Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

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luke
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby luke » Wed Feb 23, 2022 9:40 pm

stell wrote:
luke wrote:One thing I like about your approach is that you haven't tied yourself to a deadline.

I actually have a pretty tight deadline: in my 40s. Ha!

Now listen here, young lady. :)
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sat Feb 26, 2022 1:15 am

Wednesday February 23:
- Memrise: 8 minutes
- Duolingo: 24 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 44 minutes. Unit 4, lesson 2.
- Russian Made Easy: 24 minutes. Listened to episode 20.
Total time: 1 hour and 40 minutes

Thursday February 24:
- Memrise: 11 minutes. (Uh-oh! This is one minute over my desired upper limit! Hopefully it was a one-time fluke.)
- Duolingo: 27 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 43 minutes. Unit 4, lesson 4.
- Pimsleur: 30 minutes. Unit 20.
- Russian Made Easy: 25 minutes. Episode 20 review (flashcards, audio exercises, videos).
Total time: 2 hours and 16 minutes

In a beautiful act of synergy, Pimsleur Unit 20 was really easy. For the first time, almost all of the new words and structures were familiar to me from other resources. The one new construction - Её здесь нет - wasn’t hard for me to remember. And so, for the first time since unit 7 or 8, I will not be repeating a unit twice. Yay!
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sat Feb 26, 2022 9:49 pm

Russian

Friday February 25
- Memrise: 5 minutes
- Duolingo: 27 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 53 minutes. Unit 4, lesson 5.
- Russian Made Easy: 22 minutes. Listened to episode 21.
Total time: 1 hour and 47 minutes

While the first few lessons of Russian Accelerator took me about half an hour at a time, it now takes me 45 minutes to an hour to complete a new lesson. I usually do this in one sitting, and it includes reviewing my paper flashcards, going through all of the activities in a lesson, creating new flashcards, and writing down most (but not all) example sentences in my notebook in clumsy block letters. It doesn’t include reviewing past notes, although a lot of my paper flashcards are complete sentences, so I’m reviewing every day.

Here are some of the structures that I’ve learned in Russian Made Easy and Russian Accelerator, using the word “собака” in each sentence:

У меня есть собака.
У мамы есть собака.
У ивана есть собака.
Мне нравится ваша собака.
Я хочу твою собаку.
Ты хочешь мою собаку.
Он хочет собаку.
Здесь есть две собаки и два волка.

I’m sure I could come up with more sentences, but that’s enough for now. I’m sure I made some mistakes, but I haven’t done much writing in Russian, and I enjoyed the exercise! I still need to work a lot on touch-typing in Russian, because it took me way too long to type out each sentence.

Spanish

The last few days have been hard. Perhaps because of what’s happening in the world, I was drawn back into the comfort of Spanish. I read for half an hour yesterday, and booked a one-hour italki session with my lovely Mexican tutor this morning. Of course, we talked a lot about what’s going on in the world, both in Ukraine and here in North America.

While I will still focus on Russian until the end of the Six Week Challenge, I think that it’s time to make a little more room for Spanish.
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:17 am

Saturday February 26:
- Memrise: 9 minutes
- Duolingo: 22 minutes
- Pimsleur: 30 minutes. Unit 21.
- Russian Made Easy: 39 minutes. Episode 21 flashcards, audio exercises, videos.
Total time: 1 hour and 40 minutes

Sunday February 27:
- Memrise: 5 minutes
- Duolingo: 17 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 34 minutes. Transcribed unit 4 dialogue and reviewed past dialogues. Also watched unit 4 videos.
- Pimsleur: 29 minutes. Unit 22. Third unit in a row that I don’t feel the need to repeat! The last five minutes were tricky, but I don’t think it’s worth repeating the entire thing.
Total time: 1 hour and 25 minutes

Monday February 28:
- Memrise: 7 minutes
- Duolingo: 8 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 38 minutes. Unit 4 podcast, and lots of flashcards.
- Russian Made Easy: 23 minutes. Listened to episode 22.
Total time: 1 hour and 16 minutes
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:06 pm

While a day-to-day log like this one can be useful, it’s not what I plan on doing once the Six Week Challenge is completed. I much prefer to do weekly or twice-weekly updates. That said, I also think it’s really useful for me as a learner - and particularly as a beginner in a language - to be able to look back and see my growth.

I revisited my old HTLAL log a few weeks ago, and I really enjoyed seeing myself as a beginner in Spanish! I find it particularly interesting how much I bounced around in Spanish from one activity or resource to another. My approach to Russian is much more structured. I have five resources, and I use all of them every week. On my best days, I spend a bit of time on each of them. This is probably because Russian is so much more difficult for me than Spanish was. I was doing language exchanges and reading Roald Dahl books within my first few months of learning Spanish. I am laughably far from that in Russian!

Anyway, I would like to do monthly updates so that when I look back later, I can see exactly where I started and how I advanced.

Russian in February

Month of January (because I didn’t do this last month):
Memrise: 102 items
Duolingo: finished unit 1
Pimsleur level 1: units 1-12
Russian Made Easy: episodes 1-10
Russian Accelerator: Unit 1 Lessons 1-4

Month of February:
Memrise: 223 items
Duolingo: working on unit 2
Pimsleur level 1: units 13-22
Russian Made Easy: episodes 11-22
Russian Accelerator: Unit 1 Lesson 5 - Unit 4 Lesson 5

Spanish in February:

Honestly, not much! I focused exclusively on Russian for the majority of the month. It was only during the last weekend, with everything happening in the world, that I decided to steal a bit of my language time from Russian and use it for Spanish.

-one 1-hour conversation with an italki tutor
-listened to Democracy Now once (didn’t read along)
-read La Casa de los espíritus (I forgot to track the pages, but I'm still far from finished!)
-watched one half-hour episode of Nailed It! México

While I fully understand Spanish in news reports like Democracy Now or RTVE podcasts, and I don’t have a hard time conversing with native speakers, Nailed It Mexico threw me for a loop! I had such a hard time understanding one of the contestants, and many of the jokes flew over my head. I ended up turning on the Spanish CC, which of course made everything really easy to understand, but didn’t do much at all to train my listening. I need to listen to more unscripted Spanish with a variety of accents and with people who don’t always articulate clearly. I think that this would be most useful if I could dedicate a large chunk of time to it and create something of an immersion environment, rather than just watching half an hour per week. Something to think about!
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby Fortheo » Fri Mar 04, 2022 5:54 am

Your log tempted me into dabbling with the Russian made easy podcast. It's a really nice entry into the language, and I agree that the videos in their media center are a really nice way of not only reviewing what was covered in the episode, but exposing learners to native media and keeping us interested. I too found that there was a bit too much English at first, but the availability of the exercise mp3 files really eliminates that fault when it comes to reviewing.

How would you compare the Russian accelerator course to the Russian made easy course? from what I understand, accelerator is basically the next level after Russian made easy, is that right? Do you find it significantly more challenging?
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Fri Mar 04, 2022 1:30 pm

Fortheo wrote:Your log tempted me into dabbling with the Russian made easy podcast. It's a really nice entry into the language, and I agree that the videos in their media center are a really nice way of not only reviewing what was covered in the episode, but exposing learners to native media and keeping us interested. I too found that there was a bit too much English at first, but the availability of the exercise mp3 files really eliminates that fault when it comes to reviewing.

How would you compare the Russian accelerator course to the Russian made easy course? from what I understand, accelerator is basically the next level after Russian made easy, is that right? Do you find it significantly more challenging?


You might want to refill your morning coffee before reading this, because no one will ever accuse me of being succinct. :lol:

Russian Accelerator is similar to Russian Made Easy in terms of the relaxed approach to language learning. Mark (an American who learned Russian as a second language) is the “main teacher”, but most of the Russian is spoken by both male and female native Russian speakers (one of whom is Mark’s wife Dasha). I’m doing both Russian Made Easy and Russian Accelerator in tandem, and they complement each other, but Russian Accelerator definitely goes deeper and provides more practice. I would say that Russian Accelerator is significantly more challenging than Russian Made Easy, but it feels just as "easy". Mark has a gift for making you feel smart and capable. That is truly a magical quality in a language teacher.

I really like the video format, because I learn better when I can both see words written and hear them spoken. The clipart in the videos is cheesy (edited in and out here trying to express myself…I would appreciate more diversity) and I’d be quite happy if it were just words, but that’s my only complaint.

There are definitely a lot of English explanations in the course, but I find them helpful and necessary. The course builds on itself, but it isn’t at all stressful. I feel like I’m learning a lot, and - while grammar isn’t taught explicitly - patterns and constructions are introduced and practiced in a very natural way. I don’t know the grammar terms for what I’m doing, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with the way that words change - at least in the structures that I’ve learned so far. Keep in mind, also, that I’m not in a rush to learn, and I’d rather my learning be slow and pleasant.

Each lesson has a variety of short activities and exercises. So, for example, in yesterday’s lesson (Unit 5 Lesson 2):

-37 second dialogue audio (all Russian, using the words and constructions from this lesson)
-12 minute video introducing new vocab (English and Russian)
-10 fill-in-the-blank sentences to practice new words, with audio to listen to the correct answer
-12 minute grammar video to practice constructions (he says a sentence in English, there’s a pause to let you answer out loud, and then the sentence is written in Russian and read by a native speaker)
-repeat of the 37 second dialogue audio (all Russian - and this time you can understand all of it because you’ve learned new vocab and practiced constructions) and 54 second audio of the same dialogue (all Russian, but slower)
-transcript of the dialogue, with a super-literal English translation, followed by a “normal” English translation
-5 minute vocabulary practice video (he says a sentence in English, there’s a pause to let you answer out loud, and then the sentence is written in Russian and read by a native speaker)
-6 minute listening practice audio, with short dialogues in Russian followed by English translations
-”homework” suggestion: write down all of the verbs you know; this list will be used in the next lesson

There are 18 units, each with five lessons. At the end of each unit, there’s a 25-minute podcast, reviewing what was learned in the unit. These podcasts are reminiscent of Russian Made Easy. Sometimes Dasha and Mark’s adorable son helps out in the podcast, which is cute and fun. There’s also a media centre with 20-35 video clips for each unit. Some of these are the same clips from Russian Made Easy, but others are different.

Couple all of these audio and video resources with paper flashcards and a grammar notebook (yep, old-fashioned and hand-written), and I feel that I’m progressing well.

The first 3 units took me about 30 minutes per lesson, but now that I’m in unit 5, I have to set aside an hour. Along with my paper flashcard reviews, which took about 15 minutes yesterday, I spent a full 80 minutes on unit 5 lesson 2!

The course is working very well for me. I did the three-week trial for one dollar before signing up, so you can try it out for yourself before committing. It is definitely expensive (I signed up for 3 monthly payments of 97 dollars), but it’s yours forever. I much prefer this payment format to the eternal 20-30 dollar monthly payments that other language learning sites charge. Their business practices are honest, too. I received a very clear and friendly email a few days before being charged for the course, to remind me that I still had time to cancel. Customer service is excellent, with same-day replies to any questions. You also have access to a native language speaker who will correct written sentences and comment on audio files of you speaking (although I haven’t used this myself, I think that it’s a really amazing thing to offer).

And if it matters to you, Mark and Dasha are based in Ukraine, although they recently sent an email saying that they've been in Poland since day one of the invasion. When things turned horrible last week, this helped me with motivation.
Last edited by stell on Sat Mar 05, 2022 1:25 am, edited 4 times in total.
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Fri Mar 04, 2022 3:01 pm

Tuesday March 1
- Memrise: 7 minutes
- Duolingo: 18 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 66 minutes. Unit 5 Lesson 1.
- Pimsleur: 30 minutes. Unit 23. Well, it was a nice run, but I’m going to have to repeat this one. Not sure if it was harder, if I was tired, or if it was a combination of the two.
Total time: 1 hour and 1 minute

Wednesday March 2
- Memrise: 8 minutes
- Duolingo: 16 minutes
- Pimsleur: 30 minutes. Unit 23.
- Russian Made Easy: 24 minutes. Episode 22 flashcards, exercises and videos.
Total time: 1 hour and 18 minutes

Thursday March 3:
- Memrise: 8 minutes
- Duolingo: 24 minutes
- Russian Accelerator: 80 minutes. Unit 5 lesson 2. This one took me a long time! It was my first time learning about the past tense, and I wrote down a ton of sentences. Can I just say…Russian past tense is very cool!
- Russian Made Easy: 22 minutes. Listened to episode 23.
Total time: 2 hour and 14 minutes
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Fortheo
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby Fortheo » Fri Mar 04, 2022 3:29 pm

Thanks for the thorough review of the course! It sounds great. I'll try the 1$ trial after I finish Russian made easy. The best part of russian made easy thus far is that I haven't felt confused or frustrated with anything yet, which is rare for me when it comes to Russian :D. if it stays that way, I can see myself investing in Russian accelerator afterwards.

Anyways, I'm looking forwards to see how your Russian develops with all these different courses that you're doing. Good luck.
Last edited by Fortheo on Sat Mar 05, 2022 11:02 am, edited 1 time in total.
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stell
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Re: Stell's log: Russian and Spanish

Postby stell » Sat Mar 05, 2022 1:15 am

Fortheo wrote:Thanks for the thorough review of the course! It sounds great. I'll try the 1$ trial after I finish Russian made easy. The best part of russian made easy this far is that I haven't felt confused or frustrated with anything yet, which is rare for me when it comes to Russian :D if it stays that way, I can see myself investing in Russian accelerator afterwards.

Anyways, I'm looking forwards to see how your Russian develops with all these different courses that you're doing. Good luck.

Thanks, same to you! Let me know what you think if/when you try it. Do you have a log?
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