Refold Approach to Language Learning: Russian ~200-hour update
Progress Overview
It’s been almost a year since my first Russian Progress post (linked here). I’ve done about one hundred more hours of immersion (including Anki) since then and feel that my comprehension has improved substantially. Most of that improvement has occurred over the past four months or so because I went on a bit of a hiatus from immersing during the summer of 2022. As you can see from the graph below, I was doing hardly any immersion (and thus not doing any sentence mining and making new Anki cards), just keeping up with my reviews.
Total immersion time (including Anki): 226 hours (+ 113 hours since last post).
Anki
Total review time: 119 hours (+ 43 hours since last post)
While Anki reviews still make up more than half of my total immersing hours, it was less than half of the time I spent immersing since my last post, which has been a nice change. I feel like I’ve graduated from Anki being the primary way I’m engaging with the Russian language to Anki now being a tool to help me solidify and remember what I’ve learned. I’m currently experimenting with making some of my sentence mining cards with images on the back, I’m eager to see if the image cards have better retention.
Listening
Total Listening Immersion time: 85 hours (+ 32 hours since last post)
I finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist in October. While I understood FMA much more than I understood Avatar the Last Airbender, it still was pretty difficult to comprehend. I would catch a few words I knew here and there but didn’t really understand what was being said much of the time. After FMA I decided to switch to easier content for listening, so I returned to the Comprehensible Russian channel on YouTube. I finished watching all the videos in the Beginner One playlist, and much of the Beginner Two playlist. I also downloaded the Language Reactor Chrome extension to help with sentence mining.
Future Plans: watching videos is on the back burner for me right now, but soon I will start listening to audiobooks and reading along (more about that below).
Reading
Total Immersion time: 21 hours (+ 17 hours since last post).
In my last post I talked about how I started my Russian reading with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Because it’s been so long since I last read The Chronicles of Narnia in English (about 12 years), having read it before wasn’t actually that helpful for my comprehension: it was pretty difficult and I began to avoid reading because of how unenjoyable it was. Last Fall when I was getting back into learning Russian more intentionally, I wanted something easier to read. I read through a graded reader called Russian by the Natural Method by Oleg Koefoed, and part of a graded reader called Russian for Reading by Brooke and Forsythe. These were helpful for getting back into reading, but I got bored of the graded readers because the content wasn’t very interesting. It felt less like reading and more like doing homework. I tried to find Russian translations of other books I had read, but I couldn’t find any good options (wanting something that I had somewhat recently read in English but also would be easy to understand). I then decided to read Harry Potter in English so that I could then read it in Russian (yes, I was one of those kids who never read Harry Potter growing up). I really enjoyed them and read them quickly. After I finished reading the last Harry Potter book in English over Christmas break, I was ready to return to reading in Russian.
I started reading the first Harry Potter book in early January. My reading speed was incredibly slow at first, about 30 minutes per page! At first, I was spending a lot of time sounding out the words as I read, but as you can see from the graph below, I’ve gotten much faster. I’m now almost done reading the fourth chapter and have made over 120 Anki sentence mining cards so far. After I read a couple more chapters and further improve my reading speed, I’ll listen to an audiobook of the Russian translation and read along at the same time.
Future Plans: finish the first Harry Potter book, then read the rest of the series. After that, I may return to reading The Chronicles of Narnia.
Overall Impressions
My experience so far with reading Harry Potter in Russian has made immersing much more enjoyable. I find myself excited to immerse much more often than I did this time last year. One major takeaway from my past year of immersion (and especially these past few months) is that improvement really does come down to simply putting in the time of engaging with comprehensible input. I’m looking forward to listening to audiobooks soon, as that will really expand my immersion options and opportunities.
