Teango wrote:If you find any aspect of independent study to be particularly overwhelming, or mind-numbingly dull, please feel free to bin it or attack it from a more rewarding angle! You can always set it aside for now and replace it with something that makes you
smile and feel daily accomplishment instead. Don't worry, those verb conjugations won't swim away, and who knows, perhaps once you're more familiar and comfortable with Russian verbs in general, it might be interesting to return to that little lake of piranhas later on (or not).
The same goes with all those reviews nipping at your ankles every day. It sounds like misery. Believe it or not, all the most useful words and constructions will come up again; they really will. So feel free to throw them out and start afresh if they're really getting you down, or at least dramatically slim down your lists so that they don't take up more than 10-15 minutes of your time each day. It can be quite liberating and cathartic.
And I know...sunken costs...yeah...I'm all too familiar with sunken costs (especially when it comes to watching Netflix
). However there are so many other things you could do right now that are much more rewarding and motivating. And there's the key...
wanting and
looking forward to doing activities in and through the language, not just today, but tomorrow and onwards, and ideally without the need to endure too many sharp teeth or draining currents along the way.
Take it from someone who bears the scars of initially trying to wade through textbooks, grammar tables, and flashcards the hard way...
Thank you for the advice, Teango
I thought about it this morning and decided that you were right and my reviews have indeed been pretty miserable recently
So I've had a spring clean of my Memrise today and deleted three of the decks that I was using. I think that must have removed about a thousand words, so hopefully I'll have significantly fewer reviews coming up now!
The ones I deleted were the three official Memrise Russian courses I was working through; I started doing them earlier this year because they had really good audio and there were lots of words and phrases which I thought would be useful for me to practise before going to Russia. This is all true, but there were also loads of really pointless phrases that weren't of any particular use to me and I think I was just stuck in a rut of reviewing them over and over again because I'd put so much effort into memorising them in the first place.
It felt quite good to delete them anyway
Perhaps I'll come back to them at some point! For now I'm just going to try and focus on the vocab from Colloquial Russian. I am not really a lover of SRS in general but I can't find any other way of learning vocabulary that works for me, and the two main things I'm trying to do with Russian at the moment are increase my active vocabulary and get a proper handle on the grammar. I don't really like grammar study either, but I feel like I need to press on with it because my Russian is at a weird stage where I can understand a surprising amount (mainly due to the benefit of already speaking some Croatian) but can barely string a coherent sentence together myself.
15 AugustI had a meeting I was really dreading today. Dreading it has pretty much dominated my week. But it happened, and in reality it wasn't anywhere near as bad as I'd expected. I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere!
RussianOn the way back from my meeting I had 20 minutes to wait for a train so I used the time to finish the Russian 3 course. It was slightly illogical to finish it, given that I'd already decided I was going to delete it, but as I said yesterday I was only about 40 words away from the end and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I couldn't help myself
I finished it, took a screenshot of it being finished as proof, and then deleted it.
This evening I spent a fair bit of time on the first batch of exercises in chapter 11 of Colloquial Russian. The first one gave sentences with imperfective verbs in the past tense and asked you to rewrite them with perfective verbs in the past tense. That wasn't too bad, because the past tense isn't hard. The second exercise was much tougher because it gave sentences with verbs in the imperfective future and asked you to rewrite them in the perfective future. The perfective future is definitely a weak point for me and I couldn't do most of the exercise without going back to the verb list and looking up the conjugations.
Total time = 93 minutes. Streak = 226 days