~ 60 hours, and where I come from & why I'm here
Welcome to the blog! :D I'm studying Russian, roughly following the Refold method, and tracking my time: I'm currently at around 60 hours and have no plans to stop anytime soon. This blog will act as a sort of logbook for the endeavor, and I hope blogging once a week will keep me motivated and allow future-me to reflect on the experience for future language learning projects.
In addition, I hope for it to be helpful for anyone who may also be studying Russian with Refold (or any similar input-based, Anki-heavy, grammar-light, output-delayed method). Note that this isn't an intro to such a method and I write assuming you are already familiar with basic theory and terminology relevant to it (the Refold site linked above is good for that). However, hopefully this can give you some ideas for material and strategies, a feeling for how progress in Russian looks across certain hour thresholds, and, if my plans go well (🤞), give you another source of motivation.
Today I'll go over my background and my reasons for studying Russian. This probably isn't important for most visitors to this blog, but it'll give you an idea of where I'm approaching my studying from. I'll cover my current progress and methods in future posts.
My language background
My first language is American English.
I've been studying French off and on for 12 years. It's my strongest language besides English and I'd say I'm fluent in it, if not native-like. In addition to classroom study, I've spent time in France, and done plenty of reading, watching, and gaming in the language. I'm not currently studying it explicitly, but it comes up regularly in my daily life. I rarely speak it aloud (preferring to chat in text), so my speaking skills lag somewhat behind reading, listening, and writing, but I'm not a very outgoing person and don't live in a francophone country, so for now that's fine by me.
I've been studying one of the Scandinavian languages for about 6 years. I started with Danish, moving slowly until I made a Swedish friend, which motivated me to switch to Swedish and study more consistently. My Swedish is not as good as my French, but it's good enough to comfortably read non-fiction books and young adult novels, watch most video content, and write letters, though some novels and audio content can still be rough, depending on the topic (or the speaker). My real-time output will also need work before I ever visit the country. However, I've been beyond the beginner stage for quite some time. It no longer feels like a language I'm studying, so much as simply using, like French and English. And while I'll continue using Swedish, I've been itching to be explicitly studying a language from the beginning again.
I'm also an unrepentant dabbler. What can I say? Languages are interesting! I've dabbled in a bunch of them: most major romance & germanic languages, Japanese, Finnish, Russian, Esperanto, etc, none of which I'm any good at. This blog is part of an effort to buckle down on a single language. I'm going to try and stay focused on Russian for about a year, after which I'll allow myself to switch to something else if I want.
So Why Russian?
I know this is the stereotypical reason for studying Russian, but it has a famous literary canon that I'd like, in the distant long-term, to sink my teeth into (Hey, knowing French means War and Peace is already 2% comprehensible to me, right? :P ) Similarly, various pieces of more modern Russian media have been on my radar lately, including some films I'm planning to watch with friends within the next year or so.
I'm interested in learning more about the Russian Revolution. Besides languages, one of my major interests is history, and for 10 years or so I've been deeply interested in the French revolution and its follow-ups. Learning about mid-late 19th unrest in France, such as the 1848 Revolution and 1871 Paris Commune, has raised my interest in the Communist revolutions following them, such as in Russia. I know from studying French history that some language skills would be a big help. Even just being able to read the alphabet would be helpful, which is the reason why I started looking into Cyrillic last year.
Russian is hard, but not too hard. I would be proud to reach my current Swedish level in Russian, but the idea isn't overwhelming and barely imaginable like how reaching that level in Japanese or Arabic feels. I want to eventually, in my lifetime, study all three of these languages, among others, and I think it makes sense to start with Russian first.
Russian is a huge language with many speakers, and there's a lot of easily accessible media in it. Finding stuff in Swedish that both interested me and was at my level has been frustrating due to region-locked payments for digital media, few dubs of foreign media (especially for video games), living an ocean away (making physical books somewhat difficult to get cheaply), and no pirating scene. This experience kind of put me off getting into another relatively small language*, such as Finnish, for my next major project.
It'll be neat to have some knowledge of a Slavic language, a European branch of the Indo-European family that I haven't touched yet.
(*Yes, I realize how extremely relative this is. Swedish and Finnish are enormous languages compared to Cornish, which a good friend of mine is learning.)
Closing thoughts
To be honest, I started learning the Cyrillic alphabet and watching the first comprehensible videos over 60 hours ago without planning on going any further with it. But it's been months and I'm still motivated to continue. Frankly, even if I stop within the planned year and never properly make it out of the beginner phase, it would still be useful to be able to read some simple Russian.
I'm lucky that I can treat language learning as a hobby. I do it primarily for fun, secondarily so I can stumble through various pieces of media in the original, and only tertiarily in order to communicate, so I'll just stop when it stops being fun, or until I'm at a level where I can read what I want in it (even if I never quite make it to War and Peace).
That's more than enough navel gazing for now. Over the next few posts I'll go over my overall progress so far, the resources I'm using, and so on. I'm going to try and update the blog weekly, starting this weekend. I'll note down anything new or notable that happened.