Конец игры

[neofight78]

You know, I started all this as experiment a couple months ago and didn't know if I would stick with it. Since it seems like I'm going to, I'm wondering if I ought to break down and buy the book (telenovela method).

I'm sure that all the information was on Andrew Tracey's website, but perhaps he took it all down when he released the book. I did read all the posts way back, but I promptly failed to implement any of it and have forgotten it all in the meantime

[Xmmm]

You know, I started all this as experiment a couple months ago and didn't know if I would stick with it. Since it seems like I'm going to, I'm wondering if I ought to break down and buy the book (telenovela method).

I'm sure that all the information was on Andrew Tracey's website, but perhaps he took it all down when he released the book. I did read all the posts way back, but I promptly failed to implement any of it and have forgotten it all in the meantime

Just for good order's sake I got the kindle version of the book and skimmed it. I basically got the method right but left out a step:

1. Go through the transcript and look up everything you don't know and put it into Anki
2. Watch it 2 to N times until you're understanding everything that is said. Hit the pause button and look it up again if you forget something
3. Recite every line of the show, at the same speed as the actors, mimicking them as closely as possible.

So my estimate of 15 hours to go through one episode was a little low. It's probably closer to 20, which means the first season of Мажор will keep me busy till Thanksgiving.

[Xmmm]

Russian: 1000 hour update


Levels Achieved (self-assessed):

Reading: B1+
Listening: B1-
Speaking: A2
Writing: A2

How I Spent the Time (Roughly):

50 hours Italki
100 hours on various failed endeavors like memrise, gold lists, grammar-heavy courses
100 hours Assimil
100 hours Duolingo
200 hours silent reading with LingQ
250 hours Listening-Reading with LingQ
100 extensive listening to films and TV
100 hours intensive listening to films and TV

How I Would Spend the Time If I Did It Again:

200 hours Duolingo
300 hours Listening-Reading with LingQ
500 hours intensive listening to films and TV

Comments:

Progress is slower than I would have hoped. I suppose some of the lack of progress is caused by stupidity and lackadaisicality. I would attribute the rest of it to the wrong turn I took with silent reading. I spent 200 hours developing a "phantom vocabulary" -- words I recognize when I see them but not when I hear them. Phooey.

Plans for the Next 1000 Hours:

Continue to work through transcripts of Мажор and (if nothing better comes along), Нюхач. That's good for a couple hundred hours. No concrete plans after that.

[blaurebell]

Progress is slower than I would have hoped. I suppose some of the lack of progress is caused by stupidity and lackadaisicality. I would attribute the rest of it to the wrong turn I took with silent reading. I spent 200 hours developing a "phantom vocabulary" -- words I recognize when I see them but not when I hear them. Phooey.

Phew, I'm really glad I decided to listen to every new word I encounter, either using the lingvolive dictionary recording or text to speech and I tend to recognise the words I know when I hear them. I think putting it all together with a couple of books worth of listening reading and watching stuff with Russian subtitles should link it all up nicely for me in the end. Unpredictable stress in Russian really makes silent reading a problem!

But then, I think doing extensive activities too early is actually more of a waste of time than silent reading. You can now hook up the words you already recognise with the sounds and that should be fairly quick! Extensive activities, however, are totally inefficient for picking up vocabulary in general and even more so if your core vocabulary isn't in place yet. Also, I think LWT might be more efficient for picking up vocabulary than LingQ because of all the typing. You might read faster with LingQ, but I think I pick up more words along the way. I'm already at 10,000 known word forms of 20,000 encountered after 170h of reading. It's still fairly hard to predict how many word forms I'll need in the end to get to a similar level of precision as with my French, but I guess 35,000+ at least. I'm using the most efficient method I know right now - a bit of grammar up front with Assimil + Duolingo, intensive reading with LWT followed by 30h of LR, 20h watching series with subtitles, then 150h of series without subtitles, followed by 150h of listening only. Russian is slow going and I expect about 1200-1300h in total to get to B2+ comprehension. I'm at 390h right now and expect to be reading with LWT at least another 430h, probably more.

[neofight78]

I suppose some of the lack of progress is caused by stupidity and lackadaisicality.

You suppose incorrectly. Russian is hard. Getting this far already makes you a badass language learner

I would attribute the rest of it to the wrong turn I took with silent reading. I spent 200 hours developing a "phantom vocabulary" -- words I recognize when I see them but not when I hear them. Phooey.

Phew, I'm really glad I decided to listen to every new word I encounter, either using the lingvolive dictionary recording or text to speech and I tend to recognise the words I know when I hear them. I think putting it all together with a couple of books worth of listening reading and watching stuff with Russian subtitles should link it all up nicely for me in the end. Unpredictable stress in Russian really makes silent reading a problem!

I've always made it a rule to make sure that I have audio for any text or flashcard. That was on the basis that it helps me better remember. I now realise that it also has saved me a lot of pain when it comes to knowing how words are stressed.

It's also interesting to note that some native Russians who started reading a lot at an early age can end up incorrectly stressing some words because of it (albeit not all that many).

[Xmmm]

I'm conducting a sort of experiment, doing super intensive listening in Russian (telenovela method or whatever you want to call it) and much more casual listening in Italian (basically watching TV shows one time each, but writing down all the vocabulary I don't know as I go).

Sadly, the "Netflix Dubbed Italian Method" or the "Least Amount of Work Possible Method" is starting to dominate. I'm finding if I only have one hour of free time, I'd rather watch episode #7 of Bloodline, than intensely review one scene in мажор that I've already gone over ten times.


Italian "barely intensive" viewing:

House of Cards: 65 out of 65 episodes
Bloodline: 5/13
Marcella: 6/8
Roman Empire: Reign of Blood: 6/6
Black Mirror: 2/6
River: 1/6
Paranoid: 2/8
Frontier: 4/6
Marseille: 1/8

And for the record, some impressions about the shows themselves.

Paranoid: Stinks. Really, really stinks. Unlikeable characters and the overall feeling that this is the most pathetic TV police department I've ever seen.

River: Someone got the idea "Let's turn the Sixth Sense into a TV show with a cop instead of a psychologist." I guess that idea is all right, but it bugs me that the producers claim "River has a type of mental illness that is undiagnosed as of today." Yes, the type of mental illness where he sees ghosts that give him secret information that helps him solve crimes. Look for it in the next DSM. Phooey! Overall, it's a better show than Paranoid, but that's a low bar.

Marcella: Awesome! The first two episodes are unusual and edge of the seat stuff. I understand quality takes a dive as the show wears on, though. We'll see.

Black Mirror: Episode #1 was really intriguing, but episode #2 is just an updated sort of Twilight Zone. I'll pass.

Frontier: I want to put in a good word for this show. It's basically a Western with redcoats and French fur traders, and serious art it is not, but Jason Momoa gives a pretty good performance and it's an unusual time period if you like historical stuff.

Bloodline: Mixed feelings about this one. Generally I don't like family drama shows with matriarchs and patriarchs and black sheep and all that, but this show has a really creepy sinister edge to it.

[Xmmm]

I've been doing nothing except watching TV for the last three months. There's been a noticeable improvement in my listening skills (maybe 150 hours in each language), but ... at this time I'm almost totally burned out on TV. I had to take a break and go back to LingQ and read some stuff.

Also, the telenovela method is another method that requires more discipline than I have. I can't watch shows ten times or twenty times, and I certainly can't watch them scene by scene, over and over again.

So if I ever want to get going again on the productive side, I better go back to glossika (as boring as it may be) and plan for Italki again in the near future ...

As I mentioned, goldlists didn't work for me. To avoid zoning out while watching TV, I watch with the anki phone app and make cards when I run into words I don't know.

My "projected hours to S3" are Kanewai's FSI-based estimates. In my case, they will almost certainly be too low but I will leave them as is for now because it's more motivating. Obviously I will have to revise them when I go over the top.

Russian (Start: 1 September 2015)

Hours to S3	: 1013 / 1760	Words Known	: 16119 / 50000
Words Read	: 1596530 / 5000000	Anki Cards	: 525 / 10000

Italian (Start: 15 December 2016)

Hours to S3	: 205 / 960	Words Known	: 7715 / 50000
Words Read	: 193963 / 2500000	Anki Cards	: 556 / 10000

[Xmmm]

My two year anniversary for Russian is coming up and I'm pretty dissatisfied with the level I'm at. I thought I'd be B2 across the board right now, but I'm at more of a B1 receptive and A2 productive level.

My long term goals for Russian are C1 receptive and B1 productive. I understand productive skills atrophy fast so investing in bringing them up to a high level doesn't seem like a good use of time. I'm not married to a Russian, nor am I moving to Russia, nor do I live close to a community of Russians ... so my spoken Russian only needs to be good enough to prove I can actually speak in a halfway coherent way. I won't be giving any speeches at the UN ...

I've given the matter some thought, how I want to proceed, and have decided the best approach is mostly to keep doing what I was doing, only do more of it. (Definition of insanity).

1. I'm at 16279 words known on LingQ ... try to get to 30000 by end of 2017 and 50000 by end of 2018.
2. I own Glossika and theoretically if I can overcome the boredom factor there's no reason I can't finish GSR 1,2,3 by the summer of 2018. There's no question when I use Glossika that, with the sentences I remember, my pronunciation becomes close to perfect (I can hear the difference myself), and I can also shoot them out machine gun style. The problem is I only remember five at a time. So, I'm a bit skeptical of the long term benefits but sfuqua is reporting great results and I own the course so what the hell.
3. In January after Glossika warms up my productive skills a bit, restart Italki, but work with a tutor, who is more hard core into beating students up about grammar and pronunciation and not at all laid back. I have a name ...

And for my LingQ reading, I'm not going to be plowing through all the political radio like I was doing before. Previously that was a bit of a trap for me where I learned hundreds of 5000 ruble words I would never use in everyday life, and common expressions left me mystified. Instead, I'm going to be uploading transcripts from Russian TV and movies, and reading the transcripts while netflix or youtube runs on another tab. I have at least 500,000 words of transcripts thanks to the generous work of others (leosmith if he is actually BigDog, Arnaud, etc.)

Anyway, for July my known word count is at 16279 and I want to bring it up to 17500 by the end of the month ...

[neofight78]

My two year anniversary for Russian is coming up and I'm pretty dissatisfied with the level I'm at. I thought I'd be B2 across the board right now, but I'm at more of a B1 receptive and A2 productive level.

Actually, that's pretty good going. How are you assessing your level? If it's self assessment, your level might be higher than you think. If memory serves I passed the B1 exam after 2.5 years, so your progress seems pretty good to me. Perhaps you are not where you wanted to be, but give yourself more credit, Russian is hard. I'm pretty certain that with a burst of concentrated effort you could get production up to B1 pretty quickly.

[neofight78]

Also, the telenovela method is another method that requires more discipline than I have. I can't watch shows ten times or twenty times, and I certainly can't watch them scene by scene, over and over again.

I suspect if you cut the down to watch once to analyse/learn new stuff and once again a bit later as listening practice you'd get a lot of the same benefit without doing your head in. In any case I think if you can cut the routine down a bit, it could still work pretty well for you.