Lawyer&Mom, Less is More (French & German)
Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:14 am
The FLC inspired me to pick up Russian again. After all, I’m not really cheating on French if I’m not spending any money, right? (As if time isn’t priceless...) I strongly prefer an immersion approach. With French I settled on Assimil, Clozemaster and massive input. For Russian, no money means no Assimil. This made me sad. I really, really love Assimil. Just think of the Russian dad jokes I’m missing! This also made me scared. Could I jump straight into Clozemaster!?!
Short answer: Yes.
But first I tried Memrise and Duolingo. Both are slick and fun, with lots of hand holding, but both expect you to type words in Russian right away. I hate this. Spelling in a new script is just painful, and completely interrupts my flow. I wish there was a way to kill just those questions and do the remainder of the courses. Nope.
But Clozemaster is multiple choice. Yay! Holding my breath, I jumped in. It was agonizing. Super stressful. At first you just have to blindly guess, and then you really, really want to remember. I could feel my heart pounding. Once I got 19 incorrect answers on a set of 10 sentences. I was drowning.
And then I wasn’t. Honestly, the worst was over after the first hundred sentences. It was bad again when I jumped from 100 most common to 500 most common words, but not that bad.
It’s been a week, and I’ve done 2500 sentences. Here are my thoughts.
You guys made Russian sound so freaking hard. Thank you. I was super surprised and delighted that Russian isn’t actually impossible. Now, Russian is my fifth or sixth Indo-European language, and I’ve studied Latin and German, so I have a big source pool for cognates, and case declension isn’t a strange concept.
So far, the grammar is okay. Word order isn’t crazy. I can usually identify prepositions and pronouns, which helps. (As in, “I think that word is a pronoun!” even if I don’t know which one.) Wow, verb stems are wild and woolly. Like maybe one letter in the middle stays the same between tenses? Yikes.
Something is literally “What-Thing” and anybody is “Who-Thing.” This makes me very happy. I think Russian and I are going to get along.
How does Clozemaster at A0 compare to more traditional approaches? Think Islands in the Stream. If I had spent a week with a textbook, I’d be introduced to a few discrete islands of nouns and adjectives: Names, nationalities, body parts, contents of a classroom, etc. In contrast, beginning Clozemaster is all stream, a constant churning current of verbs and pronouns. “I thought you already knew about them.” “He said he told you all about her.” “I know I don’t want to have it now.” Seriously, after 2500 sentences, I think I know about 5 nouns. This is okay. I feel like I’ve been exposed to way, way more language in a week than I would have with any other approach. And nouns will come, when I get to the 1000 most common words. Only 14,000 more sentences to go!
(Seriously, I’m used to playing exclusively Fluency Fast Track with French. That won’t work this time. Russian is going to be sloooow.)
Short answer: Yes.
But first I tried Memrise and Duolingo. Both are slick and fun, with lots of hand holding, but both expect you to type words in Russian right away. I hate this. Spelling in a new script is just painful, and completely interrupts my flow. I wish there was a way to kill just those questions and do the remainder of the courses. Nope.
But Clozemaster is multiple choice. Yay! Holding my breath, I jumped in. It was agonizing. Super stressful. At first you just have to blindly guess, and then you really, really want to remember. I could feel my heart pounding. Once I got 19 incorrect answers on a set of 10 sentences. I was drowning.
And then I wasn’t. Honestly, the worst was over after the first hundred sentences. It was bad again when I jumped from 100 most common to 500 most common words, but not that bad.
It’s been a week, and I’ve done 2500 sentences. Here are my thoughts.
You guys made Russian sound so freaking hard. Thank you. I was super surprised and delighted that Russian isn’t actually impossible. Now, Russian is my fifth or sixth Indo-European language, and I’ve studied Latin and German, so I have a big source pool for cognates, and case declension isn’t a strange concept.
So far, the grammar is okay. Word order isn’t crazy. I can usually identify prepositions and pronouns, which helps. (As in, “I think that word is a pronoun!” even if I don’t know which one.) Wow, verb stems are wild and woolly. Like maybe one letter in the middle stays the same between tenses? Yikes.
Something is literally “What-Thing” and anybody is “Who-Thing.” This makes me very happy. I think Russian and I are going to get along.
How does Clozemaster at A0 compare to more traditional approaches? Think Islands in the Stream. If I had spent a week with a textbook, I’d be introduced to a few discrete islands of nouns and adjectives: Names, nationalities, body parts, contents of a classroom, etc. In contrast, beginning Clozemaster is all stream, a constant churning current of verbs and pronouns. “I thought you already knew about them.” “He said he told you all about her.” “I know I don’t want to have it now.” Seriously, after 2500 sentences, I think I know about 5 nouns. This is okay. I feel like I’ve been exposed to way, way more language in a week than I would have with any other approach. And nouns will come, when I get to the 1000 most common words. Only 14,000 more sentences to go!
(Seriously, I’m used to playing exclusively Fluency Fast Track with French. That won’t work this time. Russian is going to be sloooow.)