Reading Russian News: An April Experiment

[Axon]

Day 2:

Total study time - 75 minutes

Broke my computer screen today.

I read a quick overview of the participles and they came right back, I tell you. I don't think I could reliably produce all of them at this moment, but a few more review sessions and I'll have no trouble when I come across them in the future.

I didn't add any new Anki cards but I did review them and did a short session on Lingvist. Adding TTS with Anki really helps but I don't want to completely rely on it - I need to develop a good internal voice.

I reread my articles from yesterday and read a few more. Without realizing it I picked several in a row about the same gripping topic of steel and aluminum tariffs. So seeing these same words over and over really works them into my passive vocabulary.

I read one of the articles aloud (again, they average 150 words), and I'd like to make a recording soon to give kind of a before and after for this experiment. I can practically feel the rust coming off when I read aloud. I've got high hopes here.

I've been distracted these past two days, actually, consuming some English-language media for a change. That's unusual for me and it should be over soon.

[Axon]

Okay, well, I realized that it's not too exciting if I post the same thing every day.

Day 3: Continued reading and did Lingvist and Anki.

Day 4: Much of the same. Did a lot more reading than normal, reread the short articles again.

Total study time for days 1-4: 180 minutes.

Today I have only studied a little bit but I read aloud to give you an idea where I'm at. It's bad.

I made the first recording and then listened to a TTS read the article aloud five times. The difference is pretty big in my opinion, though it's painfully clear which words I know and which words I'm just sounding out.

Recording 1.

Recording 2.

Anyway, actually reading these articles is easier and easier. I frequently understand the NHK articles even though about 30 percent of the words are unknown. I've already figured out several from context.

I'm going to keep up the TTS method more to get the actual flow of the words in my head.

[MamaPata]

I'm really interested in this experiment as it's pretty close to what I'm doing with Russian at the moment, so depending on how it goes for you, I might try something similar in the summer. We'll see.

You mentioned that you've added a few words to Anki. Is that something you're going to keep doing or was it a one off? I assume mostly you're learning through the repetition in the texts themselves?

Also, out of interest, what are you doing with the texts you're reading? Are you adding stress markers when you've listened to it? Obviously far from any good myself, but some of your problem with the texts sounded like it might be related to stress. When you're reading are you doing anything about stress? This is one of my major problems so I'm always interested to hear what people are doing.

[Axon]

Day 5 complete. Total study time 255 minutes.

I spent a really long time fiddling with TTS on Windows and ended up just listening to the TTS from Google and Bing Translate. I went over some of the more familiar articles, listened to them more intently, and mined useful vocabulary and prepositional phrases.

MamaPata, since my goal is rapid comprehension of news specifically, I'm putting small chunks into my Anki deck. Some examples from today are "согласно сообщению" and "министерство рассчитывает." I try to review it every day. Maybe in two weeks I'll start adding single words.

At the moment, I add TTS to each Anki card. That's one way to have a crutch - for me it works faster and better than marking stress. But I think marking stress is somewhat of a crutch too, so none of my printed articles have it. They don't even have ё. I wanted to collect simple yet authentic news just the way it appears for natives.

Turns out the best TTS is pasting the entire article in Anki's AwesomeTTS and choosing the Yandex Translate voice. It's far better than the Google voice.

[Axon]

Day 6. Total study time: 310 minutes.

Broke my computer screen MORE today.

It takes me a long time to comb through articles and put the interesting phrases into Anki, even though I use Google Translate. I do count that as study time. Still adding TTS to every card and doing a little shadowing under my breath when I review.

Interestingly, today was actually pretty bad in terms of comprehending the NHK articles. Several paragraphs went by without understanding more than a few words in each, and I had to force myself to focus and not skip things. I'll do a little more review today after this post.

I think Duolingo's advanced levels are better for me right now than Lingvist, though I do like some aspects of Lingvist a lot more. Their TTS is better and you stay in Russian-output mode the whole time, plus you really get drilled on the cases. But for me, right now I need the advanced vocabulary in upper-level Duolingo. Shame I just plowed through these lessons in 2016 instead of actually learning them well.

[Axon]

Study time total through day 9: 345 minutes.

An impromptu motorcycle trip took up most of days 7 and 8, and I could barely summon motivation on Day 9 to get back into it.

This is the first time I've publicly held myself to "specific" "goals" and although they're very modest I can't help but feel the pressure sometimes.

Anyway, I didn't lose everything just by ignoring Russian for a day. I've noticed a definite uptick in reading comprehension of the NHK articles. The past few have been about very different topics but I understand more than just the gist of each.

I'm really, really fast at reading English, and that transfers over to other languages written in Latin characters. Even if I have to remap the character values considerably (Vietnamese comes to mind) it still only takes a little bit of practice to get at least comfortable using that alphabet.

So even though I've been studying Russian on and off for two and a half years, and even though it's embarrassing to admit, the alphabet really is still a bit of an obstacle for me. Most of my Russian was learned aurally and there are plenty of times that I'll see a word I know but take an extra quarter second for it to register. This never happens with other languages I know.

Therefore, even if I fail in my goal of reading simple news without a dictionary, I can tell for sure that this intensive and extensive reading practice is having a good effect on my general Cyrillic automaticity.

[Glossy]

I'm really, really fast at reading English

Do you know your reading speed, in words per minute? If it's far above the average person's, did you work to achieve that or did it come naturally?

[Axon]

I'm really, really fast at reading English

Do you know your reading speed, in words per minute? If it's far above the average person's, did you work to achieve that or did it come naturally?

It's something like 700-900 wpm, though I do a lot of backtracking and jumping around when I read on a page. It came naturally after learning to read at a relatively young age (before 3) and reading pretty much nonstop for most of my childhood. Books at the dinner table, books in the bathroom, books in the bathtub, books at school...

[eido]

Before three? You got brains, dude.

[Axon]

Before three? You got brains, dude.

Maybe, but the flipside is that since it was self-taught it was the whole-word method, so there were a fair few words I grew up mispronouncing since I'd never heard them pronounced and just memorized them as shapes. I don't make spelling mistakes in English, but even in very phonetic languages like Indonesian I'll sometimes transpose letters without thinking.

And back to Russian, the fact that so many Cyrillic characters are the same height means I do a lot more transposing of sounds and letters when reading words aloud that I don't know. That's why I'm doing so much TTS instead of marking stress. TTS forces me to follow letter by letter and also have a sound representation of the word in my mind.