The Month of Reading

Table of Contents

1. Monthly Stats
2. Highlights
3. Anki
4. Grammar
5. Speaking
6. Listening
7. Reading
8. Watching
9. Overall and Next Month

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

My Anki

My Toggl

Highlights

The biggest callout this month is the fact that, for the first time, my Watching category lagged far behind the other categories. Starting the new job meant that I had a lot less time at home, so I was getting my hours in by listening to audio books during my commute, and making morning reading a more consistent habit.

Also spoke with my language partner's kids for about an hour, and that was quite the interesting experience. More on that in the speaking and listening sections.

Anki

Had a few low days (the redder the square, the fewer cards I did). Realized I struggle to find the time to do my Anki if I don't get it done in the morning, so that's a good learning. Going to be pushing to be as consistent as possible with morning Anki, which hasn't been too bad considering that I've somehow woken up at or before 6am every day for the past month or so.

Grammar

As I wrote in my last blog post, April was going to be the month of grammar! I wanted to do ~20 minutes a day of a grammar textbook. As you can see from my toggl picture, I reached almost 3 hours total, which with a bit of math, comes out to an average of 6 minutes a day, aka about 3x less than I wanted.

I came to a similar conclusion with this as I did with my Anki. I'm far less likely to do grammar study if it isn't in the morning, and on days when I go into the office, there is just no chance.

So with that in mind, I'm lowering my goal to 4 days a week of grammar study at 20 minutes a pop. I enjoy the textbook I'm using quite a lot, but I still experience pretty severe "starting anxiety" with my grammar study. Hopefully with time and reps, this will lessen.

Speaking

Cut down a lot on italki this month, unfortunately. Was hard to schedule it in with all of the craziness going on in my life + the fact that (almost) all Russian native speakers are asleep by the time I get off of work.

However, two big highlights related to speaking happened this month. First, I spoke with a new language exchange partner every weekend (thanks, Лев), which was great.

The other big highlight was talking to my longtime language partner's kids for an extended period. I've met his kids before, but it was usually a quick как дела? нормально and that was it. But last weekend, they stuck around for a bit over an hour. Some of my takeaways:

1. fuck. I'm still completely linguistically outclassed by a seven year old boy. It doesn't matter if I know the words выкрутиться or сногшабетельный, if I can't tell a simple story as well as a literal child.
2. kids are brutal in regards to their output. It's almost like they have no concept that you maybe won't/can't understand them, so they blitz forward, paying no heed to whether they receive traditional back-channeling cues (e.g. mhmm, oh yeah, oh nice, cool, etc.).
3. children who speak Russian natively make full use of their perfective/imperfective verb system, which has the potential to massively cut down on number of words needed to tell a story. More on this in the listening section.
4. kids are quite direct with their feedback. At one point, I attempted a new word (карась), which ends in a soft S sound. For native English speakers, it is nearly impossible to differentiate between the hard and the soft S sound (both in speaking and in listening). However, I gave the word a shot and, without missing a beat, the 7 year old boy said "actually, there is a soft S at the end". Walked away with only a slightly bruised ego :)

Will be getting back onto the iTalki horse next month.

Listening

I listened to 2 audiobooks in this month:

1. Приключение шерлока холмса (The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes)
2. Записки шерлока холмса (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)

I listened to these while on walks and while commuting. Overall, a lovely way to spend your time. The translations are great too, and really capture the mood of Sherlock Holmes. Highly recommend to any upper-intermediate learners or native speakers.

I mentioned earlier that Russian-speaking kids make full use of their verb system to tell stories in a more laconic manner. This is due to a feature called последовательность, which could be translated in this context as something like "sequenceness" or "successionness". Basically, if you chain together perfective verbs, it very concretely means "I did this task to completion, and only after I was done did I continue onto this next task". Additionally, in Russian, you can drop a lot of words, such as pronouns, which can further shorten stories.

As a result, you have two very different "child-like" story telling styles. In English, you would expect a story from a child to sound something like:

So I got up from bed, and then I went to go brush my teeth, and and and then I saw a butterfly, and then after that I went to go eat breakfast. It was very yummy.

In Russian, however, this can be shortened to something like:

Я проснулся, почистил зубы, увидел бабочку, позавтракал. Вкусно было!

Of course, this is a somewhat extremely example, and there will be pauses and stutters, but all of the same "information" is conveyed in these two paragraphs. You'll note that this quirk is especially useful for storytelling when you aren't really adding any details other than "I did this and then I did this and then I did this" (i.e. exactly the type of stories that children often tell).

I wrote all this out because I frequently found myself getting lost listening to my friend's son, as he was simply chaining together these perfective verbs in order to tell a story, instead of the typical English cues (and then I) that English kids might use to break up actions.

My conclusion is that I still have a long way to go.

Reading

I also read a few books:

1. Танец огня (The Dance of Fire)
2. Душа огня (The Soul of Fire)
3. Трудно быть богом (It's Hard to be God)

The first two are modern fantasy novels that are basically a cross between Harry Potter and Avatar the Last Airbender. That's a very high level overview, but it's definitely very interesting and I devoured them. It also isn't the most "professional" writing, so I'm learning LOTS of more conversational phrases and uses of words. I'm grabbing about 200 new words/phrases from each book.

Трудно быть богом is a Soviet sci-fi classic that I absolutely loved. One of the first graded readers I read was this book, so it was a dream come true to be able to return to the real thing. It's a fairly short novel, but it's packed with philosophical ideas. It falls squarely into my favorite genre: creating a fictitious sci fi backdrop as a way to explore a philosophical idea. I'll be writing a longer review on the blog (in Russian) but the book tackled the limits of humanism, what we owe to others, how to cope with inhumanity, and other themes. Highly recommend to advanced learners and native speakers. Will definitely be revisiting this once I'm yet more competent, as there were certainly things I missed along the way.

Watching

I almost exclusively just watched random YouTube this month. Lot of gaming related content, which is great for learning niche vocab. I'll get back to watching more Тайны госпожи Кирсановой soon enough.

Overall and Next Month

Feeling very excited after this month. Despite the craziness of starting a new job and going through the home buying process, I was still able to get a respectable amount of immersion in.

Also put a serious number of hours into reading, which unsurprisingly is having an outsized impact on my ability to effortlessly understand Russian. Putting just the 3 hours into grammar study also helped immensely. I learned two new major grammar points, including a new grammar construction which I'm now seeing all over the place while reading. It turns out I was just completely misunderstanding the meaning of these sorts of sentences, which is crazy.

Overall, feeling optimistic that next month will be even better, and I'm excited to see where it takes me!

Thanks for reading! Закругляюсь!