Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I forgot to do an update for June. As I mentioned in my last post the contract I was working on was not conducive to my studies and I had some issues with in my personal life I had to deal with. The best I could do this month was listen to some D&D YouTubers. So far in July things are going a bit better. I'm focusing on close reading of the Speakly stories. Trying to understand as much as I can without looking at the translation, then picking out a few words to learn.  For the moment I've stopped using the app to learn more words (currently at 700) because new stories are being added continually before I can really understand them. Once I'm satisfied I have a good grasp of the 14 stories unlocked so far I will continue learning new words. June Statistics Passive watching and listening: 11:23 hours Active watching or Listening: 0 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 6:44 hours Reading with Audio: 0 hours Active Study: 2:20 hours Total: 13:50 hours Daily Average: 0:27 hours

May Statistics Passive watching and listening: 22:54 hours (Mostly listening to Speakly stories) Active watching or Listening: 0:6 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:37 hours (Anki) Reading with Audio: 1:42 hours Active Study: 1:20 hours Music: Stopped counting, have been listening to Russian music when I can. Total: 26:40 hours Daily Average: 0:51 hours Well that was a bad month. In May I really struggled to put in as much time as I wanted to. I've been working a new contract which takes a lot of concentration and has left me quite tired when I finish. I haven't been able to listen passively as much during working hours, because it's been too distracting. The only thing I've been able to do (occasionally) is listen to the Speakly stories. Usually in two or three hour binges when I go for a walk in the park on weekends. My daily average was not as uniformly spread across the days as in previous months. The problem is that I haven't had time to actively study some of ...

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April Statistics Passive watching and listening: 4:49 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching or Listening: 3:27 hours (Comprehensible Input, YouTube but mostly Speakly) Vocabulary and Sentences: 1:03 hours (Anki) Reading with Audio: 10:48 hours (Speakly and Glossika, 9943 reps, 604 sentences) Active Study: 12:40 hours (Mostly the app Speakly, 757 words) Music: 4:08 (Singing and listening) Total: 36:55 hours I don't have much to say about the past month. I've settled into a good routing mostly focused around Speakly, Glossika and watching YouTube videos (Comprehensible Russian, Easy Russian).  While I've been diligent with listening to the Speakly stories often I haven't been consistent with the intense / active study of them. That would entail really breaking down the stories sentence by sentence and word by word until I understand the whole thing. This means that with some of the later stories I only have a vague sense of what is being talked about. That's someth...

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...

Over the past couple of months I've been working through a deck of the 1000 most frequently used Russian words and today I 'finished'. By that I mean, I was shown my last set of new words. Of course I will continue to work to get more of those words into my long term memory. In a couple of weeks I might start adding back a couple of suspended cards per day but I'm conscious that there's a reason I struggled with those words in the first place and that they are probably better acquired within context. This Anki deck is very simple, the Russian word with audio on one side and the English translation on the other. No pictures, not context. The aim is recognition only (see the Russian word and know what it means) but not recall (see the English word and translate it to Russian). That is fine for this stage of acquiring vocabulary but in the long term I need to acquire words within the context of sentences, conversations and writing. Anki Stats New: 0 Young: 189 Mature: ...

My big passion in life is music so I'm interested to listen to Russian music and possibly use it as another way to learn the language.  I've found an artists called Hensy that had a big hit last year with the song  Поболело и прошло . I think it's a great tune and it's very similar to some of the music I've been working on myself.  I've been listening and singing along to this song  almost  every day over the past week and the words are starting to  stick  in my head. It's a simple song to play on the guitar so my aim is to be able to play it myself. I wonder how difficult it will be to play it (without reading the lyrics at the same time) as a language that I'm still learning? Do any of my readers have experience in learning songs in a different language?