Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

In the beginning of my Russian acquisition journey I discovered Gabriel Wyner from Fluent Forever who created very useful courses for learning to distinguish the different phonemes in various languages, as well as a book that helps you learn 625 useful beginner words. My attention drifted away from that list as I put more time into using apps like LingQ and Speakly but today I had a look through the full list to see how many of those words I still don't recognise. I counted 244 unrecognised words, 39% of the total in the book. I might create an Anki deck for them or load them into ListLang (probably the latter) because they are useful words that cover everyday topics and situations.

  January has been an interesting month for my Russian acquisition journey. While my average daily time with Russian hasn't changed much compared to December, there's been a shift in the type of activities I've been doing. More passive listening (probably due to getting back to the gym), a big drop in active studying which is due to not spending as much time in LingQ and Speakly and starting lessons with a new tutor.  Also, I took a trip abroad for a week which meant the hours were accumulated across around 25 days. It wasn't my intention to avoid active studying  (LingQ and Speakly), it just worked out that way. It's my intention to spend more time on those activities again. Someone on the Refold Discord channel highly recommends forging ahead with Speakly. Up until now I've been holding back somewhat, only using it to unlock new monologues / stories when I need them. I've finished working through the Anki deck for  Roots of the Russian Language . These 333...

  First an overview of December, then a look back at 2022 as a whole. December '22 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 10:15 hours Active watching or listening: 0:54 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 5:24 hours Reading with Audio: 0 hours Reading with no Audio: 3:10 hours Active Study: 13:57 hours Personal Lessons: 0 hours Conversation: 0 hours Total: 33:40 hours Daily Average: 1:07 hours Activities breakdown:  I wasn't working over the Christmas and New Years period so spent a lot less time than normal on Passive Listening and more on Active study; LingQ and Speakly. I reached some milestones over the past month. On the 24th of December I finished Beginner 1 in LingQ with about 1800 words known. Today I'm at about 2000 known words. It should be noted that on that platform the different inflections of the same word are counted as separate words. I finished reading the 60 mini-stories on the 26th of December. I don't know 100% of all the words in those stories but I...

  I'm not sure how much I've been progressing recently but I can say that I'm very motivated and I'm enjoying myself. The ListLang app is a great way to practice vocabulary and reading, and I'm able to use it whenever I have a spare moment. The Speakly app is more comprehensive but I don't want to progress too far with it until I have a better understanding of the monologues that I've already unlocked. On the LingQ forums I've found a user name named Peter Bormann who advocates something called Ultra Reading which is basically reading while listening, something that I've also speculated to be an efficient method of learning. However he says it doesn't really become powerful until you have 10 - 15,000 LingQs. He believes that you can increase your speed at that point and get to a point where you can read 3 - 6,000 words in half an hour. Then you'll be able to make big gains in understanding within 6 to 9 months. I'm don't necessarily c...

  In this video Steve from LingQ talks about applying the 80/20 rule to learning a language. He says that it can be a somewhat misleading goal to aim towards because the true meaning in any text or speech is only really understood with that last 20, 10, 5% or less of the vocabulary. According to Steve the reality is that you don't need kneed to know just a couple of thousands words you need to know tens of thousands of words. We're talking 20, 30, 40k at least. But what do we mean by 'need'. Need for what purpose? What I've been thinking about as I've undergone this language learning / acquisition journey is which words do I need and for what purpose Because different people have different goals for learning a language.  Steve often mentions how we wants to be able to read literature in the native language. Obviously that requires a different and much larger vocabulary than someone who wants to be able to order a meal in a restaurant.  Many people advocate read...

Here's a list of YouTube channels that I've watched since starting to learn Russian or have subscribed to with the intent of watching later.  This isn't an exhaustive list of what you can find. These are channels that either explicitly feature content made with Comprehensible Input or TPRS  principles in mind ( Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) or feature content that can be used for that purpose. 1420 - Sreet Interviews About Russian in Russian Boost Your Russian Comprehensible Russian Easy Languages Easy Russian Fluent Forever: Russian LingQ: Russian Podcast Real Russian Club Russian From Afar Russian With Max Your Russian Вечерние Кости (Dungeons & Dragons streams) If you have any other suggestions please leave a comment below.

I started learning Russian in the Summer of 2020. It's been surreal to watch the invasion of Ukraine unfold over the past year. Up until then I was watching YouTubers from both Russia and Ukraine going about their normal day to day life and now many of them have left their home country. When I read about the atrocities being committed against Ukrainian people it feels like I'm learning German in the 1940s. What's kept me going initially was the momentum I had built up in actually successfully acquiring a new language. Now I'm actually starting to have simple conversations with people and I've spoke to people from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Lithuania. Anyway, I wanted to unequivocally state again that I'm against the war. Donate to Ukraine here: www.defendukraine.org www.dec.org.uk www.redcross.org.uk/get-involved/donate/donation-questions/emergency-appeals/ukraine-crisis-appeal-faqs