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My first second language learning routine | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Zerzura Groupie Australia Joined 4517 days ago 45 posts - 53 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 6 04 October 2013 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello there!
After being extremely interested in visiting Russia and having Russian friends, I finally went there in August and loved it so much I missed it as soon as I left. I knew a few phrases (with a great pimsleur induced accent!) that came in handy. Now I've decided to really focus on Russian, since I have a lot of free time, and I think I'm really starting to enjoy it. I have no knowledge of even English grammar rules (my native, and only spoken language), only how it FEELS to speak it. So I have little knowledge of how a language is constructed, reading grammar books is proving to be a little difficult (conceptually) although I'm quite happy to keep going along this path. I've ordered around a dozen older courses from the 50s, 60s and 70s (after watching a lot of videos by Alexander Arguelles). I will actually be trying to enrole in a Russian major, when I start university next year, and am already a third of the way through the book that they use in the first course. Maybe my other major will interfere with Russian study, however. My goal is to be able to understand text and spoken word, in roughly a year. And to be able to start to use Russian more than English, with my Russian friends. In two or three years I'd like to go back to Russia and be able to not have to fall back on English at all. I need advice regarding time management and techniques: Do you think it's realistic for me to split up 2 hours into 15-30 minute blocks throughout the day, using a variety of techniques? I guess I'm only starting, but I have this weird hunger to really dig in. I was also thinking of giving myself some space on the weekends, maybe halve the time and allow myself to miss Saturday and Sunday. Which techniques combined should prove effective? I'm not so sure shadowing is practical in my situation, but I'll give it a try. So far I would like to spend at least 30 minutes on the Colloquial Russian textbook (2010 edition) per day. I have a memrize account, and I am keen to get through Michel Thomas series, as a bit of a "lazy" lesson for when I'm not so focused. TL;DR: I'm a keen beginner at Russian language wanting to devote 2 hours a day to learning. What routines/combinations of techniques provide efficient results? Thanks so much! I love this website. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4641 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 2 of 6 04 October 2013 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to the forum. If you look around you can find a lot of useful advice on study techniques, but you will also discover that everyone is not in agreement all the time, so you need to find out what works for you.
I think what you say makes sense. Personally though I feel that for intensive study I need to spend at least 30 minutes without interruption for it to be really efficient. It sort of takes me 10-15 minutes to get into "study mood". I also recommend you to use "dead time" to listen to Russian. In addition to what you metnion, I would add the Assimil Russian course. I used that in parallel with Colloquial Russian, and found that they complemented each other very nicely. Colloquial is better on explaning grammar, Assimil is better on building up vocabulary and with the recordings you get hours of listening material. Good luck with your studies. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4854 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 6 04 October 2013 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well the most important factor for success is motivation, so it sounds like you'll do
well. My favorite overview of practical language learning is this anecdotal overview from the Foreign Service Institute: http://www.639-3.org/archives/sla/gurt_1999_07.pdf My experience as a novice language learner learning Spanish is that using only shadowing as per ProfASR's instructions gave me little speaking ability or grammatical comprehension. So in this respect, the points about the usefulness of explicit gramatical instruction and pattern drills seem accurate. I know that modern Linguaphone complete courses are a good source of grammar drills as well as shadowing material, but no doubt there are others. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5435 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 6 04 October 2013 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes! Especially as a beginner, this is a good way to get an idea of what works best for you. Also, it helps keep things interesting. I'm doing this now for Spanish: simultaneously doing Pimsleur, Teach Yourself, Assimil, and weekly conversation sessions with a fluent speaker. Just don't use variety as an excuse to stop progressing. I tend to give myself weekends "off" in the sense that I'll watch some Spanish video, etc. or pick at one of my hobby languages. If you're just developing the habit, I wouldn't recommend you take the weekend totally off. There will come a point when the enthusiasm wanes and the force of habit gets you through. Edited by dmaddock1 on 04 October 2013 at 5:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 04 October 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
Welcome to HTLAL! A while back, we wrote up a wiki article titled How to Start Learning a Language that you might find interesting. You might also enjoy the Frequently Recommended Courses page and the rest of the Learner FAQ. These are short summaries of some of HTLAL's favorite advice. But they're also pretty generic, and they probably won't answer all of your questions. You'll get much more personalized advice here. :-) I think that two hours a day is great way to start. You might need some blocks of time longer than 15 minutes. At least for me, 15 minutes is "warm up" time, to get my head completely into French mode and ready to push my limits. But if you don't let your Russian "cool down" between sessions, it might be enough. Personally, if I had two hours a day to spend on a brand new language, here's what I'd do: 1) I'd get Assimil's Russian course, because (a) it comes with lots of understandable Russian text and audio, which I find essential to get a "feel" for a language, and (b) Assimil is divided into daily chunks, and I can just do one lesson per day on autopilot, and know that I'll make huge progress in 5 months. Plus, Assimil is amusing, in a very dry sort of way. 2) I'd order a short, concise book of Russian grammar, probably Dover's Essential Russian Grammar. Their Essential French Grammar was excellent: It covered just the important stuff, with lots of example sentences and clear explanations. Some people also love to get a good grammar workbook with fill-in-the-blank exercises. 3) I'd create a new Anki flash card deck on my laptop and sync it to my phone. Any time I found an interesting sentence in Assimil or in my grammar book, I'd type the Russian sentence on the front of the card, and put the English translation on the back. I'd also add cards for any interesting fill-in-the blank exercises from Assimil, and configure Anki to show me no more than 5 or 10 new cards per day. Basically, I'd use Anki to help me retain fragments of Russian text that I found particularly illuminating, and to kill time while waiting in line or whatever. 4) I'd start looking for sources of cool Russian media, including kid's books, comics and relatively easy-to-understand TV. If I could find the English and Russian versions of a kid's book, that would be great. (I managed to do this for ancient Egyptian! Check out Peter Rabbit in hieroglyphics.) I'd leave Russian radio or TV playing whenever I could, and start looking through the picture books to see if I understood anything yet. The goal would be to expose myself to real Russian, and to tempt myself with all the stuff I'd soon be able enjoy. :-) 5) Geeks only: If I got really lucky, I might find a good Russian dub of one of my favorite movies with accurate English and Russian subtitles. I'd put this it on my shelf until I was halfway through Assimil. And this is where things get tricky… I'd rip a DVD track of the movie in MP4 format, and rip the English and Russian subtitle tracks. Then I'd feed the subtitles through a subtitle OCR program, and use sub2srs to generate Anki cards for each line of dialog. (I'd put an image and a sound clip on the front, and the Russian and English subtitles on the back.) And then I'd go through the Anki deck, throwing out 90% of cards. I find that this is a really amazing way to get used to decoding full-speed native speech, but alas, you have to be a pretty serious computer geek to set it up. Anyway, that's how I'd use 2 hours a day. But as you can see from the other responses and from the various roadmaps on How to Start Learning a Language page, there's a lot of great ways to get started. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zerzura Groupie Australia Joined 4517 days ago 45 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 6 05 October 2013 at 2:32am | IP Logged | ||
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All posts are of help so far, but emk posted exactly what I needed. Some kind of example of a routine. If other people have a routine with their language and would like to post as an example, or what they would do in my situation it would be awesome!
Specific Russian advice would be great too, if anyone has advice relating to what I should focus on, or when to not be discouraged at a particular stage. But really my questions have been answered. I'm going away for a night or so, so if anyone wants to leave some more advice/info for me to gobble up when I get back feel free. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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