I have wanted to join you fine people for a long time. I am BOLIO. I have learned Spanish to an upper intermediate or low advance level. It is the only language I have learned outside of my native English. Iguanamon has motivated me in language learning along with James29, Crush, Tarvos, Cavesa, Iversen, Rdearman, EMK, Serpent, and MANY, MANY more on the old board as well as here. Thank you all.
As to Russian, I know nothing. Well, that is not entirely true, I took a few hours to learn the alphabet. There are a couple of the sounds I still confuse but I can slowly sound out the words as I see them. As to their meaning, I think I know three words (hello, sister and brother). When I say I am a beginner, I mean it. Also, I will be doing the FLC Challenge. I am in no hurry but will set aside time every day. My current studying is about 3.5 hours a day with Spanish. I will limit myself for a while in Russian to about an hour a day and keep 2.5 to my Spanish. When I say I study Spanish I mean I read books and watch Movies / TV. Declensions scare me a little but if I can find a way to make it logical (same for verbs of motion, etc) then I will eventually get it. Goals for Russian are to freely speak and read the language. Reading the classics in Russian Literature would be amazing (Will be amazing.
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My Russian plan looks like this:
1.
Learnrussian.rt.com/phonetics and beginner activities
2.
L-R 25 hours L2/L1 (Steps 2 and 3 are for listening to the sound of Russian and not vocabulary acquisition.)
3.
L-R 25 Hours L2/L24.
Cortina 20 with audio / Approach it like Luca's Assimil method (L2-L1-L2) and Arguelles with his Shadowing and Scriptorium. I am really going to try and milk everything I can out of this content. I will not get into a hurry (My regret with Spanish Assimil).
5.
Princeton Course - I have downloaded the entire program and it seems quite extensive.
6.
Native materials. However, I will be listening to native materials all along the way.
Additional Daily Activities:
1) Shadow Short Text without meaning. Work them intensively until I understand their meaning and Shadow some more.
2) Clozemaster Top 100 words (Shadow clozemaster Sentences) After the 100 I will go onto the top 1,000 and so on.
Weekly / Monthly activities:
There is a local group of Russians as well as a few (not too many) Americans who are learning Russian who meet weekly within a couple of miles of my house. I met one of them yesterday. He was very nice and very supportive when I told him I was starting Russian. I look forward to visiting them as much as my schedule will allow.
Anyway, I am glad to be here if that is OK with you all. I appreciate all the posts you have made with your Russian experiences.
All the best,
BOLIO
Reminder to myself: Perfection is useless and harmful. Just keep moving forward.