Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

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 ...

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 ...

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...

While I was researching how to learn Russian a couple of months ago I stumbled upon the Latin learning community. It turns out that there are people learning it as a living, spoken language. Not only that, there are in fact comprehensible input resources to help people learn it.  Specifically there is a book series called Lingua Latina which teaches the reader Latin without using any other languages. Everything is written in Latin, starting with very simple sentences and working up to authentic Roman texts. Many people believe that it is not only the best book that's ever been written to teach people Latin, it's the best book for that purpose for any language. Now prior to this I was aware that Latin like Russian uses a case system. Although until recently I only had a vague idea of what that means. That words have different forms depending on the context they are presenting. So I decided to look up how Latin grammar works and I stumbled up on a page which explains some of the...