By December 25th, 2018:
- Pass the TORFL 3 exam
Play and fully enjoy the Russian version of Witcher 3 (video game)
Teach my son (currently 7 months old) enough Russian that he and I can have some fun with it
Experience
* United States native, living in United States. No contact w/ Russian speakers except via Skype, however I used to work with several and may work with more in the future. We outsource a lot of work to a Russian firm.
* Some past experience with Spanish and Latin (but not fluent).
* 2 months of Russian study a few years ago. Retained very little except ability to read Cyrillic, ability to type Cyrillic, and < 100 word vocab.
* Started Russian again about 5 months ago. I've averaged about ~1hr a day. Some periods more than 1hr per day, some periods very little, if any, practice. I've been adjusting my sleep/wake times to give me more chances to meet that 1hr per day quota (very early morning study before other priorities start competing)
Self-Assessment of Current Abilities
Somewhere short of TORFL 0 / A1, but not by tooooo much.
* Good handle on Cyrillic and pronunciation rules
* Can have an hour long lesson with ~70%+ of it in Russian (with a patient teacher who provides a lot of assistance)
* Good pronunciation relative to my level of experience, in my opinion.
* Vocabulary somewhere around 500-1000 words, maybe more. But my vocabulary has BIG gaps and I frequently find I lack the words I need to communicate simple messages. For example, I can tell you the Russian word for "devil" or "butt," yet I don't know the Russian word for "brown."
* My greatest weakness is the grammar, particularly cases. Although accusative and genitive aren't so terrible anymore (Dative and Instrumental need a lot of help). I'm familiar with the concepts from my time learning Latin, but I never had to speak and listen to Latin. And I had college courses that forced me to sit down and memorize the grammar for the exams. For Russian, it's all self-directed.
Planned Methods and Tools
* Two one-hour Skype lessons with a Russian teacher per week
* Hodge podge of Textbook study, Duolingo, Glossika, Lingq, Memrise, manual flashcards.
* Between work, my infant son, and upcoming grad school, I have to seize every 5 min opportunity I can. Memrise, Duolingo, and paper flashcards are good for those "in between" opportunities like waiting in line, feeding a bottle, walking somewhere, etc.
* Glossika and Lingq for the car.
* Textbook, "First Readers", and other tools for when I find myself with good chunks of uninterrupted time.
Soon I hope to start doing some writing output on iTalki on the weekends and eventually graduate to language exchanges.
I want to reach the point where I can play video games in Russian. Since my son was born, I can't justify playing video games anymore, even on the weekends, but if I'm reinforcing my Russian while I do so... suddenly they are serving a purpose
Misc
My iTalki profile: https://www.italki.com/cittakyle
My teacher's profile (I highly recommend her): https://www.italki.com/teacher/1463869
I plan to post here daily with what I practiced for the day. It will help keep me accountable and also give my teacher some insight on what I'm working on.
