In my last post, I discussed having discovered the ALG (Automatic Language Growth) approach and how it, and a post by Beyond Language Learning, made me rethink my approach to acquiring Russian.

Slow Down!

This has been my big problem with Russian. After initially excited to discover much more acquisition-tailored resources for Russian than for Ukrainian, I was disappointed to find myself struggling with them nevertheless. My “crash course” mindset was putting me under pressure to understand what I was hearing much more than I could.

I’m now approaching input with a much more relaxed approach, making an effort to not consciously think about/mentally translate the words I recognise, and just let the message sink in and the language itself wash over me.

That’s not to say I’m not still striving to get as much input as possible. I’ve adjusted my goal for 100 hours of input (I was previously aiming for 50 minimum). Some days I don’t reach half an hour; other days I have the space to just binge Russian input for an afternoon.

German? Probably Not …

I’m rethinking my idea of adding German into my routine once I’ve reached A2 in Ukrainian. For one thing, I plan to maintain my Russian rather than put it aside altogether. For another, I always knew it took hundreds of hours of input to reach fluency in a language, but looking at Dreaming Spanish’s roadmap yesterday was a bit of a wakeup call.

If I’m serious about wanting to reach speaking level in the languages I’ve already taken up (which I am!), every time I add one into the mix will push that day further ahead. So for now, I’ll be sticking with what I have, and try not to dwell too much on everything else in my bucket list!

Food, Glorious Food!

I had an extremely useful epiphany about input a couple of days ago. Apart from very comprehensible storytelling, the videos I’ve enjoyed, focused on and been able to follow the message of most, are ones that revolve around food.

I am a bit of a foodie, so that makes sense. But I hadn’t realised until now that watching someone cooking is great context for what they’re saying. Lingopie has several cooking programmes in Russian for basic level, and in the last couple of days I’ve watched most of the episodes.

I’m astonished by how relaxing I’m finding it. I don’t understand most of what the chefs are saying, but I’m practically mesmerized by the visuals. This isn’t anything new for me—I remember being fascinated watching a guy in a kebab shop slicing the tomatoes so thinly—but it’s not something I’ve ever really thought about before.

Of course, watching these programmes makes me want to eat/cook the food myself! I’m on a very strict low protein diet, which rules out lots of foods, so that’s a downside; however I’m getting ideas on how to adapt what I see for my needs. I just need to not get distracted thinking about that while watching and therefore tune out the language input completely!

Organised Approach

This may sound trivial, but I never particularly liked switching between different playlists on Youtube, and I get decision paralysis sometimes. Finding myself having to choose between videos I’d seen lots of times already and found too easy to follow, and videos I struggled to follow at all, made that much worse.

So yesterday I compiled a new personal playlist, mixing up different videos, trying to roughly alternate between stories and conversations, and gradually increasing the difficulty. In addition to Comprehensible Russian and In Russian From Afar, I added the Russian BookBox videos later in the playlist.

I also made a food-specific playlist, compiling all the food-related videos from the above channels. At some point in the future, I plan to search Youtube for Russian food channels and see if I can find some easy-to-follow ones.