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...

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...