My 3rd Year of Learning Russian

Table of contents are in order of time spent on each activity in 2023 from high to low.

Table of Contents

1. Yearly Stats
2. Introduction
3. Highlights
4. Watching
5. Reading
6. Listening
7. Anki
8. Speaking
9. Class
10. Writing
11. Grammar
12. Phonetics
13. Translating
14. Overall and Next Year

First, as always, before I get into the meat of the update, here are my Anki and Toggl stats for the entire year.

My Anki

My Toggl

Introduction

Welcome one and all to my full review of my language learning journey in 2023. I'll be going deep in this blog post on each of the activities that I did in Russian, what went well, what went poorly, and what I'm planning on for 2024.

Additionally, I only started tracking my immersion time in 2023, so I don't have any other years to compare to, sadly. But I believe that I had ~400 hours in 2021 and ~700 hours in 2022.

Highlights

I had 4 goals that I set at the start of 2023:

1. Pass the C1 Exam - Done
2. Read 30 "real" books in Russian or 2 million words - Done (both)
3. Track my immersion and average >2h a day for the whole year - Done (I averaged 3h 15m per day, and tracked it all)
4. Do Anki every day - Kind of Done (I did it 95% of days)

Passing the C1 exam was definitely the main highlight of the year and also the main focus of 2023 for me. Though I think it terms of benefits to my Russian, the 30 read (прочитанный) books more than carried their weight. The combination of lots of reading and using anki felt like a language learning cheat code. Couldn't recommend that strategy highly enough.

Watching

In broad strokes, my watching can be separated into three categories: TV shows, random YouTube, movies.

Russian Movies: I also watched a few Russian movies this year, but to be completely honest, I'm just not a particularly big fan of Russian movies (at least those that I've seen thus far). In all fairness, I have a pretty high bar for movies, and I don't watch many of them as a result, but as an example, I wanted to start on my Soviet Movie Cultural Education™, and started with Бриллиантовая рука (The Diamond Arm). I couldn't even make it to the halfway point because of how bad this movie was (опять же, in my opinion). I'm not sure if these movies aren't for me because I, naturally, lack any of the nostalgic pull, or if there is some other element that I'm missing, but damn they really aren't for me. I'll still probably watch a few more this upcoming year to continue my education, but I won't be going out of my way for any of them. It just isn't the content I particularly enjoy immersing in.

Random YouTube: I basically have no problems understanding almost anything that I watch on YouTube. Conversations, blogs, video games play throughs, etc. are all more or less effortless at this point. These are easy, enjoyable, and a good way to get in hours. However, I don't think I learn many words from this, and not because I just know all of the words already, but rather because my brain seems to just interpret the sentence as a whole instead of parse the individual words, so I don't even notice when new words appear (as nonsensical as that sounds). I think this realization was the biggest impetus behind my newfound Anki habit. I just need to see a word on its own at least one, think about it, and then I can go about my day.

TV shows: This is where I struggle. Even though I have level 4 or 5 comprehension most of the time in shows, it is usually in moments of intense emotion (screaming, crying, yelling, begging) that a lot of plot movement happens. And it is precisely these moments when my comprehension CRATERS. I know that some people train this skill intentionally, but I do not have the patience nor the desire to do something like that. So I'll just keep watching TV shows, hoping that these moments become easier with time and exposure. Trust the process and whatnot.

Reading

This really was the year of reading. At the start of 2023, I could read in Russian, but it was often long, slow, unenjoyable, and frankly just didn't click. Because the written word differs so drastically from the way people speak, I was often not actually understanding entire sentences without even realizing it. Additionally, there were tons of grammatical structures that were just fully lost on me. I knew this about myself at the start of the year, and thus set a goal of fixing it. I wasn't going to half-ass reading anymore!

In terms of genre, I've definitely settled into sci-fi/fantasy as my preference and even read a few "classics" (трудно быть богом, ночной дозор, дневной дозор). Reading these sorts of books, there is a very palpable feeling of not connecting with and/or understanding the culture. For example, I was discussing It's Hard to be God with a Russian woman and she said that that book "breathes" Sovietness. I did not pick up on this at all. A similar story can be said of Night Watch, in which the philosophical discussions of right and wrong are far more grey and nuanced than typical Western™ novels. There were moments in that book that directly reflected the zeitgeist of post-USSR Russia, and I'm sure I missed more moments than I caught. This lack of cultural connection is both exciting (in that there is a lot to learn) and daunting (in that there is really a LOT to learn).

My book of the year, however, was All Quiet on the Western Front (На западном фронте без перемен). I listened to this book as an audiobook instead of reading it, and damn did it hit hard. There is an acutely strange feeling of listening to German WW1 soldiers discuss the front lines of war in Russian against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine right now. I can't recommend this book enough, and for those who want to give it a go in Russian, this was the audiobook I used (it's free). The audiobook reader is of utmost importance for a book like this.

Looking to next year, I'll likely read very little translated content, as I've gotten to the point where I can comfortably read most non-classic content for native speakers. I'll also continue to sentence mine and grow my vocabulary as, realistically, that is the most useful part of Russian for me. I won't be writing any Russian novels anytime soon.

Listening

Of my ~185 hours of listening, about half was spent on audiobooks. In that time, I managed to listen to all of the Sherlock Holmes novels (which are fantastic even in translation!), a few Agatha Christie novels (which are less fantastic in translation), and Atomic Habits (which was a piece of cake in translation).

Listening to these story-driven novels was a great way to maintain focus and keep me interested. High intrigue style books are great for listening as the speech patterns of the narrator can keep you interested by themselves. I'm currently on the lookout for new audiobooks, so if you have any that you've listened to recently and enjoyed, let me know!

The other half of my listening is on podcasts. There were 3 main podcasts that took up a bulk of my time.

1. Начнем с понедельника (Let's start with/on Monday)
2. Что это было (What was that)
3. Привет, ты иноагент (Hello, you're a foreign agent)

The first is a self improvement podcast hosted by two women who appear to be a similar age to me and is very relaxing to listen to. It's borderline ASMR and is more or less a stress reliever.

The next two are basically the opposite. Что это было is a BBC podcast in Russian that covers the war in Ukraine and other big events related to it. Привет, ты иноагент is a podcast hosted by two women who are left-wing journalists and they were both labeled foreign agents by the government in 2021 (prior to the war). The podcast started as a way to talk about the phenomenon of being a "foreign agent" but quickly grew into something else with the start of the war.

All three of these podcasts are great for building comprehension of conversations under "idealized" circumstances (i.e. no noise, yelling, crying, etc.). They are all also squarely aimed at native speakers and pretty much assume that you are a Russian native speaker living in Russia, so they frequently make references that I don't fully understand. Part of the cultural immersion I guess.

In addition, Привет, ты иноагент has a Patreon that opens up access to their second podcast called Трёп (which means like, idk meaningless/useless chatter). As the name would suggest, it is very conversational, and is a great way to feel like you're eavesdropping on a conversation between natives that isn't "supposed" to be recorded/filmed.

No real concrete plans to improve my listening in 2024 other than keep watching TV shows and hope something clicks!

Anki

Anki is incredibly boring, has a bad interface, looks old, is unintuitive, and is probably the best language learning tool that has ever been invented. I had a lot of false starts with Anki. If you'll recall, I started Russian in January of 2021. Here are my Anki stats for 2021 and 2022 for reference:

It's plainly visible when I said "yeah, I should do anki!" only to give up again a few weeks/days later. I think this ultimately stemmed from my disdain for the card creation process and not really knowing what sorts of cards worked for me. However, after zdi published his vocabsieve tool and I got a handle for it, everything changed. The tool creates sentence cards for you from the words that you highlight on your kindle, and does everything automagically.

At this point, I have ~5,200 mature cards in Anki. If I continue at my current rate of 15 new cards/day, I'll add another ~5,000 to that. I should probably figure out how to get cards from TV shows, since that is really my weakest point right now, but we'll see if I have the willpower for that later this year.

Speaking

My speaking can be broken into three categories: italki, Language exchanges, and other.

italki: For those who don't know, this is a platform where you can find teachers and native speakers who are willing to help you w/ your target language if you pay them. I spent 37 hours this year in lessons, all of which (except I think one?) were labeled "conversation practice." I'd recommend both of my teachers / conversation partners for those who are looking. Варвара and Юлия. I'm not sure what my plans are for 2024 with italki. I will probably take a break for a few months until I feel like I want to hop back into it. It's a great way to practice speaking, of course, but I found myself getting a bit burnt out on it, especially as I'm not particularly extroverted.

Language Exchanges: I have two language exchange partners (Привет Макс и Лев!). Between them, I spent 44 hours speaking. With both of them, we spend about an hour in English and an hour in Russian, so it's less "efficient" from the standpoint of maximizing my time in Russian. But it's fun and I like them, so whatever. Also it's free :D. Exchanges in general are great though. It often happens that, in helping them with something in English, I understand some nuance about Russian as well. Also it's a great way to get some cultural exposure and just meet interesting people. No plans to stop these anytime soon.

Speaking as a whole feels fine to me. I'm not Obama in Russian and won't be anytime soon, but I can string together my thoughts in a grammatical fashion more often than not. I don't find myself being confused by grammar very often and most of it naturally comes out without any real effort. The one big asterisk is that I still often set up a sentence as if I'm leading into a male/neuter noun and then at the end realize the noun I've chosen is female and I have to backtrack and re-say a few words. Such is life! Ultimately it comes down to me not "feeling" the gender of words before I say them / think of how they are spelled. In the same way that English speakers automatically choose the correct article because the definiteness of the noun is felt in our bones, Russian speakers feel the gender of the words that they are heading towards. I feel nothing but pure unbridled envy. I assume that, with time, this too will correct itself, but who knows!

Class

I take two classes, one of which isn't really a class. I live in Boston and attend a local "Russian Intermediate" course at an adult education center. I do this almost exclusively because it is fun to meet up with other learners of Russian, even though none of them are even close to my level in terms of getting carried away with it. They are much more hobbyists than fulltime tryhards. And that's fine.

The other is my weekly(ish) class with Maria who has an extremely useful YouTube channel if you're interested in, well, sounding like a Russian. It's all in Russian too, so it counts as immersion. Win-win! In these lessons we mostly work on phonetics, but also random grammar questions I have, some shadowing, some трёп, and everything in between. She's also my go-to resource when I see that there are multiple potential stress patterns and I want to know which one to use to not sound like a rube.

I'll continue with both of these in 2024 since they are quite fun. There isn't any real pressure in either of them, though they both technically give me homework (which I do with a frequency that leaves my teachers wanting).

Writing

Where do I begin with writing? I spent about 18 hours writing this year (not including any of the discord/telegram chats, which is where I do most of my writing). All of it was ultimately to prepare for the C1 exam. If you ask me, my writing prowess improved quite a bit this year. However, if you ask the examiners of the exam, they'd tell you that I'm a fool. Given that I have next to no purpose to refine my formal writing abilities in Russian, it's a miracle I was able to improve at all. I always come back to this, but Russian is just for fun, and things that aren't fun for me tend to be quite difficult on the "forcing myself to do it" front. But I passed the damn exam, so I'll probably never write another essay in Russian. Or maybe I will.

Grammar

This was the first year where I sat down with a textbook and actually tried to learn from it. I had a very beginner textbook that was in English that I used when I first started, but I really only skimmed like 10% of it because of how boring it was. The two books that I used were Виды русского глагола: значение и употребление (Aspects of the Russian verb: Meaning and Usage) and Учевно-тренировочные тесты по РКИ - Грамматика Лексика B2 / C1 (Practice Tests for Russian as a Foreign Language - Grammar B2 / C1). Both are great books, with the former being particularly interesting. Aspect in Russian is the last frontier for me and is likely something that I'll never fully master. It is in aspect that lots of nuance is conveyed, and every pair of verbs is used slightly differently. Every native speaker has a slightly different feel for the words, and if you ask for an explanation, it's often very involved and specific to the situation. Quite interesting!

I'll casually continue reading the book on aspect next year.

Phonetics

Other than my usual work with Maria, this year I decided to take a master class with Kira. I can't recommend this class enough! Kira is a fantastic teacher who has achieved a nearly flawless Russian accent as a non-native speaker. Outside of this class (which had daily homework), I spent some time with my language exchange partners slowing down and deeply analyzing every sound that was coming out of my mouth. I've still got a long way to go, but I've made good progress. Phonetics should hopefully be one of the focuses in 2024!

Translating

A new activity has appeared! In the search for new goals for 2024, I decided to try my hand at literary translation. The reason is fairly straightforward. Up till now, my method has effectively relied on understanding most (90-95%) of the meaning/nuance of sentences, and that is fine for almost everything. One area where this is definitely not fine, however, is translation. If I translated a book and only get 90-95% of the meaning/nuance across, then the final product will be a far cry from the original. So I'm undertaking this endeavor primarily as an exercise in bridging the gap between understanding almost everything and understanding literally everything. The deep analysis of every single word, comma, and dash forces me to really get into the details of the language. To that end, I'll be translating Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" into English this year. This is a big project, and I'm not entirely sure that I'll finish by the end of the year, but what I've done so far has already been a blast. I'm also taking a class called The Art of Translation and reading a book on translation theory.

For those who are interested in the translation, I'll make it available somehow when I'm finished, so stay tuned for that. I'm not sure about the best method of sharing it more broadly, so if you have ideas, feel free to let me know.

Overall and Next Year

I have 5 goals that I'm setting for 2024:

1. Translate Notes from Underground
2. Read 30 books in Russian or 2 million words
3. Track my immersion and average >2h a day for the whole year
4. Do Anki every day
5. Do at least 3 hours of Phonetics exercises per month

You'll note that 3 of these are the same, and that's not a mistake. I want to keep up what is working well and then expand in other areas.

In summation, I'm extremely pleased with my progress, but also am acutely aware of the mountain still before me. I'm far from fluent, despite whatever praise I get. The gap between my English and my Russian is still about as big as the gap between my Russian and my Spanish (note: I don't know literally any Spanish). While I can converse well enough, I'm so far from true mastery, which is my ultimate goal. Until I can natively feel gender and aspect, I won't be satisfied. It's possible that I'm never satisfied.

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!