Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:42 am

garyb wrote:I'm following your Russian updates with curiosity, as I attempted it around a decade ago but didn't get very far, with one of the main reasons being that I couldn't find resources that worked well for me.

New Penguin Russian Course started off well but it quickly got quite heavy-going and as you say it requires a certain time dedication. Even Pimsleur got difficult to keep up with after the first few lessons; finding transcripts made it a lot more accessible, even if that's not the "correct" way to use it. I found Michel Thomas quite good, but even the advanced one only barely scratches the surface. There is an Assimil now, but based on my experience with Assimil for other truly new languages (as opposed to false-beginner or closely related to one you already know) it's probably best left until you've finished a few proper beginner courses. I'm not familiar with Accelerator or the Youtube stuff but it's great to hear that there's more choice of materials now.

The other issue I found was just that as a new language it was quite overwhelming and I could only manage about half an hour of proper study per day before my brain just refused to take in any more. Definitely one for a slow-and-steady approach and accepting that it'll take a long time to even get to the stage of basic conversations.

FWIW I quite enjoyed "La inflación del yo" as it's a subject I have opinions on :D But it definitely could've explored some aspects of the subject more and better.
I thought that I would enjoy "La inflación del yo", but I just wasn't feeling it! It may have something to do with the fact that I listened while walking to the grocery store, and it was miserably cold out.

Learning Spanish was definitely more "fun" than learning Russian, because I didn't really spend much time on beginner learning materials. I was able to jump very quickly into language exchanges, real books, and interesting intermediate listening resources. That feels almost impossibly far away in Russian. But I'm enjoying the resources that I'm using right now, and I feel like I'm making slow but steady progress.

This time last year, I would have agreed with you 100% on Pimsleur. I burned out before finishing level 1 last year. It was dull and tedious. For some reason, it's a better match for me this year. As for Assimil, I think that I won't bother with it until I've finished Russian Accelerator. I don't really know how I feel about New Penguin Russian Course yet. It's kind of boring, but so far it's been easy. I've only done the first three chapters, so I know that if I keep working with it, I'll hit a massive wall at some point very soon.
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Mon Feb 06, 2023 12:46 am

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m currently feeling hyper-focused on Russian. This is how I generally am with hobbies. I hyper-focus, do something every single day, and then from one day to the next lose interest. This used to bother me. I lamented the fact that if I had just stuck to something, that I could be an expert at something. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Hobbies are for fun. If I’m having fun, then my hobbies are meeting my needs. For me, trying too hard to increase my productivity takes away the joy that I get from the doing.

In the past year, I’ve cycled through a few different hobbies. I spent the first few months of 2022 focused on learning Russian, and then spent hours playing ukulele (until one day I just stopped), and then got sucked into the world of solo board-gaming. In between, I spent a few weeks obsessively binge-watching a tv show or researching something that suddenly grabbed my interest for a few days. And now I’m back to Russian! I kind of hope that I wake up one day and want to pick up the ukulele again, but I also hope that I stick to Russian.

Anyway, all that to say that my brain is currently drawn to Russian.

Today, I didn’t have anything that I needed (or wanted) to do, and my partner had a whole pile of homework and assignments to do. I knew that the house would be quiet and focused, so I decided to see how much Russian I would do if I gave myself the whole day to do it. I didn’t make any plans; I just decided that I would do what I felt like doing when I felt like doing it. The only real rules: stay home all day, and no media, books or screen time in any language other than Russian. So it was basically either Russian or housework.

And I do not like doing housework.

I interspersed working with all of my resources with other short tasks - doing a couple of loads of laundry, quickly proofreading a text for my partner, making pasta for lunch. I didn’t get tired or bored, and I could have kept going well into the evening…but we needed to eat dinner and be ready for the basketball game at 6:00. (We’re Raptors fans in this house!)

It felt like I spent the entire day on Russian. And yet the funny thing is - despite it feeling like I did Russian non-stop, all day long - it turns out that I only did a little less than four hours!

I won’t go too into detail on anything, but here’s what I did (with breaks of various lengths in between each activity):

- 14 minutes: vocab (duolingo, anki, clozemaster)
- 56 minutes: Russian Accelerator Unit 5 Lesson 5
- 28 minutes: In Russian From Afar - My Family Tree (once with Russian subtitles, once audio only)
- 30 minutes while walking the dog: Russian Accelerator Unit 5 podcast
- 25 minutes: New Penguin Russian Course chapters 2 and 3
- 22 minutes: Red Kalinka 25 Texts in Easy Russian (which I decided to buy today) - worked on story 1
- 30 minutes while walking the dog: Pimsleur 2 Unit 2
- 31 minutes: writing an introduction and some very basic conversation questions

…for a grand total of 236 minutes, or 3.93 hours.

This is definitely the most time I’ve ever spent in one day on self-studying a language that was too opaque for native materials! I’ve probably spent longer than that binge-watching Spanish TV shows at some point, but this was four hours of beginner learning materials. And while I don’t see myself doing it on an everyday basis, it was a lot of fun! Now I’m thinking about doing a week of intensive language study at some point. It would be interesting to see how much I could progress in a week with 20-25 hours of self-study.
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sun Feb 12, 2023 3:23 pm

Weekly Russian Update:

Pimsleur 2 (four times since last update): units 3-6. I think I need to repeat unit six today, because I struggled yesterday. I just wasn’t able to focus, and I think it was more of a me-issue than a unit-6-issue.

anki (daily): I’m now at 334 “new” cards, 345 “young” cards and 452 “mature” cards. I mentioned last week that I was a bit concerned about the backlog of new cards, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem yet. When new cards pop up, they’re not completely unfamiliar to me.

Duolingo (daily): just finished unit 5

Clozemaster (daily): 100 Most Common Words - playing 495 of 534 cards

Russian Accelerator (four times since last update): I finished unit 5 and am halfway through unit 6. I remember getting a little bit annoyed at Russian Accelerator last year, and I’m feeling the same way now. There’s just such a focus on attractive young women, both in the stock photos and in the examples. I have nothing against attractive young women - in fact, some of my favourite people in the world are attractive young women! But the overemphasis, especially in the stock photos, makes me wonder who this course is aimed at. The course itself is really strong! I just wish that they’d chosen stock photos to be a little bit more representative of society at large. I do seem to remember that this got better somewhere around Unit 7 (which is where I stopped last year).

Listening: In Russian From Afar (four times since last update): I watched a few of the A1 videos with puppets, and they are CHEESY, especially when Sergey chuckles at the camera as though he and the viewer are sharing an inside joke. But I’m ok with cheesy, and I find it a bit endearing rather than irritating. I really appreciate that the creator has gone to great lengths to create listening materials for absolute beginners. I’ve been watching once with English subtitles and once or twice with no subtitles. I don’t feel the need to watch these with Russian subtitles. The stories are very silly, and also treat Africa as a country instead of a continent, but I love that I can understand them!

Vasya Crocodile arrives in Russia and meets his roommate Pyotr Cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmd9yj-W1SA
Vasya Crocodile and his roommate Pyotr Cat talk about their daily routine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYUPwzOZvI

New Penguin Russian Course (once since last update): I’m working on chapter four. I’m not feeling very inspired to work on it, though.

25 Texts in Easy Russian (four times since last update): Back on HTLAL I talked about using a “book bin” approach to reading in Tagalog. I spent the better part of my career up until last year teaching young learners to read, and each of my students had a bin with “just right” books. Every day, we would set a timer and all of my students would find a comfy spot and read from their bins.

When I was learning Tagalog, I had an actual bin filled with children’s books, texts I’d written, and copies from printed materials. While I had access to print material and a native speaker in Tagalog, I have access to neither in Russian. Pronunciation is tricky when reading new texts. Aside from Penguin, I don’t have any print materials in Russian, and hand-printing is slow and clumsy so I don’t have any hand-written texts.

So instead of a physical book bin, I’ve been treating my audiobook as a book bin, setting a timer for 15 or 20 minutes at a time, and just reading whatever I feel like reading from the book. Sometimes I read the same text over and over again, working on pronunciation. Sometimes I work through a few new texts in a row, focusing on vocabulary and sentence structure. Sometimes - like yesterday - I’m feeling tired, and I just start at the beginning and read along while listening to the audio of one text after another, until the timer goes off. I’m enjoying my reading time! It’s relaxing and intrinsically rewarding. I do think that it would be better if I had access to a few different books.

iTalki tutor (twice this week): I tried out two half-hour iTalki sessions, and they were both positive experiences!

One of the tutors had very poor audio, which was unfortunate. She was very kind and encouraging. I will book another session with her in the hope that the audio issues were a one-time problem.

The second tutoring session went very well! It was with the same person as my first not-so-successful session, but this time I sent her a document with conversation questions that I wanted to work on. She seems to be a lovely human being, very patient and encouraging. I will book half-hour sessions with her on Saturday mornings for the next few weeks, and then reevaluate whether conversational tutoring sessions are a current good use of my time and money, or whether it would be better for me to just keep working through my materials for the next few months until my knowledge of conversational Russian is stronger.

Good choices this time around:

While my interest in Russian lasted until about May of last year, I worked a lot more slowly through my materials, and I ended up losing my momentum. Both last year and this year I started Russian in January. But now it’s still February, and by next week I will have surpassed where I was last spring.

Specifically, I think that the following changes are working for me:

-Running through the Pimsleur lessons and moving on at the end of each lesson. I’m taking Pimsleur’s “80% rule” at face value, rather than repeating difficult lessons. It’s working much better, and I don’t feel bogged down by the process. I will repeat a lesson for the first time today, but that’s only because I wasn’t very focused yesterday and I just stopped answering at some point.

-Adding more “fun” material like YouTube videos and graded readers. Last year I only used my courses and some phone apps. Adding the fun stuff is definitely motivating.

-Switching from paper flashcards to anki. I think that the Russian Accelerator lessons were taking me way too long to get through, in large part because I was creating paper flashcards in clumsy block writing. The paper flashcards were really unwieldy, I couldn’t control how many new cards I studied every day, and it just wasn’t as easy as pulling up anki on my phone. I’m pretty sure that paper flashcards are a better way to learn vocabulary. But I’m also pretty sure that paper flashcards are a big part of why I quit Russian last year.

-Not doing Memrise. Nothing more to say about that.
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby ShawnP » Mon Feb 13, 2023 12:47 am

Stell,

How long have you been taking Italki lessons? How are you finding them thus far? I took one a long time ago but really need to start going that route if I ever want to have decent conversations.
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Mon Feb 13, 2023 11:52 pm

ShawnP wrote:How long have you been taking Italki lessons? How are you finding them thus far? I took one a long time ago but really need to start going that route if I ever want to have decent conversations.
I've been taking italki lessons on and off since 2014. I just checked, and I've taken 320!!! A lot of those were in Spanish, but I've also taken classes in Italian, Tagalog, Esperanto and Russian. I also taught French for a few years, just to get enough credits to flip over to taking lessons.

I think that a lot of my early progress in spoken Spanish was due to italki sessions. I think that for me, conversational tutoring is especially useful at the late beginner / early intermediate level, when you have words that you can say, but it would require a lot of patience and effort on the listener to actually engage in a conversation. I prefer to pay someone, because then I can repeat the same thing over and over, without feeling like I'm wasting my listener's time. At an intermediate level, I don't feel like I need to prepare much...I just go in and chat, and let the errors that I make guide my learning.

I'm at an early beginner level in Russian, and I'm not as convinced that conversational tutoring is useful...although I do like having the opportunity to speak out loud with feedback, and preparing for the tutoring sessions is definitely a very good use of my time. As a beginner, I think that you either have to choose a teacher who will lead lessons with his/her own materials, or else you have to be really straightforward about what you want, and prepare your own materials. Some people, like me, prefer the second scenario; other people prefer the first. Everyone is different, and you have to figure out what works for you.

At the beginner stage, I prefer shorter half-hour sessions. I like to send my teacher a list of questions, and then we just take turns asking and answering questions, and hopefully adding details to answers. It's when I haven't prepared in advance that I end up in a lesson that doesn't meet my needs.

Here are the questions that I used in my last tutoring session (my teacher prefers to use the informal ты, which is fine by me):

Какая сегодня погода? (What’s the weather like today?)
Откуда ты? (Where are you from?)
Где ты живёшь? (Where do you live?)
У тебя есть ______? (Do you have ______?)
Тебе нравится ______? (Do you like _______?)

Those, along with friendly greetings and a very short text that I wrote and that my teacher gave me feedback on, easily filled up half an hour. I always have a few texts from other resources ready to go so that I can practise reading out loud if I get tired or run out of things to say, but I didn't have time to read any of them last time. I have a Google Slides document with the questions, the text I wrote, some texts that I can read aloud, maybe a few pictures that I can describe, and then I just update my document and share it with my teacher before class.

Not all teachers like this approach, but if a teacher doesn't feel comfortable relinquishing control of the lesson, then they're not the right teacher for me.

At the advanced level, I find that I'm just too lazy to get the best out of italki sessions. I genuinely enjoy chatting with a tutor in Spanish for an hour, but I don't know that it helps me grow much as a Spanish-speaker. Sure, it’s important to keep conversing, but I think that I would get just as much (if not more) out of a friendly language exchange. I think that a good use of an hour at my current level would involve reading an article and writing about it in advance, and then getting text corrections and discussing the content during the actual lesson. Will I do this? Meh...
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sat Feb 18, 2023 8:57 pm

Weekly Russian Update:

Russian Accelerator (twice since last update): I’m almost finished with unit six. And none of the lessons have annoyed me this week! But I’ve been focusing too much on tutoring sessions and on preparing for tutoring sessions, which means that I haven’t had as much time for RA lately. More on the tutoring later…but I definitely want to readjust my study time in the coming week, and focus more on Russian Accelerator.

Pimsleur 2 (six times since last update): Units 6-10. I repeated unit 8 twice. At some point I do think that I’m going to have to make a decision about whether to carry on, or whether I should go back and repeat a few units.

anki (daily): 294 “new” cards, 362 “young” cards and 575 “mature” cards. Twenty new cards per day is working well so far.

Duolingo (daily): I’m working on unit 6. Most days I complete three lessons.

Clozemaster (daily): 100 Most Common Words - I’ve worked my way through all 534 sentences, but 0% are mastered. I started the 500 Most Common Words set, but it was a massive jump in difficulty. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, especially because I prefer to use my phone apps (anki, duolingo, clozemaster) more for consolidation than for new learning. For the next week, I think I’ll just focus my 30 sentences per day on reviewing the ones I’ve already done.

Listening: In Russian From Afar (four times since last update): I love how comprehensible these videos are! Would I watch them in a language I understood well? No, obviously not. But I get a lot of pleasure out of being able to understand something in Russian, even if it’s something extremely simple.

Talking about my hometown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it19zi5Fs2A
Masha and the Three Bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prSfxdmjNzE

Reading: 25 Texts in Easy Russian (four times since last update): I’m still using my “book bin” approach to reading. I find it interesting that some days - like yesterday - I just want to read the same new text over and over, sometimes with audio and sometimes without. And other days - like the day before - I feel like re-reading one text after another with no audio at all. I like the flexibility that I get from having a collection of short, accessible texts with full audio.

iTalki tutor (twice this week): Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll be continuing with two lessons per week. The after-work lesson was just so painful. I was tired, and I spent the afternoon dreading it. Really not the feeling I want to associate with language learning, especially since I’m learning for fun. I really like the tutor as a human being, but I just don’t see myself continuing with a mid-week class. The weekend class (which I schedule for 9AM on Saturday) is better, because I’m fresher and more interested. I will keep up with weekly classes for the next few weeks and then reevaluate. My Saturday tutor sent me a beginner textbook called Спасибо. We used it for half the class this morning, and I actually enjoyed it. It was nice to have a crutch. I think that spending half of the session on simple conversation and half of the session working on oral activities from the textbook seems like a reasonable balance.

Writing:
Мне нравится чай, но больше я люблю кофе. Я люблю пить чёрный кофе, и мне тоже нравится пить кофе с молоком. Я пью кофе каждое утро. Мне очень нравится пить кофе в кафе. Моё любимое кафе находится в очень красивом месте, возле реки.
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sun Feb 19, 2023 4:19 pm

When I first started learning Spanish, I used a hodge-podge of materials. I bounced happily from one thing to the next, abandoning resources as quickly as I adopted them. My only real structure was trying to hit each of these categories every single day:

1. speaking - language exchange partners, italki tutors, and FSI drills
2. listening - podcasts during walks or commutes, and lots of different shows of various calibers, some aimed at students and some aimed at native Spanish speakers
3. reading - articles for Spanish learners, news articles, and novels - starting quite early with Roald Dahl books, and then working through a few series of books for young people before reading novels for adults
4. writing - although I barely wrote in Spanish, so I cheated with this one by classifying my grammar exercise book as writing. I finished the whole book of Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses, and then basically never wrote again.
5. vocabulary - anki and duolingo, mainly

This worked very well for me in Spanish. Most days I would spend at least an hour and a half on Spanish, often more, but I could just as easily only have 30 minutes in a day, and still do my best to touch on each category. I really didn’t do any structured courses. I did parts of courses - like watching the ENTIRE Destinos video series! Ugh! - but never anything comprehensive.

Russian is very different! I know that I can’t progress in Russian by bouncing around from resource to resource, and there’s absolutely no way that I will learn without a structured course. Still, I really liked the simplicity of my Spanish learning categories, so I’d like to see how I can apply a similar approach to Russian. After some thought, I’m going to experiment with hitting these four categories every single day:

1. vocabulary - anki, duolingo, clozemaster. I want to do anki every day without fail, because I know myself, and if I let my reviews pile up, I may just quit. Keeping Duolingo and Clozemaster streaks going is pretty easy.

2. coursework - Russian Accelerator or my beginner textbook, either a new lesson or reviewing past learning.

3. ”doing Russian” (ie. reading/writing/listening) - In the future, I would definitely consider separating these into separate categories, but for now, with such a focus on coursework, it makes sense to bundle them. Better to set myself up for success than failure. For a sustained period of time each day, I would like to work on these three skills in whichever combination appeals to me. So one day, I may watch a video several times, and that’s it. Another day, I may read a few texts, followed by writing a few sentences, followed by rewatching a short video. Basically, “do Russian” every day. I’ll start with a loose goal of at least 30 minutes per day. Of course, on a busy (or tired) day, just a few minutes will still let me check the “doing Russian” box.

4. speaking - this is Pimsleur right now. Pimsleur definitely has its issues, but I think that it’s really helping me with pronunciation. And of course, tutoring once a week. I guess on an exceptionally busy day, I could say a few sentences aloud and call it done! But my goal of averaging 10,000 steps/day in 2023 means that I go for a few walks every single day, and that makes it easy to find time for Pimsleur. One day last week there was freezing rain, and I did a Pimsleur lesson while pacing in my basement. Still have to get those steps in!
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Thu Feb 23, 2023 2:58 am

So I’m now officially further than I've ever gotten in Russian, which is kind of cool!

Last year, I made it up to unit 7 lesson 2 in Russian Accelerator, and today I just finished unit 7 lesson 3. Last time, I made it to Pimsleur 1 Unit 26 before rage-quitting. This year, I made it halfway through Pimsleur 2. And I have yet to rage-quit, so I’ll call that a win! I’m ahead of where I was last time in Clozemaster, but I’m not sure how to compare Duolingo, because the interface has changed. I suspect that I was farther along in Duolingo last year, before I wiped it and started over. Still, overall, I’m now in all-new territory.

What else is different? Last year I didn’t do any listening or reading outside of Russian Accelerator. This year, I’ve added videos and texts, and they’re currently my favourite resources. They’re so much more intrinsically motivating than courses. Last year I was also doing Memrise and I finished the Russian Made Easy series - two resources that I decided not to revisit this year.

It’s kind of exciting to know that from this point onward, everything is new!
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sat Feb 25, 2023 5:15 pm

I dreamt of Russian one night last week. I don’t remember what the dream was about, except that I was walking through a park and saying the same two words over and over. When I woke up, I was repeating those two words in my head:

путешествовать (to travel)
понедельник (Monday)

The funny thing is that those were two words that I was struggling to remember during anki reps the day before, and now I know them pretty well. So…thank you unconscious brain! Much appreciated!

Weekly Russian Update:

So this was my first week structuring Russian learning with four categories: coursework, “doing Russian”, speaking and vocabulary. I hit all four categories every day this past week. High five to self! I was really tired yesterday and found myself at 9:00 at night having done nothing but my apps. I thought about skipping the other categories, but decided that I had enough energy for at least half an hour of work. I spent ten minutes practicing a new text, five minutes recording an audio journal, and ten minutes doing a few pages of the New Penguin Russian Course. Goal met!

I think that organizing my learning by categories in this way will really help me to stick with Russian. Last year, if I'd found myself at 9:00 PM having done nothing, the idea of doing a Russian Accelerator lesson or a Pimsleur lesson would have been way too daunting. I would have skipped just one day...and I know how easy it is to lose momentum and have one day stretch into many!

Note: writing everything out like this makes it seem like I’m doing A LOT of Russian, but I don’t really feel that I am! On a typical day, I probably spend between one and two hours on Russian. I may count minutes next week, just out of curiosity. Honestly, I should have joined the six-week challenge that started at the beginning of February.

1. coursework:

  • Russian Accelerator: finished Unit 7 Lesson 4, so I’ll be finished with unit 7 shortly. The most wonderful part of this unit? The stock images are no longer annoying! They seem much more balanced, and I appreciate that
  • Спасибо (beginner textbook): worked my way through lesson two. I mostly read the words and sentences aloud, and wrote a few sentences when prompted. I’ve taken screenshots of the pages of the book that I want to work on, and put them into a slideshow that I shared with my tutor. I add my sentences directly into the slideshow, and also include discussion prompts when appropriate (for example, “What’s your favourite season?” and “What’s your favourite month?” on the calendar page). That way, I can decide which pages I want to focus on during my oral language lessons, rather than just moving through the book page by page.
  • New Penguin Russian Course: finished chapter 4. It was just basic vocab and simple present tense verbs that I've already learned through other resources. It was a nice consolidation. Also completed chapter 5. I’m not sure I’m making the most of this resource, though. I’m reading and doing the exercise orally aloud, but I’m not taking notes anywhere. If I’m going to continue with the book, I need to think about my approach.

2. ”doing Russian” (listening, reading and writing):

  • Listening: In Russian From Afar - I worked on a few videos this week. Listening to a new video once with English subtitles and once without subtitles seemed like enough. These Vasya Crocodile stories are utterly silly and cheesy, but it’s fun to listen to Russian that I can actually (mostly) comprehend. Still, I think next week I’m going to look for some of his videos that don’t rely on puppets.
    Vasya meets Zaika: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rNlMF4aSiY
    Zaika and Vasya talk about the weather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcY8LyueO0w
    I’ve made myself a YouTube playlist of all of the videos that I’ve worked on so far, and from time to time I’ll listen to one or more at random while walking (so no video, just audio).
  • Reading/listening: 25 Texts in Easy Russian. It’s hard to differentiate between listening and reading when it comes to this resource, because I’m really using it for both skills. One day this past week, I just listened to the audio while pacing in the living room, so I didn’t read at all. Another day I read several texts aloud without listening to the audio. So it’s hard for me to disconnect reading and listening when using this resource.

    I’ve also started a new anki deck for intensive reading with the 25 Texts in Easy Russian book. My approach to an intensive reading deck is really, really simple, and it only takes me two or three minutes to make all of the cards for a given text. Could I break the audio up into smaller pieces? Well, yeah. Sure. But I honestly can’t be bothered. Instead, I make a card with a screenshot of the full text on one side and the full audio on the other side. I read the text aloud, and then flip the card and read it again while the audio plays. I also make reading-only cards from each text with one sentence on a card, and nothing on the back. These are all sentences that I’m very familiar with. I just focus on reading each one aloud with good pronunciation. I always choose the shortest interval for the full text with full audio, and choose the appropriate interval based on difficulty for the sentence cards. So far I’ve made cards for the first five texts in this resource.
  • Writing: I wrote only twice this week:

    February 19 - Я плохо говорю и очень плохо понимаю по-русски, но мне очень нравится изучать русский язык. Я занимаюсь русским каждый день. Я тоже говорю по-английски, по-французски, и по-испански. Я люблю учить языки.

    February 24 - Я в моём любимом кафе, с моей мамой. Мы пьем кофе. Мне нравится кофе с молоком. Моя мама больше любит черный кофе. Мы едим круассаны, и мы говорим вместе. Возле кафе есть река. Когда солнечно - река красивая. Какой хороший день! Я очень люблю здесь быть, с моей мамой.
3. speaking:

  • Pimsleur 2: Units 11-12 and 1-3. Hello wall, my old friend. It’s nice to slam into you again. I completely crashed on units 11 and 12. They were boring. As a teacher, I’ve always differentiated between “hard-boring” and “easy-boring”. This was definitely hard-boring. Way-too-hard-boring. At one point I just gave up and listened passively, too demotivated to even repeat after the audio. I figured that I had three options: give up, keep trudging through waist-deep mud (anyone seen The Neverending Story? That doesn’t usually end well…), or back up and start again. I went with option three, and decided to restart Pimsleur level 2 at lesson 1. The lessons are still surprisingly challenging, especially since I’m officially two weeks past that first lesson, but it was good-challenging. I feel a little burst of energy at the small struggle to come up with the words, followed by quickly saying them aloud right before the audio kicks in. Backing up and starting over was the right choice at this point in time.
  • Audio journal: I made two short audio recordings of myself speaking unscripted Russian. I’m storing this audio journal in a slide deck, with the date recorded followed by the clickable audio. I don’t plan on ever sharing these with anyone! But they’re fun for me to listen to, and I’m hoping that a few years from now I’ll revisit them and laugh.
  • iTalki tutor: This morning’s session went pretty well! I was very tired, and free talk was an absolute joke. Honestly…I know for a fact that I haven’t been learning long enough for proper free talk. But I try! Today we also worked on some more structured activities: practicing pages from the beginner textbook, describing a photo of people in a restaurant, making sentences with present-tense verbs (swim, run, walk, eat, etc). I need to revisit and review all of these things, and use them again in our next session.

4. vocabulary:

  • anki: 402 “new” cards, 368 “young” cards and 709 “mature” cards. It takes me between six and ten minutes to do my main Russian deck. The backlog of new cards is a bit concerning, because I’m now adding words from more than one source to anki. So far it’s ok, but I’ve realized that I’m really only doing 10 new notes per day, because I have it set at 20 new cards, and each note generates two cards (L1 > L2 and L2 > L1). I also have the new intensive reading deck that I mentioned earlier, but I consider that more a part of "doing Russian" than vocabulary.
  • Duolingo: currently working on unit 7
  • Clozemaster: still reviewing 100 Most Common Words
8 x

User avatar
stell
Orange Belt
Posts: 178
Joined: Sat Jan 15, 2022 11:25 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: English (N1), French (N2), Spanish (advanced), Tagalog (perpetual toddler), Russian (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17696
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Mon Feb 27, 2023 2:32 am

I’m off for a week, and I have nothing planned, aside from a day in the city and possibly having my parents over for a few days towards the end of the week. I’ve decided to do some intensive Russian study, with a goal of 25 hours over the next seven days. Of course, that may change if my parents do decide to come up for a long weekend, but I’ll reevaluate closer to the time.

I played around with the idea of booking daily Russian tutoring sessions. But although I enjoy my weekly sessions once they start, I usually consider canceling right up until the very last minute. The idea of waking up with that negative feeling every morning during my time off doesn’t really appeal. I think that daily oral Russian lessons would have been good for my learning. But I don’t think it would have been good for my holiday. And holidays win!

Besides, I may wake up tomorrow, change my mind, and decide not to do intensive Russian after all. But I’ll update daily as long as I keep it up, if only so I don’t have to write an entire novel next week.

1. coursework:

  • Russian Accelerator (77 minutes) - completed unit 7 lesson 5. Also listened to the unit 7 podcast, which had some fun oral drills

2. ”doing Russian” (listening, reading, writing):

  • Listening (48 minutes):
    Comprehensible Russian: I watched the first video in the A1 series, about Moscow’s rings. I’m not sure yet if I’ll watch any more of these.
    In Russian From Afar: The Three Little Pigs - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B366RDyxngw - I watched this one twice, once with subtitles and once without. I really like these folk tale videos!
    In Russian From Afar: Vasya and Zaika go to a restaurant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLO9qWJDtrg - yes, another puppet video. I watched this one once, with subtitles.
  • Reading/listening (31 minutes): 25 Texts in Easy Russian - did my anki reviews, created anki cards for text 7, and worked on new text 12.
  • Writing (12 minutes) - I wrote a few sentences about things that I enjoy doing. Corrections welcome!

    Я очень люблю читать книги. Иногда я читаю по-английски, и иногда я читаю по-испански. Я ещё не умею хорошо читать по-русски, но я занимаюсь русским каждый день. Каждый день, я играю с собакой. Мы идём в парке вместе. Вечером, мне очень нравится играть настольные игры, одна или с мужем. Мы с мужем смотрим баскетбол, когда играют Рапторс.

3. speaking:

  • Pimsleur 2 (30 minutes): unit 4

4. vocabulary:

  • apps (21 minutes) - anki, Duolingo and Clozemaster

minutes today: 219
total minutes: 219
goal between February 26 and March 4: 1,500 minutes
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