Re: Lilly's log - French and Russian
Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2017 5:45 pm
Current progress:
: Assimil Russian
: Duolingo Russian
: Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2
Finished:
: Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
It's been almost 2 weeks since I took up Russian again and I've been working pretty consistently throughout. I've been redoing Duolingo from the top to revise grammar, practiced my pronunciation by shadowing the Assimil lessons and I also started reading simple texts a week ago. This last week I've pretty much gone through my usual list, Duolingo, Assimil and a Red Kalinka Story, repeat every day. I've done between 1.5 and 3h a day and the last two days I've decided to increase my reading time a little and read two stories a day. Since my first goal is to start reading native content instead of teaching texts, this is right now the focus. So far reading isn't fun yet. The texts are still a little boring and typing almost every word out for the LWT database is rather tedious. It will get better quickly though, or at least I hope so. I find those Red Kalinka readers actually a little expensive to be honest, but they are also really well made, with stress marked, translation, comprehension questions / exercises, as well as audio.
Assimil is still pretty basic 9 lessons in which is good and bad. It's not really helpful yet, but it doesn't really pose any problems either. Apart from a couple of words that still twist my tongue into a knot there isn't much to say about it so far. It starts with a different case than Russian World on Youtube and a different case again from Duolingo. Basically there doesn't seem to be a consensus which case is easiest or most important to learn. So, in the end I've actually lost track of how many cases I've encountered before. That's alright though, since I need them all for reading.
Duolingo became a little more difficult and today I actually had to repeat a lesson, which I didn't need to do with any of the other skills before. I'm still not close to the point where I stopped using Duolingo the last time round, so maybe it's just a fluke with that particular skill, who knows. In any case, I think I'm slowly getting up to speed again and I'll be making a real effort to get through my graded readers quickly. I already finished A1 and I don't seem to be running into many problems with the first A2 reader either. I'm a little impatient to get to real content, but looking at the first page of the book I want to read in Russian translation, I still have some revision and practice to do beforehand. Maybe another couple of weeks and I'll get there, hopefully.
Apart from that I've been playing around with several other resources. I've listened to a few glossika spaced repetition files and today I had a go at clozemaster. The latter seems rather interesting because the sentences from Tatoeba aren't quite as "clean" as most of the sentences I see in my other resources. It seems a little closer to real usage maybe. I will definitely play around with it for a few days and see whether it works for me.
And then of course I was also longingly looking at resources for intermediate and advanced Russian learners. There seem to be some really interesting books out there, advanced grammar workbooks and advanced courses based on history. I can't wait to reach that level and have a look at those, especially the history one looked very interesting!
: Assimil Russian
: Duolingo Russian
: Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A2
Finished:
: Red Kalinka - Stories in Russian A1
It's been almost 2 weeks since I took up Russian again and I've been working pretty consistently throughout. I've been redoing Duolingo from the top to revise grammar, practiced my pronunciation by shadowing the Assimil lessons and I also started reading simple texts a week ago. This last week I've pretty much gone through my usual list, Duolingo, Assimil and a Red Kalinka Story, repeat every day. I've done between 1.5 and 3h a day and the last two days I've decided to increase my reading time a little and read two stories a day. Since my first goal is to start reading native content instead of teaching texts, this is right now the focus. So far reading isn't fun yet. The texts are still a little boring and typing almost every word out for the LWT database is rather tedious. It will get better quickly though, or at least I hope so. I find those Red Kalinka readers actually a little expensive to be honest, but they are also really well made, with stress marked, translation, comprehension questions / exercises, as well as audio.
Assimil is still pretty basic 9 lessons in which is good and bad. It's not really helpful yet, but it doesn't really pose any problems either. Apart from a couple of words that still twist my tongue into a knot there isn't much to say about it so far. It starts with a different case than Russian World on Youtube and a different case again from Duolingo. Basically there doesn't seem to be a consensus which case is easiest or most important to learn. So, in the end I've actually lost track of how many cases I've encountered before. That's alright though, since I need them all for reading.
Duolingo became a little more difficult and today I actually had to repeat a lesson, which I didn't need to do with any of the other skills before. I'm still not close to the point where I stopped using Duolingo the last time round, so maybe it's just a fluke with that particular skill, who knows. In any case, I think I'm slowly getting up to speed again and I'll be making a real effort to get through my graded readers quickly. I already finished A1 and I don't seem to be running into many problems with the first A2 reader either. I'm a little impatient to get to real content, but looking at the first page of the book I want to read in Russian translation, I still have some revision and practice to do beforehand. Maybe another couple of weeks and I'll get there, hopefully.
Apart from that I've been playing around with several other resources. I've listened to a few glossika spaced repetition files and today I had a go at clozemaster. The latter seems rather interesting because the sentences from Tatoeba aren't quite as "clean" as most of the sentences I see in my other resources. It seems a little closer to real usage maybe. I will definitely play around with it for a few days and see whether it works for me.
And then of course I was also longingly looking at resources for intermediate and advanced Russian learners. There seem to be some really interesting books out there, advanced grammar workbooks and advanced courses based on history. I can't wait to reach that level and have a look at those, especially the history one looked very interesting!