~ 80 Hours, and talking about Anki
(Note: this post was written at about 80 hours. For various reasons, I couldn't get it posted until now, at almost 100 hours. I already have most of my next post written and that should be posted by the end of the week)
Introduction
So, it has been longer than a week. Apologies. There have been several times in the past two weeks when I've thought about making my next post, but the thing is, I always think "I could be just doing Russian instead." :P
I think I've found a good way to take care of that though. I'm lucky that at my work, I can sometimes study or do something personal on my laptop, as long as there's no sound. I've been using that time to get in extra reading in Assimil and whatnot. However, it's not consistent: for the sake of goal-setting and plans, I can't count on having that time. Also, it's less than ideal to be working without sound this early in the process, before I've really internalized phonetics and orthography. So instead, I'm going to use whatever time I have at work to write up these blog posts.
In this post, I'll explain what I did up to starting this blog, talk about the last couple weeks, then finally go over my use of Anki. At the end, I'll mention what subjects I plan to cover in the future.
Progress to 60 hrs total
Initial untracked hours
I started way back last year, in November 2023, with the Cyrillic alphabet. To be honest, I don't remember what resources I used for this. It may well have just been the first several units on Duolingo, using the Russian Alphabet Wikipedia page and various youtube videos and websites as a reference when needed.
The first few hours of learning Russian revolved around using apps such as Duolingo, Drops, and Speakly, and watching the Comprehensible Russian youtube channel. At this point I was just planning on dabbling a little and learning how to say a few words. I didn't start tracking time until several hours in, when I realized I wanted to continue with the language, and thought it might be nice to keep a record of my time with it. This early time remains uncounted.
First ~20 tracked hours
Around the time I started tracking time, I also started the Lingo Llama Russian deck linked to in the Refold Russian discord. I "finished" the deck in early January, by which I mean I had seen all the cards at least once. I quit the deck without continuing with reviews as I found that my being able to pass cards had more to do with the meta knowledge of what sentences were on the deck rather than my actual knowledge of the words, which seemed less than useful. At the same time, I watched most of the Beginner Zero playlist on the Comprehensible Russian channel and the TPRS playlist on the In Russian from Afar channel. I also read up on some grammar, though not much.
Spring Break
Russian took a back-seat starting in mid-January for the spring school semester. I would not have done this if not for the Italian. I needed extra credits to fill a gap in my schedule and count as a full-time student. Language classes have always been the easiest for me, and there was an easy Italian class that fit my schedule. I couldn't focus on Italian and Russian at the same time, so I chose Italian for a few months and got my school credits. It was very fun, but it does mean I now have a large gap in my Russian language learning.
I picked Russian back up after school ended in May, and really started to get consistent with daily study in June. The gap probably did put a dent into my progress, but I feel like I was able to pick back up where I left off fairly painlessly, all things considered.
To 80 hours
Since then, I've gotten into a groove of doing my anki, doing some freeflow immersion with comprehensible videos (adding the Inhale Russian channel into the mix), and doing some form of intensive reading with audio on Lute or with Assimil PDFs every day. I aim to get in at least an hour per day of language study, but have happily been hitting 2 hours multiple times a week recently. I'll go over this all in more detail on other posts.
Bi-Weekly update -- ~80 hrs total
The past couple weeks have gone alright. I didn't do anything worth tracking on the 4th of July, as holiday stuff messed with my habits, but otherwise I've consistently done something active in Russian every day.
In particular, I'm enjoying the A1 playlist on the In Russian from Afar channel. The podcast episodes are a bit beyond me still (at least without transcripts or Russian subs), but even without Russian text the episodes with the puppets feel just right: not so hard that I can't follow, but I still have to really focus to pick up on everything.
I've also found a few volumes of Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics in Russian online, and even though it's certainly not the most efficient thing I could be doing (and doesn't have audio, besides), it's the one bit of immersion I genuinely look forward to the most. The pictures and previously having read the comics in English, French, or Swedish give me plenty of support towards understanding text that is definitely above my level, and the series is a soft spot of mine. I've been using them as bait: do my Anki reviews, watch some comprehensible videos, and do some Lute reading with audio, and I can reward myself with a bit of Donald Duck reading.
My motivation when learning a language tends to swing between "I'm so good at this! I know so much!" and "Oh my god. There's so much basic stuff I don't know." This past week it's been more of the latter than the former, but for once it's been a motivator rather than a de-motivator.
Anki
The Deck
I jumped around a couple of different Anki decks in May and early June, eventually deciding to stick with this 5k frequency deck based on openrussian.org's database.
It's not perfect. The frequency order feels a little off. It's mostly fine, but then there are entries like "watermelon," which was within the first couple hundred words, and "(military) company," near word 500.
However, I'm finding the order more useful than the other large frequency deck I tried, and I really appreciate the fuller definitions, examples, and audio that this deck provides. Plus, it has a pleasing style and layout out of the box.
In addition, being able to reference the same definitions/examples/etc and the frequency number in the OpenRussian dictionary while immersing is nice. It makes it more obvious if I've seen the word in my deck already, rather than relying on a sneaking suspicion.
New cards per day
I started at a high 50 words/day, since most of the words were ones I had already seen in other decks or in immersing, but soon dialed it back to 15/day. This has been shockingly sustainable, with daily Anki times sitting around 20 minutes. In the past when I've used Anki for other languages, I often had to cap it at 5-10 new cards/day, or risk spending 40-60 minutes daily on Anki. I think this is because previously, I haven't immersed as much so early on in the process.
I suspect at some point I will be slowing down to that 5-10 rate, once I start hitting slightly rarer words. For now though, I've actually upped the ante, and for the past couple of days have done 20 words/day. This has pushed my daily Anki time to around 25-30 minutes. My reasoning is thus: if get the most common 2k words in my brain, that'll help immersion go more efficiently, since there will be more opportunities to recognize words and acquire them in context. Therefore, it's worth a bit of extra time and effort at the start to get to that 2k threshold quickly.
Leeches
In tandem with upping the number of cards, I've also lowered the leech threshold to 5, and set them to suspend.
A lot of my "problem cards" are words that are very similar to others in the deck, often with similar meanings. The verbs of motion, verbs with the same meaning but different aspect, and verbs with the same root but different prefixes/suffixes, for example, can cause trouble. When I see these cards in context while immersing I can usually figure out what is meant, but when I'm seeing one right after the other without any context, it's much harder (the downside to using word cards rather than sentence cards). I figure these will become easier once I've internalized more of the language through immersion, and/or done some explicit grammar study (f.ex. studying the meaning of common affixes).
My plan is that once I reach the 225th hour of Russian study*, I'll spin off the suspended leeches into their own deck and re-learn them 3 at a time, lowering the new daily cards from the main deck to compensate. By that point I hope I'll have enough intuition from immersion that the words will stick.
(*Yes, this is a weirdly specific number for a reason. I'll go over this in another post, but in short, it's based loosely on level thresholds in DreamingSpanish's roadmap (pdf file), x 1.5 to account for Russian difficulty. I plan on switching multiple things up when I hit it, which should be sometime towards the middle of October.)
Adding Image Examples
One last thing about the deck: when I read Donald Duck, I look up words I don't know on OpenRussian. If a word is within the top 5k (and thus in my deck), I take a screenshot of the panel and annotate it to underline the target word. I sometimes also add definitions to rarer words in the panel to force it to be closer to i + 1 (actual i + 1 panels are not very common yet). Then I add it to the Anki note for that word. Images show up on the back of the card with the definition while reviewing. Often just seeing the panel without reading the words instantly reminds me of the definition when I flip a failed card, and when I do read the panel, I get to review the word in a context I've seen before. In addition, seeing cartoon characters regularly makes Anki slightly less miserable: sort of my own version of the puppy reinforcement add-on.
My opinion may change in the future, especially once I've reached the 1k cards Refold recommends before beginning sentence mining, but for now, this editing of notes to add immersion examples seems like a good compromise between making your own cards (ideal for memory and context, but takes a long time and is generally a pain in the butt) and using a pre-built deck (easy, but not as tuned to what you are consuming in the language and less memorable). For now, I don't see any reason to not finish the deck to 5k before beginning to mine my own sentences, and have been adding immersion examples to the whole deck accordingly.
An iconic Scrooge panel that is i+1 and that I'll be very happy to see in an Anki session later this year.
This panel is not i+1 (I know отпуск, but less well than the target word, and haven't learned возражаете), but it is immediately clear what the target word means, and it's a funny panel, to boot.
Future posts
My posts going forward will likely contain a weekly update, plus one other subject. I'll probably discuss, among other things, books I've been using, videos I've been watching, my process for intensive reading with audio, and my medium- and long-term plans.
Thanks for reading!