Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

While listening to a Dungeons & Dragons stream I experienced my best moment of understanding real spoken Russian.  The game master was describing a magician who was wearing a tall turban made out of some notable material. His magic was derived from astronomical knowledge involving the sun and stars.  It was just two or three sentences but my comprehension was high with almost no translating happening in my mind. I heard the words and I saw the image in my mind. I understood some words like   тюрбан , because they are similar to English. Others were words that I acquired from the 625 words list or from watching comprehensible input videos.

It seems that the consensus is that native English speakers have the worst Russian accent. Have a look at some of the comments I found on a Reddit thread.  I wonder if this is to English speakers in general? I'd like to think I have a better ear than average for the nuances of languages but I may be wrong!  Anyway, this is one of the reasons I'm spending so much time listening to native speakers. It's not that I would feel self-conscious with a strong accent. I want to make myself understood as clearly as possible and make the experiences painless as I can for the listener. "English accent, though,  ugh. Especially the Judoon-grade chunkiness. Can. Someone? Figure! Out. Intonation? Already! Might be biased because that's the kind of Russian our crappy Hollywood representations tend to speak. The analogy I like to use is, English is like a pulsating spectrum analyzer (the thing with the bars for different frequencies); whereas Russian is like a rollercoaster — with ...

I found a great set of Anki decks posted on Reddit aimed at getting people to 'survival level' in 50 different languages. Here's a direct link to the Russian deck:  Xefjord's Complete Russian Anki Deck .  I'll experiment with spending a couple of minutes a day on this deck. I haven't had good experiences with previous attempts at rote memorisation of stock phrases. But perhaps it will be easier now that I'm spending time on immersion and comprehensible input. I'm not looking to speak (force output) for a number of months so this will be a very low priority for me. But if I bump into any Russian speakers over the next few months (I live in London so it does happen) it would be nice to be able to say something. From the reddit post: "Xefjord's Complete Language Series  is a project I started a little over a year ago to teach every known living language to a "survival" level. Survival level being a term I created to refer to the ability t...

I'm working through the Fluent Forever pronunciation trainer and I'm struggling to hear the difference between Ш and Щ. I've found some videos that try to explain the difference but it really depends on who is speaking. I can hear a difference in Fedor's video. To me Ш sounds like "shuh" and Щ sounds like "sheh". But with Alina I can't hear any difference. However I'm not sure if the difference I'm picking up in Fedor's video is the important one because I'm not sure how that would work if it's followed by a vowel.

I'll aim to do a monthly report about my Russian acquisition journey and since I didn't do one for August this will be a double feature! My background: I made several attempts to learn Russian over the past couple of years. I had a maximum vocabulary of around 50 words which I learned through a combination of Anki, Memrise, Duo Lingo, Babbel and Michel Thomas. I learned the Cyrillic script although I was conscious I wasn't pronouncing all the words correctly. My knowledge of grammar was and is still non existent.  Besides English I'm also fluent in another West European language (I won't say which, but it's one of Danish, Dutch and German). I was raised bilingually so I have first hand knowledge of acquiring a language through immersion only. Later I attended primary school and secondary school in both language environments but I was reading in both languages regardless of where I was going to school. Fast forward to the summer of 2020 and I was once again inspi...

It might just be my imagination but I think my ability to concentrate while watching Russian Comprehensible Input is improving. My main source of Russian CI is the wonderful channel:  Comprehensible Russian  specifically the Zero Beginners playlist . When I first started watching these videos a couple of weeks ago I could only watch one per day, even though they are very short. Perhaps because I had to concentrate very hard to follow what was being shown and to try and grasp as much meaning as I could. But lately I've been finding it easier to watch a couple of new videos in a row, plus rewatch some I previously looked at. Perhaps it's because I have an increased vocabulary and because I've become more used to spoken Russian? That would seem the most logical explanation. Let's see how long this lasts. Will it continue if I'm watching a video for the 4th or 5th time? Will comprehending and understanding more make it easier to consume more input or will I need to swit...

I've started noticing random Russian words popping into my head. Sometimes I know its meaning, sometimes I don't. Today it was  игрушка / toy  which is part of the pronunciation course I'm following. If I can't remember the meaning of the word I just use Google Translate on my phone to quickly find out. I just have to be sure that I'm pronouncing the word correctly.