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-W1SAVasya Crocodile and his roommate Pyotr Cat talk about their daily routine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYUPwzOZvINew 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.