Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

January has been a good start to the year for my Russian acquisition journey. I started 1-on-1 Comprehensible Input lessons, did a little bit of grammar study and increased my active and passive listening.  I spent more time listening to D&D streams again because I was getting bored of listening to the Speakly. However with some of the stories I have gotten the number of unknown words down to less than 50 (using LingQ) so it might soon be time to work with the Speakly app again in order to unlock some new monologues. January '21 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 36:14 hours Active watching or Listening: 4:09 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 0 hours Reading with Audio: 2:28 hours Reading with no Audio: 0 hours Active Study: 2:19 hours Personal Lessons: 2:45 hours Total: 47:56 hours Daily Average: 1:33 hours Totals Since August 2020 Passive watching and listening: 401:28 hours Active watching or Listening: 40:09 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 63:60 hours Reading with Aud...

A couple of weeks ago I started taking Russian lessons with a local tutor. We're using comprehensible input, so the tutor tells me a story using images and short sentences for me read and listen along to. The sessions last 30 minutes and there's time for me to ask questions for clarification. I write down new words and get occasional explanations of grammar but I'm not putting any pressure on myself to remember anything. I sometimes practice reading out particular words but there's no need for me to produce output. I don't think these lessons are strictly necessary as part of my current language strategy, I could continue progressing with what I've been doing over the past couple of months. But I think it's good to introduce new activities to keep things interesting for myself.  For the moment I've stopped passively listening to the Speakly stories and gone back to listening to D&D streams. I've listened to those stories for more than 100 hours o...

  Half way through December I caught the Omicron variation of COVID which coincided with time off work for Christmas and New Year. I took the opportunity to keep away from screens as much as possible and then stopped studying Russian for two weeks. As you can see this resulted in my average for the month dropping to 30 minutes per day. I started back into my usual routine yesterday and definitely noticed it being slightly more difficult to understand what I was reading. It makes me weary of taking time off for longer than two weeks. I don't have any particular resolutions when it comes to acquiring Russian other than to stick to the routine I've developed. But I would really like to increase the number of hours.  I'm going to try out some online 'lessons' but only if I can find a tutor / teacher that can facilitate my approach with comprehensible input. I would like to practice output (speaking) but I don't feel the need to force myself to hit particular goals. ...

Last month I only provided an update on my statistics so let me go into a little more detail about my studies today. It seems I've logged the most amount of time on Russian since March 2021. It might be the case that with the weather getting noticeably colder I'm spending more time inside. I'm still nowhere near mass immersion as per the Refold.la method, but at least I'm consistent. Over the course of 15 months I've dedicated just under an hour a day to Russian. Over the course of this period I dabbled with various approaches and over the past 6 months I've adapted the Refold strategy in a way that suits me right now.  My main source of content is stories and monologues from the  Speakly  app since they cover everyday topics that I want to be able to understand and speak. Things like family, travel, food, hobbies etc. I usually don't have the patience for watching shows, although I go through phases where I watch some episodes. I do occasionally watch Comp...

October '21 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 24:38 hours Active watching or Listening: 0:35 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 0 hours Active Study: 1:04 hours Total: 27:39 hours Daily Average: 0:53 hours

Passive listening was mostly of Speakly stories, Reading with Audio was Glossika and Active Study was done with LingQ, mostly the beginner stories and dialogues. I read a little bit about grammar in the Penguin book and I started watching a Russian drama show called  СОДЕРЖА́НКА  which literally translates as Kept Women but which is titled as Gold Diggers on the streaming platform I used. I've been watching it with English subtitles but I feel like I can understand  quite  bit of dialogue. While the show is enjoyable it's not really convinced me to spend a lot more time on Russian media. It just doesn't provide the language density that I want. I'm currently watching the 5th out of 8 episodes and once I'm done I'll switch back to focussing on the Speakly stories and supplement it with Russian YouTube channels like Comprehensible Russian, Easy Russian and Russian With Max which are more beneficial to me. September '21 Statistics Passive watching and listening...

No time for an in depth report this month. Passive listening was mostly of Speakly stories, Reading with Audio was Glossika and Active Study with LingQ, mostly the beginner stories and dialogues. August '21 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 19:01 hours Active watching or Listening: 0 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 0 hours Reading with Audio: 4:57 hours Active Study: 4:40 hours Total: 28:39 hours Daily Average: 0:55 hours