April roundup — Russian

 Another month is over! Here are my Russian learning activities in April: 

Anki

I kept reviewing the Russian starter deck and the Ru15K deck (see my previous posts for more details). But I also started my own sentence deck. I’m currently adding sentences mostly from Animal Crossing that contain only one unknown word. I decided to focus on Animal Crossing for a while until I can understand most dialogues more easily. (They are surprisingly difficult at my current level. XD)

Assimil

This month I did lesson 11 - 36. After reaching lesson 36, I started to review older lessons. At some point, I noticed that the lessons became more challenging so I think I should spend a bit more time reviewing new lessons before moving on. Reviewing old ones will also help.

 

(YouTube) Comprehensible Russian: Beginner 1

I kept watching videos from this playlist. I'm currently at video 31. I like it when there are several videos about a certain topic instead of a different topic in every video. This way, certain words are repeated more often and I can learn more about this topic. Some of them are really interesting. 

(YouTube) In Russian From Afar - Beginner Videos A1

I only watched one video so far. He tells children stories and draws on a white board while speaking to make understanding easier (similar to Inna from Comprehensible Russian). Russian subtitles are available. I try to understand as much as I can without reading the subtitles in Russian but if in doubt I can check what he said. The first video I watched was very easy to understand, though. 

(YouTube) Inhale Russian

Similar to the beginner videos from Comprehensible Russian, just a bit more "modern“ and efficient and Russian subtitles are available. Instead of drawing, he already prepared all pictures on his computer so that he only needs to point at them during his speech. I like Inna’s drawings from Comprehensible Russian, but the use of photos and graphics makes understanding the meaning easier and faster in my opinion. 

However, he speaks veeery calm. Almost monotonous even. Maybe he speaks like this to make it easier for beginners? Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to speak that calm. A little bit more emotions and personality would make the video more engaging. If someone talks too monotonous, I tend to zone out (my mind starts to wander). This makes it more difficult to stay focused which is not helpful if you want to learn something. 

Short Stories in Russian for intermediate (by Olly Richards) 

I finished this graded reader! I read the e-book version. This book is aimed at intermediate learners so it’s noticeably more difficult than the beginner book. But it’s still easier than the novel I started (which is aimed at native speakers). By looking up every word I noticed a few small errors in the text (like a wrong letter or an additional letter for example). It’s not a big deal but learners should keep that in mind.

I don’t know if it’s because the level of difficulty was higher but somehow these stories gave me a weird feeling. They were not really my cup of tea. I liked the stories of the beginner book much more. Nevertheless, I learned a lot.

Две встречи в Париже

This book contains two stories. I already read chapter 1 of Медовый месяц в Париже so I continued with chapter 2.

Animal Crossing

I continued playing Animal Crossing. I’m using Google Translate to digitalize the text from the game, then I look up words and safe the text for later review. I'm currently using this material to create sentence cards (like I mentioned above).

Метро 2033

I couldn’t wait any longer. XD I started to read chapter 1. Tons of new words, but since I know the video game I’m not completely lost. I have at least a vague idea what awaits me. I’m very curious about the book!

Stranger Things

I watched the first episode of Stranger Things in Russian on Netflix. I turned off the Russian subtitles because most of the time they don't match with the audio. This is a downside because I can't easily check unknown words. So I'll regard it as pure listening practice. I only understand single words here and there, which is no surprise at my current level, but that’s okay. 

Maybe it's a bit early but I prefer to mix easier content (aimed at language learners) and difficult content (aimed at native speakers) instead of listen to learner content only. More variety not only makes the learning process more fun and interesting but this will also help me to familiarize myself to native level content. It will take a lot of time time to get accustomed to content aimed at native speakers so I start early. 

Plus, watching (or reading) difficult but interesting content is also a great motivation booster. Understanding interesting series and books is my main reason to learn the language. It's very hard right now, but as long as I keep going it will get easier over time.