Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I'm working through the Fluent Forever pronunciation trainer and I'm struggling to hear the difference between Ш and Щ. I've found some videos that try to explain the difference but it really depends on who is speaking. I can hear a difference in Fedor's video. To me Ш sounds like "shuh" and Щ sounds like "sheh". But with Alina I can't hear any difference. However I'm not sure if the difference I'm picking up in Fedor's video is the important one because I'm not sure how that would work if it's followed by a vowel.

I've started noticing random Russian words popping into my head. Sometimes I know its meaning, sometimes I don't. Today it was  игрушка / toy  which is part of the pronunciation course I'm following. If I can't remember the meaning of the word I just use Google Translate on my phone to quickly find out. I just have to be sure that I'm pronouncing the word correctly.

As I mentioned yesterday I've started to notice why some people advise to not start reading or speaking too early. While I can read a lot of Cyrillic I've noticed that I sometimes pronounce words the wrong way. I think I do a good job 60% of the time but I'm weary of building bad habits that will be hard to change for the other 40%. While a word like   слова is easy enough, I'm not sure I'm really getting the nuances of words like  который or маленький correct. Unfortunately I can't erase the Cyrillic script from my mind and  as someone that is actively learning Russian I can't but help notice Cyrillic on the internet. To fix this as best I can I'm going to do the following. 1. Train my ear to better recognise the Russian phonemes with this video series provided by Fluent Forever and the accompanying Anki deck. 2. Train my mouth to better pronounce the Russian phonemes. 3. Adjust how I'm learning the 625 words. I mentioned that I've been creatin...

I recently discovered that included with the 625 words pdf are audio recordings of each word. After listening to them I realised that I was pronouncing a couple of words in the wrong way. And it's noticeable how difficult it is to override a wrongly remembered pronunciation. This shows to me the importance of learning it correctly the first time. While someone like Steve Kaufmann has learned multiple languages through a lot of reading, from what I can tell he has a strong accent and that's something I want to avoid as much as possible.  An interview he does with Matt vs Japan shows that while he can speak it well he has a poor accent compared to Matt, who has only focused on Japanese with a Mass Immersion / All Japanese All The Time approach.  26:46 / 30:21 Steve Kaufmann & Matt vs. Japan Discuss Hardcore Language Learning  (I've linked to the part of the video where they speak Japanese with each other). From now on I'm going to review the included recordings e...