In this post I want to evaluate my progress in the Russian language after learning mostly by listening and reading and without studying grammar rules.
My time listening is composed of two parts, passive and active listening. I define passive listening as playing audio in the background while undertaking other tasks, for example, washing the dishes, playing video games etc.
Before I continue to evaluate my progress, I will show you my current statistics on LingQ below.
As you can see above, I have read approximately 62,000 words in Russian with a total listening time of 13.65 hours. However, it must be noted that a lot of my listening also occurred on Spotify, which was not recorded on LingQ.
Listening
In the first month of learning, my listening and reading materials were composed of beginner stories with repetition of roughly the same 100 words. I listened to the same audio many times and I often returned to each lesson throughout the month, even when most of the words were saved as known. I found this very useful when learning pronouns and present tense forms.
I must admit that I do find that beginner's materials rapidly become boring and I often need to find more interesting material, despite not having a large vocabulary. Therefore, by the second month of learning I was already searching for material rated B1+. This material consisted of podcasts and vlogs, which I imported directly from YouTube.
During this time, I couldn't understand everything I encountered. I often only understood 5-10% of the vocabulary without subtitles, most of which was vocabulary similar to my native language or languages I studied in the past, such as German. But after listening to the same content for some time, my understanding grew to approximately 25-30%.
Reading
In regard to reading, I must admit that many years ago, I did pick up a 'Russian for Dummies book' and learned the Cyrillic alphabet. Despite this being a clear advantage, I believe it wouldn't take a novice very long to learn, especially if their native language uses a Latin alphabet.
I found reading to be an easier task than listening. This is something most experienced language learners would agree with. I find that most Russian words can be read clearly and the pronunciation of those words is often as written. When reading on LingQ, I always save vocabulary as phrases or chunks, allowing me to learn new vocabulary in context. This is a piece of advice I always give to my students.
The moment of truth... speaking!
By the third month of learning, I found myself in a privileged position. Due to my work as a language teacher, I meet many people from all parts of the world. As luck would have it I teach two native Russian speakers, who kindly offered to speak to me in Russian.
Now, as a rule I wouldn't always advise a learner to speak in their target language after only three months but I couldn't miss such an excellent opportunity!
Over the duration of two weeks, we spoke with each other for a total of 4 hours. The conversations consisted of broken but understandable Russian. I was asked questions about why I decided to learn Russian, what my ambitions with the language are and other similar questions. Despite feeling embarrassed at times, I cherished the opportunity to finally put my knowledge to use.
The Results
On reflection, I believe that through lot's of listening and reading, on some days for 2 hours or more and on others for less than 30 minutes, I can now say I have reached a comfortable position. By no means am I a fluent speaker nor am I very conversational but I am able to enjoy more and more content without being limited to beginner's material. I have enough vocabulary to be able to express my thoughts on topics related to my work and my language learning hobby and enough to engage in short conversations.
But the most valuable asset I have after 3 months is the confidence that I can continue to improve. This motivates me to learn more and more.
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