Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

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...

I dusted off the copy of  the New Penguin Russian Course  I bought a couple of years ago and decided to start reading up on Russian grammar, a full 4 months after my decision to acquire Russian with a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion Approach. I quickly skipped the first two chapters which cover how to read the Cyrillic script and encountered the first grammar lesson in chapter 3. 1. There is no present tense of 'to be' ('am', 'is', 'are') 2. No equivalent of the articles 'a' and 'the' 3. The word это has multiple meanings, including 'this', 'that' and sometimes 'it' 4. All Russian nouns are either masculine (он), feminine (она) it (оно)   or neuter. 5. Masculine nouns normally end with a consonant or й. 6. Feminine nouns normally end with a or я. Although words that specifically denote men are masculine.  7. Neuter nouns end with o or e. 8. Most nouns ending with ь are feminine but there are masculine words w...

November Statistics Passive watching and listening: 58:58 hours (Mostly listening) Active watching: 3:07 hours (Mostly comprehensible input) Pronunciation, Vocabulary and Sentences: 8:01 hours (Anki) Reading with audio: 0:30 minutes (Dialogue) Total: 70:36 hours November was another lockdown month here in London which meant I was able to spend more time on my  Russian acquisition mission. As I mentioned in previous posts I reassessed how I was spending my time  half way through the month. I stopped using the Fluent Forever Pronunciation Trainer  because I had reached the point of diminishing returns and I refocused my attention on increasing my passive vocabulary. Although I said I would spend more time on Fluent Forever's  The Most Awesome Word List You Have Ever Seen , that didn't end up happening.  Instead I spent roughly 10 minutes a day on Xefjord's  200 words and phrases  and 10 minutes on a frequency deck of the 1000 most used Russian words...

Last week I wrote about reassessing my approach to language learning and how I realised that I was spending time on output without realising it. In effect I had strayed away from a strict input first / mass immersion approach. Since that post I no longer practice producing Russian when prompted by English. So when I'm working through Xefjord's Anki deck for example, I suspend the English to Russian cards. I'm aiming to understand spoken Russian only, not speak it. I've also found a set of frequency decks from 1000 to 10,000 words . These decks are for recognition of Russian only. My work with the first deck has somewhat overtaken my efforts with the 625 words although it is not my intention to stop with that book.  The types of words that I'm learning with the frequency deck are especially useful because it contains a lot of conjunctions, words such as 'and', 'or', 'but', 'so','for' etc. These contain a lot of meaning and allo...

 This video was in my YouTube feed and in my opinion it's a much clearer explanation of the difference between Ш and Щ. I'm saving it here in case anyone needs help with it.