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Russian through extensive reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| blauwevos Newbie France Joined 3696 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 5 01 January 2015 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
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So far, I've been studying Russian mostly through intensive reading (novels). It's certainly an effective method, taking me from beginner to a solid intermediate level, but I don't think I could rightly call it efficient - it's obviously very time-consuming to look up every unknown word in the dictionary, and it's hard to stay motivated this way, too.
I've been wanting to do more extensive reading, Kato Lomb style, focusing more on what I can figure out from context than on the unknowns. This method has worked well for me with other languages in the past, but those have mostly been Romance languages, where there were enough cognates to make even the rarer words easy to decipher. What I want to know is, will this technique work for a more opaque language like Russian? Has anyone had good (or not-so-good) results with it in the past? Are there limits to how far it can take you? (I'm gunning for C1 with Russian, someday.) Edited by blauwevos on 01 January 2015 at 9:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 2 of 5 02 January 2015 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
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I think combining both techniques is always the way to go. You can read 1 page intensively - like a news story
- and then extensively read a novel from which you already know the story. I had a disastrous experience with reading Russian extensively last year. I should have read only one page intensively instead of trying 3 long pages extensively at the end of the day when I was bordering burnout. Even when you are reading extensively - and that will become clear as you make progress - it doesn't hurt to look up the 5 most important words on each page on the go. I notice a better result doing this with Norwegian than purely reading extensively. After all, the more you progress in a language the rarer the unknown words will become - in the sense that they will be mostly low-frequency words now - and thus the better use you should make of each opportunity to learn them in context. Some people prefer to just grab this odd word and do SRS, but that is not what I enjoy doing. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| blauwevos Newbie France Joined 3696 days ago 7 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 5 03 January 2015 at 3:09pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for your reply, Expugnator. Restricting myself to only looking up a certain number of words per page is a really helpful suggestion, that way I don't spend too much of my time in the dictionary, but I'm still learning the most important words.
So in your experience, extensive reading is a technique best suited to more transparent languages. Does anybody feel differently? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| day1 Groupie Latvia Joined 3893 days ago 93 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English | Message 4 of 5 03 January 2015 at 9:33pm | IP Logged |
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Bilingual texts?
Like these ones 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 5 of 5 04 January 2015 at 1:45pm | IP Logged |
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As a matter of fact, intensive x extensive doesn't necessarily relate to the availability of a translation side-by-side. I read most of my books with a translation, but I don't consider what I am doing as intensive reading, because I first read portions in the language I'm studying, extensively, and then I read the translation only to keep following the story. Intensive reading would be more in the likes of comparing the translations word by word then sentence by sentence then as you get better paragraph by paragraph and then you'd let go of the translation and only look at it occasionally.
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