly 9 hours studying with it. On average 10 minutes a day, occasionally up to 15 or 20 minutes if I missed a session. Over the past couple of weeks the average time has come down to 3 to 10 minutes and I haven't noticed any new cards come up for a while. At this point the hardest cards are those that ask me to spell words after hearing them, but writing isn't something I'm particularly interested in right now. Generally I am pretty good with spelling what I hear but as an example I still struggle to hear and to place soft signs ( Ь ) if they appear the middle of words. All in all I feel that there's little benefit to continuing considering my focus right now is on listening and understanding spoken Russian. If someone had absolutely no experience with Russian then I would recommend this training deck. You'll learn the Russian script and your f...

I've said before that I've been in two minds about reading Russian. People like Steve Kaufmann advocate reading as soon as possible and while he is able to acquire languages quite quickly, his accents in each one are usually not that great. Other people say that you shouldn't start reading until you've been listening for hundreds or even thousands of hours. For me the most important aspect in all my endeavours is that I need to be able to do it sustainably over the long term. Whether it's exercise, a hobby or a business idea I always think about how I can incorporate it into my life in such a way that I will put in consistent effort, week after week, month after month. After just over two months I can definitely say that the current approach is more enjoyable and more sustainable than my previous attempts (Michel Thomas, Duolingo, Memrise).  But I do want to give myself some variety to keep things interesting so I've decided that a good middle ground is to read ...

This is the first month where I was somewhat back into a normal routine with my work and social life. So the time that I was spending on acquiring Russian in the last 30 days might be indicative of what I can sustain in the long term, at least over the winter months. August Passive watching and listening: 31:28 hours Active watching: 2:32 hours Vocabulary: 1:38 hours Total: 35:38 hours September Passive watching and listening: 11:27 hours Active watching: 1:14 hours Vocabulary: 3:56 hours Total: 16:37 hours October Passive watching and listening: 35:53 hours Active watching: 1:47  hours Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 8:03 hours Reading with audio: 7:29 minutes Total: 42:51 hours You can find my study log here:  Google Doc: Russian Study Log September was a transition month for me but I've settled back into a new routine. I increased my passive listening time since I can do that while working. On average I listen to an hour of Russian a day but in reality I'm listenin...

While listening to a Dungeons & Dragons stream I experienced my best moment of understanding real spoken Russian.  The game master was describing a magician who was wearing a tall turban made out of some notable material. His magic was derived from astronomical knowledge involving the sun and stars.  It was just two or three sentences but my comprehension was high with almost no translating happening in my mind. I heard the words and I saw the image in my mind. I understood some words like   тюрбан , because they are similar to English. Others were words that I acquired from the 625 words list or from watching comprehensible input videos.

It seems that the consensus is that native English speakers have the worst Russian accent. Have a look at some of the comments I found on a Reddit thread.  I wonder if this is to English speakers in general? I'd like to think I have a better ear than average for the nuances of languages but I may be wrong!  Anyway, this is one of the reasons I'm spending so much time listening to native speakers. It's not that I would feel self-conscious with a strong accent. I want to make myself understood as clearly as possible and make the experiences painless as I can for the listener. "English accent, though,  ugh. Especially the Judoon-grade chunkiness. Can. Someone? Figure! Out. Intonation? Already! Might be biased because that's the kind of Russian our crappy Hollywood representations tend to speak. The analogy I like to use is, English is like a pulsating spectrum analyzer (the thing with the bars for different frequencies); whereas Russian is like a rollercoaster — with ...