Reading Russian News: An April Experiment

[Axon]

Two more recordings for you around the halfway point.

No prep, unfamiliar article. No TTS. After shadowing TTS three times.

Reading fluently out loud is totally not my main goal, but obviously if I improve in that then I've improved somewhat toward my goal of reading comfortably. I definitely have a long way to go, but I'd say there's definite progress compared to my first recording.

Total study time through day 17: 690 minutes.

During the weekdays I have more obligations and I have to sneak more tiny reading practice sessions in. Still keeping up with Anki.

Turns out the BBC articles, at least the first one I chose, are too far above my level for me to tackle now, even by breaking them up and reading them intensively.

So I'll switch my paper reading to review of NHK articles and begin with the Global Voices parallel text. I'll also try to intensively read at least one new NHK article daily.

I did this yesterday and could handle it pretty well on the first 'passive' pass. Later on I listened to French news in the gym and to my delight I realized that they were reporting on the same story I'd read in Russian, and I remembered other details from the Russian version that didn't appear in the French newscast!

[Axon]

Total study time through day 19: 745 minutes.

Not much new to report. My brain is getting into kind of a groove with the Anki cards where some phrases are completely transparent - finally! These were all unknowns when I started, so that's another clear sign of progress.

I read quite a few pages of Global Voices today, and the stories varied considerably in difficulty. Some sentences were very clear to me, others were so different from the parallel text that I was pretty lost reading them. I found that in one of them the translator had rendered "Pyeongchang" (site of the Winter Olympics in South Korea) as "Пхеньян" (capital of North Korea). Oops!

I've started sparingly using Linguee to add example sentences for words that keep tripping me up in my flashcards. Although Linguee isn't a perfect RU-EN dictionary, it works well, has a lot of set phrases, and provides formal example sentences very similar to the news that I read.

I'm looking forward to some solid study hours these next three days.

[rdearman]

I found that in one of them the translator had rendered "Pyeongchang" (site of the Winter Olympics in South Korea) as "Пхеньян" (capital of North Korea). Oops!

That confused the crap out of me when the Winter Olympics were on! I kept saying to my wife that it couldn't be right. It never actually twigged until you said that now.

[iguanamon]

As to Russian on GV, I think it would probably be more useful to read articles originally written in Russian alongside an English translation, as opposed to English articles translated into Russian alongside the original English.

[Axon]

Day 20: 20 min
Day 21: 35 min
Day 22: 50 min
Day 23: 20 min

Total: 870 minutes

I thought I'd be able to really knuckle down again, but instead I took on a bunch of new responsibilities! Who could have seen it coming?

Anyway, those minutes were mostly reading new NHK articles and finding new words. I did a tiny bit of video watching but not enough to make much impact. Sometimes I copy new words into Linguee and use their example sentences instead. The benefit to this is that their sentences resemble news sentences and are generally pretty clear. The drawback is that reading their sentences doesn't seem to be more efficient than just sticking with the Google Translate sentence/phrase pairs.

I can understand the main points of a randomly selected NHK article about 75% of the time. I can fully comprehend the article about 20% of the time. If I switch to a different website, I usually need a few dictionary lookups before I can understand the main point of the article.

I can think in Russian a lot more than I could in March. It's not great Russian, but I can remember lots of words that I thought were gone forever. If I had stuck to my goal of doing Duolingo and Lingvist, this effect would be stronger.

This week I'm going to try to kick those numbers up a little. One more weekend to go.

[Axon]

Day 24: 25 min
Day 25: 50 min
Day 26: 55 min

Total time through day 26: 1000 minutes

Finally hit 1000 minutes! Remember, that time counts everything related to studying Russian this month. I'm even counting the brief sequences of Russian dialogue in the film I saw today. If I'm slow making flash cards, or need to repeat the same card over and over, that adds up the minutes. Outside of these minutes there is no new Russian information entering my brain.

Since I haven't made the leaps in vocabulary required to read longer and more advanced articles, I'm sticking only to NHK articles for now. That's fine - my original goal was "read simple news articles." It's okay if I don't meet stretch goals.

A new topic, animal extinction, threw me way off today and I had to look up a lot of the words. I've decided that using example sentences from Linguee or Wiktionary don't help as much as just intensively reading more articles - especially not when every minute counts. I'm pretty comfortable with articles about heads of state visiting each other, projects being completed, and economic agreements.

I'm coming up with lots of ideas about how to make studying news easier. I can see myself doing this again in the future with Russian or another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. Anki works really well for me when I'm trying to build that whole-word recognition.

[Axon]

Day 27: 25 min
Day 28: 10 min
Day 29: 40 min

Total through day 29: 1075 minutes

These are pretty low numbers, I know. They really just represent Anki and reading a couple of NHK articles each day. Otherwise I've been far busier than normal. Fortunately, my other obligations also include using foreign languages. Unfortunately, they're not Russian.

By now I've gotten to be comfortable with all the different sentence structures that regularly appear in NHK. Vocabulary is a never-ending task, but I've gotten the hang of the most common ones, and with a bit of effort I can remember some of the more confusing words as I see them.

I very much know what's going on with every article. If I go to a more "complicated" news site that includes lifestyle tips and product reviews, there's a good chance I'll flail for a bit before figuring out what the article is about. One neat advantage is that the NHK articles, being about politics, generally have simple pictures of the leaders involved or the buildings where they do their thing. An article on LIFE.ru had several big photos of a bunch of trees knocked over in the streets, so I knew the article was about windstorms even before trying to puzzle out the language.

My reading speed has been improving the last few days. As I predicted, I got used to the formulaic structure of the articles. I recognize dozens of "new" words on sight, and I'm much better now at puzzling out Japanese names in Cyrillic.

[Axon]

Total time through day 30: 1100 minutes.

I can now read simple Russian news about certain topics.

I didn't keep track of the number of articles I read. On day 30, I read three articles twice each with no dictionary assistance. After the second reading, all three were fairly clear to me. All three were about politicians agreeing to things with other politicians - nothing as difficult as sports news, new infrastructure projects, or wildlife preservation.

Anki says that I studied 27 of 30 days with an average of 59.8 reviews a day making a total of 1614 reviews. I spent 248 minutes (22.5% of my total study time) on Anki review. My deck has 262 cards.

If you don't want a lot of analysis of this little study project (the conclusions of which can be summarized as "read news and you'll get better at reading news") stop here.

What I Did Right

I read lots of news and reviewed what I learned.
I noticed around day 7 or 8 that I was getting faster and better at re-reading. It took me until about day 25 to notice that I was getting faster and better at reading new articles for the first time. Nevertheless, I think the review, with Anki and with plain old re-reading, was crucial. If I'd just read each article once or twice with a translation, I believe I wouldn't have advanced as fast.

I made Anki cards of varying length.
During my review time, I didn't get bored just reading long paragraphs or skimming through single word cards. Instead, some cards focused on prepositional phrases, some on full sentences, and some on little sections of sentences that had interesting grammar. The sweet spot was around 4-8 words - and the more known words in the card already, the better.

I was consistent.
I studied an average of 36 minutes a day while still keeping up my German, Mandarin, and Indonesian and also juggling various daily responsibilities. There were definitely times when I slacked off or felt less motivated, but on the whole I thought I did a pretty good job sticking to this "challenge."

I used audio.
The Yandex TTS was a wonderful resource. I used it for about three-quarters of my Anki cards. That really helped me read faster and get some of the harder words to stick in my memory. Even though I just had RU->EN cards, I ended up memorizing several sentences and phrases just because they got stuck in my head.

What I Might Have Improved

My sources were too varied.
I imagined that I would master NHK in about two weeks and then go on to harder articles. When that didn't happen, I still tried to read harder articles instead of adjusting my goals back to NHK only. I'm sure the harder articles helped, but the format was too different and I pulled articles from too many places to get used to more writing styles quickly. Only now do I really feel like I could start tackling BBC or LIFE.ru - not even Global Voices yet. Obviously in the long term you need to have a variety of sources, but that's not necessary when you're dealing with a short-term goal.

I used pre-made example sentences.
Across the board, the example sentences from Linguee or Wiktionary were less useful than sentences taken directly from the articles. I had nothing to mentally anchor the "artificial" examples with, and I would have been better served just looking up unfamiliar words instead of making new cards with new sentences that didn't relate to what I was learning.

I probably skipped important words.
Especially toward the second half of the month, I had a feeling that I should get through more articles instead of reviewing and really looking up all the words in my previous articles. An effect of this, coupled with the short timeframe, was that even in some of my most familiar articles there are still words I don't completely know. It would have been a good idea to seriously pick apart maybe four or five articles in addition to the main learning strategy I had.

I barely tried using other resources.
This whole month, I probably listened to 30 minutes of Russian radio and watched 10 minutes of subtitled Russian videos. I was obviously nowhere close to my "maximum study time" and so if I'd added more audio and video it would probably have helped a bit. I also failed to really try out Lingvist/Duolingo. It's true that these resources suffer from the same drawback of not being relevant to my main study material, but more output might have helped solidify the words I was learning too. On the other hand, it was pretty easy, psychologically speaking, to stick to simple study resources.

Other Notes

More articles with audio would really be a boon to learners. If I'd been able to sit down and do some listening-reading with a native speaker voice, I think my reading speed would have developed even faster than it did.

"Overlapping" Anki cards might be a good idea. If I read a phrase "The meetings were held in a government building outside Helsinki," I usually just made the one card. But of course that one phrase has "the meetings were held in a building" "in a government building" "a building outside Helsinki" and more. If someone out there wants to design a book or course for learning to read news, I think this is a fantastic way to get more learning value out of a single article.

I think I'll keep using my Anki deck here and there, just reviewing cards. I'm happy to have had this little jump in my Russian ability, but it's not a very high priority for me at the moment. It's very nice to see progress in a relatively short time - and without a ton of effort!

Questions, comments, suggestions? I'd love to hear them!