Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

I've found my motivation again. I think the main cause is that I demonstrably have a basic level of Russian comprehension. For example, yesterday a friend posted a meme on Instagram and I could understand the whole text (it was only about 12 words and I knew all of them except one). Of course since I'm not practicing my output I'm unaware of the mountain ahead of me, but for now I'm enjoying playing in the foot hills. My passive listening this month was mostly of the Speakly stories (I go through periods of listening to them and then I'll spend a couple of weeks listening to RPG YouTube channels) and my active study was of those same stories in LingQ. BTW I just discovered the LingQ mini stories that Steve Kaufmann is always talking about. Somehow I had always missed them (although I blame the interface for that). They seem to showcase different aspect of grammar which is useful. June '22 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 22:07 hours Active watching or ...

I thought I'd just write a quick update to say that my motivation has returned. I don't want to give readers and fellow Russian learners the impression that I'm giving up.  It's normal to have ups and downs with any long term project and it's understandable to have conflicting feelings due to the invasion of Ukraine. I had to reconnect with some of the core motivations; learning to speak another language and pursuing an intellectual challenge. I've been focussing on the absolute core activities which is passively listening to the Speakly stories and reading and listening to them with LingQ. I also spent 10 minutes in the Speakly App for the first time in months. I'm not a big fan of the fill-in-the-blank speaking exercises but it's a necessary evil in order to unlock more monologues. I've noticed that Speakly now allows me to skip those sections, I need to think about whether they are useful to do or not. I've unlocked 14 stories and I've rea...

I've been lacking in the motivation to keep learning Russian over the past couple of months due to the invasion of Ukraine. When I started I was excited at the prospect of one day visiting Russia and Ukraine. In fact I would have liked to have gone this summer. It makes me question whether to even continue. What is my relation going to be with the language going forward? At the moment I feel I've come so far that I might as well keep going. I'm not sure if that's a sunk cost fallacy or not. I do want to learn to speak another language and I don't have any particular interest in any other language so right now it's mostly an intellectual challenge. Perhaps that will be enough for now. As you can see the time spent on activities (and the variety) has dipped considerably. My aim is to at least increase the variety if not the absolute times. BTW here are some links in case you want to donate towards charities that help Ukraine: www.defendukraine.org www.dec.org.uk w...

Over the weekend I had my first attempt to speak some Russian in a real setting. In a way this was my first real attempt not counting interactions with a tutor. (I've had to suspend my tutoring sessions because my tutor is Ukranian and her family and friends are suffering due to the invasion by Russia). I was in a bar where I happened to meet two Russian speaking Lithuanians. I jumped at the chance to say something but only managed to get a few sentences out. Although I didn't say much they were impressed by my accent. They said that English speakers usually struggle with correct pronunciation. Perhaps all the input is to thank?

  I started the month quite well, keeping up with the good work I had done in January but not surprisingly I became distracted by Putin's invasion of Ukraine. War is always a horrible thing but this time I'm experiencing it in a whole new way.  For more than a year I've been using social media to interact with Russian speakers in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in order to learn the language of regular people. I've been watching YouTubers, following Instagram accounts and have been interacting with people on iTalki. Whereas before I was learning about every day life like going to the supermarket, now I'm seeing those people post about bombings, sanctions and becoming refugees.  My tutor is Ukrainian, obviously we stopped the lessons when the invasion happened. What can you in a situation like that, will she want to keep teaching Russian? I can't blame her if she won't. So I've been spending a lot of time following the day by day developments and have not bee...

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...