Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

According to Speakly I've learned another 200 words (or lemmas) since August 23rd. Over 149 days that comes to 1.34 new words per day. Of course I'm sure that I've picked up more vocabulary through my other activities. I know there are different levels to knowing a word and the aim is for fully activated vocabulary that can be used in conversation. But it's nice to tick off another milestone.  If I were to continue at the current rate it would take almost 6 years to learn all 4000 words in the Speakly app. 2800 / 1.34 = 2089 days 2089 / 365 = 5.72 years I think I will progress faster than that though. I've found that int the past couple of weeks I'm able to use the app for longer periods of time compared to when I first started. Sometimes I can be using Speakly for 25 minutes before I get bored or tired. And I more often I'm being introduced to words that I already know due to my other learning activities. I expect this to happen more frequently as I progres...

  It was a fairly good month, I spent a lot of time on what I call Active Study which for me consists of using the Speakly App, writing out its dialogues, studying Russian Accelerator and reading LingQ.  That last one could arguably be counted as simply Reading (with or without audio) but I usually count it as Active Studying because most of the time I'm doing it intensively (looking up words, trying to notice grammar). Other times I read LingQ without too many lookups. In those cases I count it as Reading. At the moment most of my Reading With Audio is from using Glossika and Reading With No Audio is mostly Olly Richard's 101 Conversations in Simple Russian. There was some Free Conversation Practice (Speaking or messaging with Russian speakers) which is hard to count so I put 30 minutes. I aim to spend more time on this real world usage of language and it's going to be hard to measure that activity accurately. I'm leaning towards not counting it as part of my statistic...

Nothing much to say about November. I travelled to a country where there is supposedly a big population of Russian speakers but I hardly heard any Russian while I was there which was disappointing. I'm feeling very motivated at the moment but haven't found the time to dedicate as much time as I normally do. November 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 7:03 hours Active watching or listening: 0:00 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:00 minutes Reading with Audio: 4:31 hours Reading with no Audio: 0:27 hours Active Study: 4:30 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 06:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:00 minutes Total: 22:32 hours Daily Average: 0:45 hours October 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 17:56 hours Active watching or listening: 0:25 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:23 minutes Reading with Audio: 5:53 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:15 hours Active Study: 6:21 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 10:00 hours Free Conversati...

  Nothing much to say about October, I've been busy with some work projects and haven't spent much time studying as I wanted. I did get a chance to have some real world conversations which was good. October 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 17:56 hours Active watching or listening: 0:25 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:23 minutes Reading with Audio: 5:53 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:15 hours Active Study: 6:21 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 10:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:50 minutes Total: 42:14 hours Daily Average: 1:24 hours September 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 17:56 hours Active watching or listening: 0:25 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:23 minutes Reading with Audio: 5:53 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:15 hours Active Study: 6:21 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 10:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:50 minutes Total: 42:14 hours Daily Average: 1:24 hours August 2023 Statistics Passive watchi...

Nothing much to say about September, just more of the same. I would like to read more this month. September 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 17:56 hours Active watching or listening: 0:25 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:23 minutes Reading with Audio: 5:53 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:15 hours Active Study: 6:21 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 10:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:50 minutes Total: 42:14 hours Daily Average: 1:24 hours August 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 21:31 hours Active watching or listening: 0:38 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:26 minutes Reading with Audio: 6:47 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:22 hours Active Study: 10:02 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 8:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:50 minutes Total: 49:37 hours Daily Average: 1:36 hours July 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 15:34 hours Active watching or listening: 0:23 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:13 minutes ...

Over the weekend I went to a Russian language social event. I was a little bit nervous about going because I didn't want to impose my basic speaking abilities on others. But the people I met were accommodating and took me seriously.  Funnily enough I didn't speak to any Russians but I did meet people from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Bulgaria. Although my conversations were simple people were happy to engage and it didn't seem like they were just humouring me. When it came to more advanced topics I had to use English but that was expected.  Overall I consider the outing a success.

  August 2023 Statistics Passive watching and listening: 21:31 hours Active watching or listening: 0:38 minutes Vocabulary and Sentences: 0:26 minutes Reading with Audio: 6:47 hours Reading with no Audio: 1:22 hours Active Study: 10:02 hours Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice): 8:00 hours Free Conversation Practice: 0:50 minutes Total: 49:37 hours Daily Average: 1:36 hours Note: I'm renaming Conversation Practice to Free Conversation Practice . It's meant to indicate time spent on apps in Tandem or in real life situations. I'm also renaming Personal Lessons to Tutor Lessons (Conversation Practice)  also for clarity. It currently consists of conversation practice with my tutor and includes the time spent on corrections, grammar and vocabulary explanations. Another big jump in time spent on Russian this month, in the first half of the month I was actually averaging 2 hours a day but I've been busy over the last week causing my average to drop off. I was extremely motiv...