18 Months of Learning Russian with Immersion Methods: Rebound
Refold
About a month into my pandemic studies, I kept seeing Matt vs. Japan
in my YouTube recommendations while watching Russian With Max's videos.
“Who’s this self-important weeb who thinks he knows so much about language
learning?” was a frequent thought I had. After watching a few of his
videos, I found that a lot of his points made sense, and I began to
follow Refold, a guide to learning languages through consuming media which Matt co-created.
You can read more on the Refold website at https://refold.la, but two core assumptions of the methodology (based on the theories of the linguist Stephen Krashen) are:
- Subconsciously acquiring a language is different from consciously learning it—knowing the mechanics of swimming is not enough for you to be able to swim well.
- Language is acquired only through comprehensible input—reading
or listening to language that is slightly above our level. Corollary:
grammar study, speaking, and writing do not contribute directly to language acquisition.
The core methods of Refold are:
- Stage 1. First, learn the sounds, writing system, and basic vocabulary (500-1,500 words) of your target language (TL). Skim through some basic grammar. Start consuming content in your TL, even if you feel like you can only catch the occasional word.
- Stage 2. Fully immerse in the language—listen to and read as much content by native speakers of the TL as possible. Look up grammar and vocab when you feel like it. The easier the content is, the more comprehensible input there will be to learn from, but enjoyment takes priority.
- Use Anki to supplement immersion with sentence mining—when
you find a sentence in your immersion with only one unknown word or
grammar concept, make a card for it with the text or audio on the front
and a (preferably TL) definition of the unknown word on the back. This
helps keep your memory of that word or concept alive long enough for you
to acquire it in your immersion.
- Stage 3. Once you have almost perfect comprehension of a particular domain of content (e.g. slice-of-live TV shows), work on outputting (writing and speaking) by immersing in everyday conversation and choosing one native speaker as your language parent.
Write small amounts each week and immerse in your parent’s content until you can understand them with
ease, then copy their style of speaking. As you output, you'll notice
gaps in your knowledge to target with further immersion.
- Stage 4. Once you’re comfortable outputting, master other domains.
Numbers
Here are my summary stats for this year:
As a table:
Sum/Mean, in hours except for total time spent in Anki and cards made. The "Total" at the bottom is the sum of:
- Reading
- Active Listening
- Shadowing
- Writing
- Speaking
- 0.33 * Passive Listening
- Anki
- 0.75 * Cards
Events
Still no big "eureka I'm fluent" moment, but I hit a couple of milestones that were important for me.
I finished my first full-length native-written novel! I read the Нашествие монголов [Invasion of the Mongols] trilogy, historical novels written by Василий Ян [Vasiliy Yan] in the 1940s and 50s. While they felt difficult at first, overall I feel like the transition from translated books and native-written fanfiction to this was fairly smooth. Nothing like my struggles with my first books or with Джамиля. I talk more about my opinions on the books themselves in the Stuff I Did section.
I had my first conversation! I'd spoken the occasional word to natives before, but this was my first real conversation, a full ~25 minutes of pure Russian (other than asking for a translation of one word from English). I was extremely nervous the whole time, but luckily it was with somebody who I was already friends with and had gone through the struggles of learning another language as an adult themself, and they were very supportive. I had 4-5 stumbles where I just couldn't remember a word or case, and I also had 3-4 moments where I let them pick up the conversation where I probably would have tried to come up with something to say if I had been speaking English.
They said my accent from the last time we had spoken had improved dramatically, which I attribute to spending a lot of time studying pronunciation through the YouTube channel PhoneticFanatic and the Russian phonology article on Wikipedia along with about 25 hours of shadowing my language parent (more details about my process below).
By the end of those 25 minutes whatever part of my brain is in charge of producing Russian felt absolutely fried and my accent deteriorated the longer we spoke, but we continued to chat for quite a while after that in mixed Russian and English. Overall I'm pretty happy with this result! I was able to have a conversation way beyond "my name is X, I work in Y", and a lot of it felt pretty natural to me. It was fun enough to rekindle my interest in trying to spend a little more time on slice-of-life content rather than so much on fantasy and historical stuff.
I'm also celebrating:
- 1,000 active listening hours this year!
- 50 hours of shadowing!
- 3,000 sentence cards in Anki made this year!
- 2,000 hours studied this year!
- 3,000,000 words read from books total!
Content and resource recommendations
https://atteniusll.blogspot.com/2021/12/my-favorite-resources-and-content-for.html
Stuff I did
Listening
- ~20% Dubbed shows and movies
- ~15% Podcasts
- ~20% Streams
- ~15% Native TV and movies
- ~20% YouTube, mostly pop history, video essays, game and anime reviews
- ~10% Audiobooks
I continued to listen to my language parent from Вечерние Кости [Vechernie Kosti--Evening Dice/Bones] a fair bit, although I also counted shadowing time towards my daily goal of one hour of listening to his content. Sadly I finished all the episodes of his TTRPG review show, so mostly listened to his D&D campaign, Эноа.
For the first time in a while I actually watched a Russian TV show all the way through, Жуки [Zhuki], a comedy about 3 young programmers from Moscow sent to work in a tiny village, at the suggestion of a user on the Refold Russian Discord server, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I wouldn't say I had level 5 understanding for most of it, but I didn't feel like I dipped below level 4 much.
Of the dubbed stuff I watched in this period, I especially enjoyed (begrudgingly, as a long-time Dota fan) Arcane, a Netflix animation based on the League of Legends universe, and Ranking of Kings, an anime with really unique kinda Western-style art that's absolutely captivated me. It's kinda like if you made a more serious, grounded, and violent Adventure Time with a deaf child as the main character. It's in the running for my favorite anime ever.
I became a pretty big fan of Далада Подкаст [Dalada Podcast], a podcast in Kazakhstan where they set up a table in random places and let anybody walking by sit down and be a guest for a few minutes.
I kept up my habit of lurking in native Discord voice chats whenever I could.
I've been getting more into Russian music (although I hold strongly to the opinion that it's a very inefficient way to learn a language, it's still something I enjoy). Король и Шут [Korol' i Shut], Пневмослон [Pnevmoslon], and Омела [Omela] are a few favorite bands. I've even been finding that I like listening to the kinds of 20th-century pop and rock songs I don't like in English--something to do with the effort it took to be able to understand them and knowing that this is the stuff that all Russians know that's totally unknown here.
Reading
A note on reading speed
- A lot of people talk about being able to read at crazy speeds like 1,000+ words per minute in English. This is basically nonsense. Comprehension starts to drop off way before then.
- English speeds don't translate to Russian speeds--Russian words are longer.
- My speed does seem like it's slowly but steadily increasing.
- 30 minutes chorusing and perfect sentence shadowing on previously rehearsed material
- 10 minutes looking for, clipping, and learning new material
- 20 minutes continuous shadowing from random videos of my parent
At this point, I don't think my pronunciation will improve a ton without some tips from natives on what to practice, so that's something to prioritize for this year. I also want to do less shadowing overall (because it's tedious) and shift to more continuous shadowing as my confidence in my pronunciation grows.
Output
Plans
Thanks
Огромное спасибо [huge thanks] to my friends and the Refold Discord server communities for chatting with me, enduring my complaints, humoring my questions, and correcting my mistakes!If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment here or hit me up in the Refold Discord.
I'm in awe of the amount of time you've put into this. I've only managed around 600 hours in the same timeframe so I need to up my game.
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