Hello everyone! Привет всем! Since this seems to be the place to keep track of learning, I will do that - I want to see how my learning foray into Russian continues I grew up bilingual (German/Russian) and at around 6 years old I stopped speaking Russian. Now, almost 20 years later, I'm trying to relearn it. Or probably learn it better, since most 6 year olds don't have a terribly refined vocabulary (although a big one...). I never unlearned reading Russian, so I always knew how to read, even if I didn't understand what I was reading, and if I read something out loud, my parents said that it sounded native or at least pretty convincing. Therefore I definitely didn't start out at zero, however I didn't understand anything except for some vocabulary that must have been so important to a 6 year old that it stuck (кошка, собака, слон... ))). About two years ago I started learning Russian for the first time, but it was very difficult, and I stopped. I was also living in Italy at the time, so combining these languages didn't work out for me. But, to get back to the point of the story, three months ago I very seriously started relearning Russian again, with incredible motivation (I have no idea where it comes from!), and here's what I do. I have a www.habitica.com daily to prompt me to actually do all of this work. I think I picked the suggestion up from this forum, so thanks for that!! It contains: www.russianpod101.com - I know the site looks spammy, but paying for the subscription made me actually spend time there. I like the audio series, I started out with Lower Beginner and am now almost done with Upper Beginner. They taught me a lot. I also love the listening comprehension and vocabulary videos. I use the flashcards service - it has native spoken audio for every card, which is helpful. HelloTalk/lang8 - I try to write something every day. I'm not much of a speaker (yet), so I write. I actually prefer HelloTalk because of my phone's autocorrect! It makes mistakes of the ь-variety much more unlikely. It produces some nice things, like when I tried to talk about my phone and said something about a могильник instead I found one very good language partner on HelloTalk who helped me immensely. Everything I learn from these places goes to Anki. Preferably entire sentences or constructions that I got wrong. I assume that at some point I will have used all of the sentences I try to use in my everyday speech and know how to put that in Russian if I saw those constructions often enough. I think it's currently down But I really loved www.morpheem.com, while it was up. A great vocabulary builder! It shows words in context. I currently substitute www.memrise.com for it to learn specific vocabulary sets like how to tell time. I watch Youtube series every day, even when I don't do any of the other stuff. I learned almost all of my English from series, so I believe in that method. Currently I watch Анжелика, which is crazy. ))) This is how I found this forum. I started out with subtitles and interlinear text, but I got to lazy to scroll along, so I just listen and see what I understand. Very recently I also started using www.lingq.com. I don't really like the flashcard service as compared to russianpod101's, I don't want to press a button to get the audio, so I never listen to the words Apart from that I think it's going to be very helpful, plus I like pushing my vocabulary number up. This sounds like, and is, a lot of work. Until very recently (this week or so) my coursework for this semester was very light, so I had a lot of time to spare. I used it for learning Russian, up to around 6 hours a day. Right now I sometimes do half an hour (for the series), and up to around 2 hours. That's still a lot of time, but it yields results. I've started to understand the plot of Анжелика even in some stranger parts, although not all, and all around I'm becoming more fluent. I have recently started to be able to just type out messages on HelloTalk without checking every word or declension, and it still works out quite well. I talk to myself in my head and when reading texts on news sites, I start to get the gist of things. Also, today, I took a language proficiency test and I'm quite amazed by myself. So I hope that my crazy motivation continues and I'm very excited to see where the next 3 months and thereby a total of 6 months of Russian studies will take me.
