Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

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

Exactly one year ago I decided to 'Acquire' Russian! I had several aborted attempts over the years with apps like Duolingo and courses like Michel Thomas. When the world plunged into COVID related lockdowns I decided I was going to make the most of the extra time I had and finally get to grips with this language.  You can read my plan in my first post here:  An experiment in acquiring Russian the natural way . In short: I discovered various methods that emphasised Input first and set up this blog to track my plan to acquire Russian. The first thing I'd like to say is that I feel happy about the time I spent with Russian over the past year. Overall I've enjoyed myself and I feel motivated to continue exposing myself to the language. I think this is really important because whatever you do in life, you have to be motivated! While I thought I'd be further along and would have achieved more by now I have to remember that spent time trying different approaches before I f...

Although I felt like I was getting back into Russian properly this month it seems the stats don't bear this out. My daily average was the exact same and the type of activities I did were reduced. My passive listening consisted of listening to D&D streams and Speakly stories. I feel like listening to the Speakly stories (even if passively), is the most beneficial for me at this point because I'm also spending my active study time on them. However the streams are good to break up the monotony of listening to the same voices over and over. The conversation in streams is also completely natural which is important to get to grips with.  When I was actively studying the Speakly stories I picked out particular words (not all) that I didn't know and would note them in spreadsheet and would look up the translation. I realised this was taking up valuable time and it's precisely the type of activity that LingQ was made for. So I signed up for it and imported the first Speakly ...

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