Reading Russian News: An April Experiment

[Lawyer&Mom]

I pronounced “nostalgic” as “nose-logic.” Definitely a whole word kid.

[Glossy]

Maybe, but the flipside is that since it was self-taught it was the whole-word method

I'm a native Russian speaker, and I hate having to read Russian text in the Latin alphabet. A discussion on the languagehat blog a while ago made me think about the possible reasons for this. I think it's the whole-word phenomenon. I'm used to the Cyrillic shapes of Russian words. I'm not used to their Latin shapes. If I don't recognize the overall shape of a word, I have to parse it letter-by-letter. That's slow and annoying.

When I said this in languagehat's comment section, a couple of people told me that the whole-word phenomenon is a myth. I suspect it's real.

Before the spread of smartphones and tablets it was difficult to switch alphabets online. Either your keyboard was made for Cyrillic or it wasn't. Well, some people put stickers on theirs, but that was a hassle. So in the past you saw Latinized Russian online more often than you do now. It was a torture for me to read it.

[Glossy]

It's something like 700-900 wpm

Do you "pronounce" words silently when you read? I've known people who didn't. I'm guessing that might be associated with speed-reading. I do "pronounce" them, and I read at an average speed.

[Axon]

My biggest whole-word mistake was making "Michelangelo" into "mishel-ango."

They definitely taught me that whole-word learning was a real thing in the language acquisition classes I took a few years ago. I never delved into any of that research so it could turn out to be an oversimplification.

Many people prefer reading Chinese in Pinyin romanization but I can only use it as a guide for pronouncing unknown characters. I've spent way too long with the characters to be able to efficiently get meaning from a text written in Pinyin. Glossy, if you were to pick up Serbian, would you prefer the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet?

I definitely pronounce words in my head as I read silently. The voice goes really fast . That's never seemed weird to me, though. If I focus on one word then I can hear it clearly in my mind, but as I read a sentence the words kind of overlap in a way.

[Axon]

Total study time through day 11: 400 minutes. We'll call it 400 even though things have been pretty hectic and I did a lot of tiny study bursts instead of actually counting minutes. I'll do some more reading after this post to make sure the real count isn't too low.

If I had studied the full 75 minutes each day, I'd be at more than double that figure. I feel that I've already achieved some little bump in my ability, which is of course a great feeling. But I can't help but wonder what would happen if I started studying harder and longer.

What would I spend that extra time on? Grammar? A recent grammar hole that popped up is declension of cardinal numbers. The TTS does that automatically but I certainly can't. Vocabulary? Could I really handle an extra half hour of Russian vocab drills every day?

I listened to a little bit of news radio. Although it was mostly incomprehensible as usual, I definitely noticed some of my new words being used. That gives me hope that NHK isn't simplified to the point of being unhelpful.

Some of the trickier Anki cards are sticking better in my mind. I'm better able to parse some of the sentences that I just threw in on the first day.

I'd really like to devote some serious time to just powering through my 30-page collection of NHK/BBC articles. I have this feeling that if I can just expose myself to all of these in one go, I'll make some kind of important gain. The language used in the Global Voices articles is much more varied and advanced, and so I haven't been looking at those for a while. That's my week 3 goal.

[Glossy]

Glossy, if you were to pick up Serbian, would you prefer the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet?

Cyrillic. I've read that Serbs use the Latin alphabet more often than Russians, but still, there's got to be more Serbian reading material in Cyrillic. I'm assuming that almost all Serbian books are in it, for example.

The letter height issue isn't a problem for me, but that's because I started reading in Cyrillic when I was in kindergarten, when my mind was at its most malleable. I see how it would be a problem for people learning it as adults.

[yehor]

I, literally, have spent an hour of time to find a similar resource to learningenglish.voanews.com (news with audio) for Russian but can't do it.

I have found this resource http://nclrc.org/webcasts/russian that now is not working but you can listen to content here http://web.archive.org/web/201611271950 ... s/russian/

Also I recommend you listen to pronunciation of real people here https://forvo.com because sometimes TTS can be wrong.

[Axon]

Wow, yehor, thank you very much for that! It's working extremely slowly for me right now, but I'll keep trying because that's a valuable resource. I really appreciate it!

I do use Forvo and Wiktionary for native speaker pronunciations sometimes. It just takes too long to look up all the new words, so I'll accept a couple of TTS errors in return for more and easier exposure to the audio I need.

Total study time through day 12: 450 minutes.

Today was definitely a good study day even though I got sidetracked by a wonderful book in English. I finished my first pass through the NHK articles, made a bunch of new flashcards, and even read a little bit of Wikipedia.

I'm not sure if I've been explicit about my paper study materials: one little booklet of monolingual NHK and BBC articles, another of parallel texts in Iguanamon style from Global Voices. I didn't count the number of articles but I'd estimate I've read at least 20 short NHK articles so far, about half of them twice, and maybe six or seven intensively, line by line with parallel text from Google Translate. I'll report later to see if the BBC articles represent a big leap in difficulty.

When I was studying German I got a parallel text way above my level. For weeks I plodded through the first short story in the collection, starting over from the beginning every night. This intensive parallel text study (I was taking classes at the same time too) made a massive difference in my ability to understand German fiction, which I can now read slowly but pleasurably.

[Axon]

Total study time through day 13: 500 minutes.

Been having some better luck these last few days with getting study time in. I even did a Duolingo session to test out the new Crowns thing. Looks pretty much the same to me so far, though I like that I can switch to just clicking on the words instead of constantly failing because of Russian typos (or, to be honest, imperfect knowledge).

Seems like my best intensive reading routine is:

Select about 400 words worth of the monolingual articles and glance through them. Copy them into Google Translate and read them line by line. Sometimes the TTS is on for this, sometimes not. Copy interesting phrases into the same GT box as additional translation lines. Read through these selections again and make Anki cards with the Yandex TTS.

Today when I did Anki review I looked up some words that weren't quite sticking. I also read (in English) some more grammar notes about Russian including one that cleared up something that had been bothering me for a while. But to counter that I learned that I have more questions about verbs than I thought. Comprehending isn't hard but I've forgotten the rules for producing some forms, if indeed I ever knew them. Maybe next month will be a more intense Russian grammar month.

[Axon]

Total study time through day 15: 615 minutes

I had a feeling I'd be able to knuckle down this weekend, but to my great joy it didn't seem like knuckling down at all!

I certainly can't read for pleasure, but I'm at that marvelous stage where progress comes quickly when you put in the work. It's hard to imagine that even these simple articles were virtually unreadable for me on day 1. Definitely a mental block going on there: I believe Russian news is hard, which means I can't read it, which means I won't read it. Myth busted.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not there yet. I still run into whole paragraphs sometimes that I don't understand. But the momentum has built to such a point that I'm actively interested in reading Wikipedia articles and other, native Russian news sites. Just two weeks ago I dreaded the idea of trying to read even Wikipedia introductions in Russian.

Here's a great overview of short form participles that I ran into.

At the halfway point, I've read roughly 5000 words of simple news (not counting ample rereadings). I've done a measly three Duolingo and two Lingvist lessons. I've listened to about twenty minutes of Russian news radio. I have made 163 Russian->English Anki cards and studied 12 of 14 days for an average of 8 minutes a day, making 637 reviews in total.