Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

Last night I had another dream in which I was speaking in Russian. As before I was limited by my real life abilities. So it was a very short conversation. Does anyone else dream about speaking the language they are learning?

  I recently passed 1000 hours of Russian in almost as many days (944 to be exact). I would have liked to be much further along my Russian acquisition journey, but I guess it's an achievement to have stuck with it consistently over this length of time. As much as I enjoy Russian, I have other interests that are a bigger priority for me. This is the first time I've attempted to acquire a new language so in the beginning there was a lot of trial and error with different approaches and apps. Broadly speaking I've been following a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion / Refold approach, but the exact activities varied until I settled on what I found most enjoyable and useful.  In hindsight I would do some things differently, but only to be more efficient rather than to employ a completely different method or strategy. Going forward I really want to increase the amount of time spent reading, studying grammar and on conversation practice (the latter is slowly happening as part of...

  It's been a good month but there's nothing out of the ordinary to report. I continued with 1-on-1 Comprehensible Input lessons (short stories, discussing every day situations with he help of images), which includes a little bit of conversation practice. I was tracking towards an average of 1:30 per day in total however my teacher went on holiday last week and I slacked off with my other activities bringing the average down. I'd like to pick up with my reading in LingQ because I did very little of that this month. Other than that my main activities were: Listening to the Speakly monologues, using the ListLang and Speakly apps and reading / listening to sentences in Glossika. February 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 25:53 hours Active watching or listening: 0:29 hours Vocabulary and Sentences: 2:33 hours Reading with Audio: 2:14 hours Reading with no Audio: 0:44 minutes Active Study: 2:52 hours Personal Lessons: 2:15 hours Total: 37:02 hours Daily Average: 1...

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...