Reading Russian News: An April Experiment

[Axon]

My Russian reading is not good enough. I would like to be able to read simple news articles. I cannot.

So all through the month of April, I'm going to work on this.

The "experiment" portion comes in two parts. First, I don't want to spend more than 75 minutes a day on this. My schedule changes pretty unpredictably and I think 45-75 minutes a day is pretty achievable. Ideally it'll be less, but this might change as time goes by.

Second, I'm going to use free and legal material. I can't buy any Russian books even if I wanted to. I won't use my Glossika subscription for Russian for this month.

The resources I've gathered are about 16000 words of articles mined from NHK and other news sites, including a few parallel texts I made from Global Voices. I'm going to print these out and read them frequently.

I'll also listen-read some Russian Wikipedia articles that have audio. I haven't collected these yet.

Lastly, I'll do a small amount of Lingvist and Duolingo every day to get a sliver of output in as well. I would use Clozemaster but I've paid for the Pro features already.

If anyone sees glaring flaws in this, or has done something similar and has some advice, I'm all ears. Tomorrow is the official Day 1 and that's when I'll estimate my current ability. Stay tuned!

[Expugnator]

I'm curious about this experiment! After all, you've had great success with languages in the other range of the spectrum of inflection.

How much grammar do you know? I have the feeling you need proportionally less grammar for decoding the Russian sentence than for German, Georgian or Estonian (on the other hand, you need much more to produce it. My point is that or doesn't take much to understand the Russian sentence once you've understood the main functions of the cases). Even so, my reading skills are much behind in Russian and I have the feeling that the vocabulary is so much detailed for Russian even in simpler texts and it's not always straightforward to figure out those richer or subtler words from the most frequent ones.

Do you think that experiment with Russian might take time from those languages you're succeeding at? I'm taking the opposite path: I'm considering taking time from Russia so I can use it in languages I enjoy and I've been better at learning and/or am more likely to succeed.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I'm using a combination of Ilya Frank's material and the free content from A Taste of Russian (from the beginning, June 2007).

[Axon]

How much grammar do you know?

A reasonable amount. I know the cases and what they do and almost always how to spot them. I'm pretty bad at participles, though - we'll see how much they come up this month.

Do you think that experiment with Russian might take time from those languages you're succeeding at?

Ideally it'll take time from Facebook and other mindless browsing. I have no worries about German, Mandarin, and Indonesian as I use them every day. I think I'll probably read a little less French and Spanish, but I'll keep listening to those at the gym at least. We'll see about the others.

[Axon]

Day 1:

Eased myself in. I remembered that Anki exists and I made twelve cards with sentences from Duolingo and fragments from my NHK articles.

Why NHK? Two reasons, actually. First, I don't know much about Japan and Japanese news and I figure it's a good source for that. Secondly, the Russian articles are very short and very formulaic and I think mastering these is a good first goal.

As for assessing my ability, I am absolutely missing crucial vocabulary. So I know in these first few days I really need to commit to memory the high-frequency news lexical items like "went into effect" "state security" and "taxes."

With the aid of a dictionary, it took me 4 minutes to read 150 words. There was one construction that gave me trouble but I got the meaning through Google Translate.

I read three NHK articles and got the gist of each, such as who were the subjects and what they were discussing. I will reread them after writing this post, bringing my study time to about 35 minutes today.

[Zireael]

What does NHK have to do with Russian?

[IronMike]

How much grammar do you know?

A reasonable amount. I know the cases and what they do and almost always how to spot them. I'm pretty bad at participles, though - we'll see how much they come up this month.

Russian news is rife with participles! A review of those first might be warranted.

[rfnsoares]

How much grammar do you know?

A reasonable amount. I know the cases and what they do and almost always how to spot them. I'm pretty bad at participles, though - we'll see how much they come up this month.

Russian news is rife with participles! A review of those first might be warranted.

Yes! You won't be able to read if you do not master the participles. There is a huge difference between the spoken language and the written one. And in order to read anything, from news to novels, it is vital to understand the usage of all participles.

[Xmmm]

There's a series on Echo of Moscow called "My Moscow". They are 1 to 2 minute radio clips with transcript where famous Russians give their childhood recollections of Moscow. They tend to be a little sad, like "I used to love a park that was here but they put in a bunch of high rises." I don't think the language would be much harder than what you're reading (although less formulaic to be sure) ... and, free, etc.

[Axon]

What does NHK have to do with Russian?

NHK publishes rather perfunctorily in about 16 different languages besides English and Japanese. I chose them specifically because I know the Russian news articles are going to be simple and uncluttered, perfect for someone still getting used to Russian news vocabulary.

Thanks everyone for advice on participles and links to many more resources! I'm focusing specifically on news at the moment, but I'll absolutely continue my Russian studies in the future and I'll be sure to use all these resources.