Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

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...

I signed up for Glossika a week ago and it's having some kind of effect on me. I'm not sure if this is actually contributing to my acquisition of Russian though. I guess I'll have to wait and see. At the moment I'm only using it read and listen to, then repeat, the provided phrases. I'm not writing or translating from English to Russian. I'm noticing some of these sentences popping into my head throughout the day. Which makes sense because I'm saying them out loud over and over. As I've mentioned before the Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion / Refold method usually advocates to wait with output. One of the reasons is that the speaker might ingrain bad habits such as poor grammar or a bad pronunciation. With Glossika I'm repeating what I hope are grammatically correct sentences and as far as I can tell I'm now good enough at pronunciation from listening to hours and hours of native Russian. So at the very least I don't think I'm doing a...

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 ...

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 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.