Language immersion without travelling - resources

[Cam]

I've recently gotten much more serious about learning French this year, specifically getting myself to a level B2 proficiency as measured by the DELF. https://www.france-education-internatio ... out-public

As I've heard from several sources, complete immersion in your target language is one of the best ways to learn in addition to focused practice. Here are resources and ideas I've implemented to move myself further along, without travelling to a french speaking place.

Youtube - watch videos in your target language. Fun tip that has helped me enormously: create another google account, and only watch content in your target language. Only search in your target language too. The algorithm will think you're a native speaker of whatever language (e.g. Youtube thinks I'm a Frenchie) you're learning and only recommend content in said language.

Music - you can use your new google account for this too. Youtube music will give you a free month, and you can go wild listening to music in your language. I've actually discovered quite a few new songs this way en français. Try En Rouge et Noir by Jeanne Mas. You'll want to get a perm and go find a dance floor somewhere.

Radio - If you're lucky enough to have a radio station in your target language (for me it's French CBC here in Canada) keep it tuned whenever you're tidying up around the house or out driving.

Podcasts - Même chose que la radio. For example in French there are podcasts for learners (News in Slow French, Slow French with Gaelle, etc.) but also podcasts for native speakers for when you get more advanced. Podcasts are great for learning conversational tips indirectly...for example I know in french not to go "uhh" when thinking of my next point but "euuu" instead

Books - I started a couple years ago with children's books on topics I was interested in. I am still yet to make it through a full novel in French, though I am getting there!

Courses - I ordered a DELF preparation book for $37 that came with a CD. It is heavy on listening comprehension and writing practice. There are MANY free courses as well.

Language learning apps - there are a ton of them. I started with Duolingo years ago. I completed the learning tree, and moved onto Lingodeer. Lingodeer has been my favourite of all the apps I've tried. I bought a lifetime membership for $99 two years ago and it has already paid for itself in just my French learning. No ads, it works well, and it has practice for every aspect of language.

These are all good for listening and comprehension, but what about all-important speaking?

Friends or family members who speak your target language - if you're lucky you might have them! My mom speaks French well and we talk in French when we take the dog out together.

Local language exchange - search for local language exchange groups in your area. If none exist, you can start one or just put a post in a local group on Facebook or via paper on some public bulletin boards.

Online language exchange - Tandem is my favourite. I tried this pre-digital detox and it worked alright. The big challenge is talking with people in different timezones. Texting is no problem as it's asynchronous but video or audio calls can be tough when there is a 6 hour + difference. It is doable though, it just takes effort.

This is what I've been doing. Anyone else with stuff I forgot, feel free to chime in.

[Western Red Cedar]

Great thread and excellent ideas @Cam! I''d add getting a VPN and set it to the location in your preferred country.

Also, looking for volunteer opportunities or establishing relationships with new immigrants or refugees. This will depend a bit on the language you are trying to learn, but you might be able to make a dramatic difference in someone's life by doing something that seems relatively simple, such as helping them navigate a hiring process for example or get a drivers license, and they are usually thrilled to share their language and culture. I've seen friends and family develop Arabic and Amharic with this approach - and it is very aligned with a WOG philosophy.

[theanimal]

Change the settings on your phone and computer to the language you desire to learn.

To echo WRC, look for opportunities in your community for practice. Even if you don't think there is anything, you may be surprised. For example, I am currently in what would seem to be an Anglo exclusive community but was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Catholic Church 2 houses over has masses in Spanish and weekend events like tamale sales. If you are in a city, this will be much easier.

There are also language tutoring platforms like Preply and iTalki where you can learn 1 on 1 with an instructor from the country of your choosing. I have been using Preply to learn Spanish for over 2 years now and my instructor lives in the state of Veracruz, Mexico.

[ertyu]

Change the settings on your phone and computer to the language you desire to learn.

+1. Most major apps will be available in your target language also. Same with any other electronics you use.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Interesting stuff. I decided recently I'm going to learn Russian, and it's been ~10 years since I last tried to learn a language (German then). So I boot up the internet, and I am shocked at the huge quantity of free resources out there for this compared to even 10 years ago. In addition to all the suggestions here, I found some bilingual Discord servers for native English and Russian speakers to mix, and there's a ton of people in voice chat on there at any given time who are native Russian speakers. I'm really impressed with how easy this is to find resources compared to when I was in high school.

Of course, any internet content is going to be skewed, as there is plenty language/cultural experiences that never find their way to the internet or can't be done online, but it's amazing the sheer quantity for the free price.

Another interesting thing about Russian vs German is the language barrier is much steeper, so I run into more genuinely new content/ideas. I found with German that so many native German speakers also spoke English fluently, so there wasn't as much to "discover" by learning German as there has been with Russian.

ETA: per the advice I keep reading, it seems the more you can think in the target language (as opposed to just translate), the better off you are with fluency, so that may be a tip too if it's true.

[OutOfTheBlue]

If I wanted to learn a new language from scratch with the goal of becoming near native, I would definitely use the comprehensible input method.

For the first few hundred hours (for learning Thai as a westerner, that's around 700-800 hours or one year with 2h a day), you observe a silent period where you refrain from output (speaking/writing) and instead focus exclusively on input (listening, not reading yet) and actively (full attention, not in the background) consuming content in the foreign language from the get go (no explanations in your own language), that you understand to a good extent and that is compelling. As you advance, you complement this with passive listening as well.

The challenge during this period is to: (a) refrain from speaking, which is more easy when you are actually NOT in the country and (b) find learning content exclusively in the target language (and ideally made with comprehensible input in mind) that is suitable for your level of understanding and progression.

This means content with interactions between native speakers, picture descriptions and stories, where body language, props and pictures help understand the message. You don't focus on retention, but on understanding. You retain best what you understand.

At that point, you will have internalized a native knowledge of the language (thinking like a native) and will be able to consume regular native content at a very high level of understanding.

Next up, you will start speaking spontaneously and at that point you can seek interactions with native language speakers and teachers. If you have really observed a silent period, you'll be ultimately able to express fluently with a native accent, as naturally as a native speaker would.

It is also at this point that you can focus on the second input type: reading. If you can't learn to read the language as a native child would (with instructions in the native language exclusively), and don't have the vocabulary to understand what you are reading, you have no business reading yet.

This is counter intuitive because most think you learn and progress by speaking or firing from all cylinders at the same time (DELF etc. has sections on reading and writing, listening and speaking).

This method has no homework, no space repetition and drills, no learning grammar rules etc. (until you can read a native grammar book). This method is light on learning and heavy on natural language acquisition (aka automatic language growth).

In short, one of the big reasons why we don't learn as fast/well as children, is that we don't learn the language close to the way children do.

Children start by absorbing the language and building an iceberg of intuitive understanding. At some point, speaking will begin spontaneously and you will learn to make completely native constructions. There will be errors, but many of them will self-correct as you progress. Reading and writing come later.

It is the difference between feeling we progress (I've learned x words today, I can ask directions and order food in that language!) and actually building native understanding and skills from the ground up. Slower start, but gets you much further.

There is no secret, you have to put in the hours, But hours alone are not sufficient. How you learn is crucial.

For content and theory, you can check "comprehensible input" in your target language,

A good but old video on the matter (Stephen Krashen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug

PS: To the OP. The above is for starting from scratch, I think you are doing many things right for the language level you are at. Keep going!

[Cam]

Great thread and excellent ideas @Cam! I''d add getting a VPN and set it to the location in your preferred country.

Also, looking for volunteer opportunities or establishing relationships with new immigrants or refugees. This will depend a bit on the language you are trying to learn, but you might be able to make a dramatic difference in someone's life by doing something that seems relatively simple, such as helping them navigate a hiring process for example or get a drivers license, and they are usually thrilled to share their language and culture. I've seen friends and family develop Arabic and Amharic with this approach - and it is very aligned with a WOG philosophy.

Great suggestion about working with immigrants. I have two guys I know from Mexico working at my grocery store right now. Both real nice guys, in school, and both native Spanish speakers learning English. Spanish is my next language to learn after French, and one guy at the store has already expressed interest in some language exchange stuff.

Change the settings on your phone and computer to the language you desire to learn.

To echo WRC, look for opportunities in your community for practice. Even if you don't think there is anything, you may be surprised. For example, I am currently in what would seem to be an Anglo exclusive community but was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Catholic Church 2 houses over has masses in Spanish and weekend events like tamale sales. If you are in a city, this will be much easier.

There are also language tutoring platforms like Preply and iTalki where you can learn 1 on 1 with an instructor from the country of your choosing. I have been using Preply to learn Spanish for over 2 years now and my instructor lives in the state of Veracruz, Mexico.

Good point about language on my phone...not sure how that slipped my mind. My phone is French now

As for small communities within my own town, I know of new immigrants for one. But I'm also in a university town so there are plenty of international students, mostly from India I believe. Canada is great for having many people speaking many different languages.

Excellent point about iTalki and Preply, those two completely slipped my mind.

Interesting stuff. I decided recently I'm going to learn Russian, and it's been ~10 years since I last tried to learn a language (German then). So I boot up the internet, and I am shocked at the huge quantity of free resources out there for this compared to even 10 years ago. In addition to all the suggestions here, I found some bilingual Discord servers for native English and Russian speakers to mix, and there's a ton of people in voice chat on there at any given time who are native Russian speakers. I'm really impressed with how easy this is to find resources compared to when I was in high school.

Of course, any internet content is going to be skewed, as there is plenty language/cultural experiences that never find their way to the internet or can't be done online, but it's amazing the sheer quantity for the free price.

Another interesting thing about Russian vs German is the language barrier is much steeper, so I run into more genuinely new content/ideas. I found with German that so many native German speakers also spoke English fluently, so there wasn't as much to "discover" by learning German as there has been with Russian.

ETA: per the advice I keep reading, it seems the more you can think in the target language (as opposed to just translate), the better off you are with fluency, so that may be a tip too if it's true.

It is phenomenal just how much is out there, for free. This really is the golden age for the autodidact! Some of the free services such as Youtube you have to be careful with, as they're attention merchants. I'm over three weeks into my digital detox and it's the service I've missed most. Facebook, Instagram, all the dating apps...I couldn't care less and will most likely be keeping those out of my life post-detox. But Youtube, oh how I miss it. Just got back from a trip where we had a pool in the hotel so I messed around practicing different strokes (breast stroke, butterfly, etc.). I would have loved to watch videos demonstrating but I just went to websites instead. And in the spirit of this thread, I miss my French videos! They're just stupid comedy (think Just for Laughs or stupid pranks) but in French and I learned a lot of casual phrases from them.

I remember reading something about the benefits of thinking of an image, then the target word in your head, instead of the target word in your native language then in your second language. E.g. instead of thinking "apple" is "pomme", picture an apple in your head then think "pomme". Skip the translation portion altogether. This is a vague memory though so take that with a grain of salt!

If I wanted to learn a new language from scratch with the goal of becoming near native, I would definitely use the comprehensible input method.

For the first few hundred hours (for learning Thai as a westerner, that's around 700-800 hours or one year with 2h a day), you observe a silent period where you refrain from output (speaking/writing) and instead focus exclusively on input (listening, not reading yet) and actively (full attention, not in the background) consuming content in the foreign language from the get go (no explanations in your own language), that you understand to a good extent and that is compelling. As you advance, you complement this with passive listening as well.

The challenge during this period is to: (a) refrain from speaking, which is more easy when you are actually NOT in the country and (b) find learning content exclusively in the target language (and ideally made with comprehensible input in mind) that is suitable for your level of understanding and progression.

This means content with interactions between native speakers, picture descriptions and stories, where body language, props and pictures help understand the message. You don't focus on retention, but on understanding. You retain best what you understand.

At that point, you will have internalized a native knowledge of the language (thinking like a native) and will be able to consume regular native content at a very high level of understanding.

Next up, you will start speaking spontaneously and at that point you can seek interactions with native language speakers and teachers. If you have really observed a silent period, you'll be ultimately able to express fluently with a native accent, as naturally as a native speaker would.

It is also at this point that you can focus on the second input type: reading. If you can't learn to read the language as a native child would (with instructions in the native language exclusively), and don't have the vocabulary to understand what you are reading, you have no business reading yet.

This is counter intuitive because most think you learn and progress by speaking or firing from all cylinders at the same time (DELF etc. has sections on reading and writing, listening and speaking).

This method has no homework, no space repetition and drills, no learning grammar rules etc. (until you can read a native grammar book). This method is light on learning and heavy on natural language acquisition (aka automatic language growth).

In short, one of the big reasons why we don't learn as fast/well as children, is that we don't learn the language close to the way children do.

Children start by absorbing the language and building an iceberg of intuitive understanding. At some point, speaking will begin spontaneously and you will learn to make completely native constructions. There will be errors, but many of them will self-correct as you progress. Reading and writing come later.

It is the difference between feeling we progress (I've learned x words today, I can ask directions and order food in that language!) and actually building native understanding and skills from the ground up. Slower start, but gets you much further.

There is no secret, you have to put in the hours, But hours alone are not sufficient. How you learn is crucial.

For content and theory, you can check "comprehensible input" in your target language,

A good but old video on the matter (Stephen Krashen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug

PS: To the OP. The above is for starting from scratch, I think you are doing many things right for the language level you are at. Keep going!

Wow talk about a paradigm change. Thanks for the great input! I'll save that video for when my detox ends in early March. That method makes intuitive sense as it is how children learn. Lots and lots of absorbtion, and very little production until much later.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Cam - I wonder if only using YouTube in the target language could be a good approach? I agree that YouTube is by far the hardest digital service to give up, so enforcing a "foreign-language only" might aid learning and help limit how addictive YouTube can be.

@OutOfTheBlue - That is interesting! I'll do some more research on that paradigm because it does sound intriguing, especially the part with getting closer to native pronunciation.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Here's a comprehensible input theory video playlist for Thai, but most stuff will apply to any language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW8M4Js ... pLHV0bL_JA

[white belt]

When I was interested in this sort of thing, I used to find my favorite animated shows (South Park was a big one) in the language I was learning. Often, they will be dubbed in the target language, sometimes with subtitles in the target language as well. These are entertaining to watch and can help you to learn things due to context clues. Another useful resource I found was game shows, because they are usually entertaining, and people tend to speak colloquially. You want to find a show that probably has more speaking/discussions/monologues compared to something that is all based on visual stunts.

[Cam]

Good suggestions whitebelt. I have watched some of my favourite shows in French too, and it makes learning a whole lot more fun. I haven't tried game shows though, I really like the idea of that!

[ffj]

Humor is so subjective, but I find this guy hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i667IrEpUII

Back to the grown-up responses. . .

[theanimal]

Chat GPT- Ability to converse on different topics or do exercises in grammar, vocabulary, comprehension and more.

[AnalyticalEngine]

I've spent the past month digging into the comprehensive input/automatic language growth learning paradigm some more, and it seems to have some solid results behind it. The general idea of it is that language is largely an unconscious process inside of your mind, so studying grammar rules/etc isn't helpful because your brain doesn't think in terms of grammar rules; it thinks in terms of whatever raw process makes language possible.

If anyone wants to try a proof of concept with it, I found a playlist of comprehensive input for toki pona, which is a tiny constructed language. The idea here is that you should be able to learn toki pona in a month because it's a simple constructed language to show that comprehensible input does work. I haven't tried it myself but it might be useful if anyone is curious about the concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_a0s0w ... kD_Z1RzUgm

I've been trying this for ~1 hour a day with Russian for the past month, and while I am still very much an illiterate beginner, I will say I do think the idea has some merit behind it because my comprehension is getting a little bit better. I think I'm going to stick with an hour a day for the rest of the year and see how far I can get.

[Cam]

@theanimal I still haven't tried ChatGPT, I really gotta give it a shot.

@AnalyticalEngine I've been exploring it further too. For French I'm continuing with CBC provided stuff as I'm getting into intermediate stuff now.

But for Spanish I am basically starting from scratch so it will be a great test run of the concept. I'm into Destinos right now, a Spanish learning TV program made in the 90s I think. https://www.learner.org/series/destinos ... o-spanish/
It's about a lawyer trying to find the lost wife of this old guy before he dies. Lots of conversational spanish, and occasionally a narrator who speaks in very slow spanish. I took a few days off when I get busy (usually an episode a day) and when I went back to it and saw the recap of the previous episode, I was astounded with just how much I understood. Of course it's a telecourse designed for beginners, but I was still pumped when just a few days later I was understanding many more words than I had. And of course I am focused while watching the videos, but it doesn't feel like work like studying grammar would. Man is it ever neat.

What a paradigm change for me!

[AnalyticalEngine]

Given it's been about six months since I decided to learn Russian, here's an update on my experience of the application of these methods.

I put in roughly ~30 min a day for six months. Some days, it was over an hour, other days, I didn't get any practice in, so it averaged out to 30 min/day.

I started off doing only the comprehensible input approach, but have since switched to a mix of input and deliberate practice. One reason for this is that Russian is a more challenging language for a native English speaker and input-only wasn't helping with the Cyrillic or the grammar. I was able to get about half the alphabet with input-only by listening to short stories read out loud while following along but then I just gave up and memorized the alphabet.

Also trying to pronounce words after hearing them helps me remember them because I'm an auditory learner with minor dyslexic tendencies, so hearing myself say the word helps a ton with remembering the sound.

To try to get the accent right, I've been listening to English words pronounced in a Russian accent, and this helps me hear the sound differences. For example, you say Co-lo-rad-o in English but Kal-a-rah-da in Russian. This is helping me manage a better accent but it does require deliberate practice. Also I had some fun writing US state and city names in Cyrillic to help with the alphabet sounds too.

Minor dyslexic tendencies combined with Cyrillic have back flowed into English and caused me to be confused about which direction the letter N in English should face about 50% of the time now.

Memorizing lists of words is almost entirely useless and I need to see them in a sentence to having any hope of remembering them. I think this is because so many words are so abstract that trying to remember them in English is kind of useless. It's better to just associate дом with the "house-ness mental essence" than it is to write дом on a notecard with "house" on the back then have to filter everything I read through my English memory.

That being said, I do use English translation as a crutch in some cases if it's significantly above my comprehension level.

One thing the input-only approach falls short on is the fact there's a ton of cultural and non-verbal elements to communication. I'm pretty sure I'd end up sounding like a YouTube video if I only used YouTube. So interacting with Russian-speakers, even if it's in English, has helped a lot here. Actually I started to run into Russian-speakers a lot in person once I started to look for them because there are a lot more of them in Denver than I realized. I also joined a few Russian expat groups on Facebook, which has also helped find people in person to talk to.

Learning a new language is a lot of fun because it stretches your brain to learn. I've also appreciated how being reduced to only being able to talk about concrete things like my cat's name influences how I think and communicate when speaking in Russian. I have a new appreciation for the role language plays in cognition.

I'm going to be taking some paid lessons soon however because I feel like I'd learn a lot faster that way. Language is fundamentally social and that interaction helps a lot.

I'd have to rate my skill level as still very beginner but I can expect this is going to take me a long time to learn due to being so different from English.

[Lemur]

Thanks for posting your experiences AnalyticalEngine. This thread is timely as I'm like just over a month of learning Tagalog and just now seeing this thread....

I did not think it was possible for an adult to pick up a second language unless they had some sort of innate ability to do that or tons of time on their hands. I've been mistaken and my mind changed on that topic when I was in the Philippines recently with my Spouse and noticed the vast improvements in her siblings English over the years. I was also quite surprised at just how quickly I myself was picking up words and phrases. And that really motivated me to keep practicing after I left.

Though it still is going to be quite a challenge if one does not have the time, habits, or right strategy to learn. One of the first things I asked myself is how quickly could I get to the level of speaking that a typical elementary school kid could do in my target language. That is rather fluent for even a child and I realized what I'm up against. Consider this: A 5 year old has ~22,000 hours of comprehensible input if we assume each day is 12 hours worth of input (the other 12 hours for sleep and quiet times). That is a lot of time that we adults do not have but there is some good news. Where the adult has an advantage that a child does not is we can be much more deliberate. Of those 22k hours, the child may not be actually paying much attention to their surroundings or trying to connect the dots on anything people are saying (too busy tossing a remote control around or something). So assume only half of that is useful input and the child might have 10-11k hours of good input. Enough to be fluent at 5 and also this many hours is a bit more feasible for an adult to accomplish in <3 years or so with good daily study habits.

I had this idea called "unconscious associations" that seems very close to this comprehensible input method. I vaguely recall a guy on YouTube about a decade ago who learned to speak Japanese rather fluently in a year or so. He claimed to just watch 8 hours of anime per day after work. I thought it was kind of BS at the time because well...how is this possible without grammar books, deliberate study and practice, flashcards, etc. and not to mention actually speaking the language with a native? But then again a child can do just that!

So memories are formed when we can associate many things together. A flash card might have one association. An English to your target language in a flashcard flip is one association. Add a relevant picture and you might get 2 associations (for example, if you want to learn Dog in French don't just think of a picture of any dog, think of a "French Dog" like a poodle or something...in the Philippines an Aso has mange and likely is wild and has fleas). Add an audio file (preferably by a native speaker and not a bot) ... that is 3 associations. Use that word in a few different sentences of your target language then you can get 4 associations (e.g. I love dogs, My mom has 3 dogs, That dog needs a bath, etc.). Bring that word to life and use it in real life somewhere and you'll get multiple associations that may include sight/smell/touch/etc.

Here is an example of me making one of these associations. As part of my Tagalog immersion, I've been watching Filipino movies with no subtitles. I watched a movie with my Spouse last week and I had a vague idea of the plot (some sort of love-triangle I guess) but most of the time, I've no idea what anyone is talking about. I know a word or a short phrase here and there due to some deliberate study. But anyhow, in one scene there is a couple lying in bed and the alarm clock keeps going off. The woman wakes up first and chugs a pillow at her boyfriend who proceeds to just keep covering up his eyes after she opens the window. She yells "Gising Na!" twice. I'm sitting there thinking "oh well that must mean get up / wake up". I'll tell that to my son tomorrow morning to get ready for school. Now I use that phrase IRL to wake my son up to get ready for school ("Gising Na! Maghanda para sa paaralan!" = Wake up. Get ready for school).

That scene is burned in my brain and I can't forget the phrase now. Didn't have to study it really. Another super relevant example today (this thread is timely) where I was trying to think of the Tagalog phrase for "I miss you" and it only took me a second remember "Miss na Kita." I used to text that to my Spouse when she visited her family overseas a few years ago. I haven't used that phrase in many years but it was sort of a lightbulb for me as I realized it was a perfect example of how these long term memories are formed - many associations.

I do have quite the advantage of living with a native speaker and also being able to do small talk with her family/friends. Very effective practice. I do find comprehensible input theory interesting and seemingly a bit contrarian - I still find a lot of use from old school grammar and flip cards but the key I think is to bring your language to life and "use it in a sentence" that is relevant to you. I've been using Anki on my iPhone and someone hooked me up with 44,000 words/phrases with 400 cards split off into a separate "survival deck." Maybe a combination of all methods is best but I do find it interesting that in one of the videos I watched above, the best learners were the ones who sat back and did not deliberately try to mimic the words but just watched the scenes...very interesting stuff.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks for sharing, @Lemur, a lot of that tracks with my experience as well.

One thing I've learned after trying this for about six months is that it's wise to be somewhat skeptical of bold claims on YouTube. That is, these comprehensible input YouTube channels do benefit from people watching their channel, so of course they're going to say watching TV is all you need to do to learn a language. So I have come to temper my expectations there. I think learning does still require actual study, especially when you are below A2, because one needs to bootstrap a basic level of comprehension in order to get much out of normal media.

However, there is a really good channel called Comprehensible Russian that starts at the absolute beginner level, which I have found helpful to watch. I had zero idea what the channel host was saying the first time I watched the 0 beginner videos, but when I went back and rewatched them, I realized I knew exactly what she was saying. So I've found that studying other resources, which for me consists of this grammar book and simple short stories read aloud with translation, combined with comprehensible input, has helped a lot.

Per this article, a native speaker is going to know 15k-20k word families/lemmas (a word family/lemma is basically a root word and all its conjugations). It then goes on to talk about how much you need in a foreign language:

Prof Webb says the most effective way to be able to speak a language quickly is to pick the 800 to 1,000 lemmas which appear most frequently in a language, and learn those.

If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you'll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life.

Eight hundred lemmas will help you speak a language in a day-to-day setting, but to understand dialogue in film or TV you'll need to know the 3,000 most common lemmas.

And if you want to get your head around the written word - so novels, newspapers, excellently-written BBC articles - you need to learn 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas.

After reading this, I tried to memorize some of the most common Russian words, and I did not retain them at all. I think this is because a lot of the most common words are prepositions and pronouns and other words that do not make much sense out of context. For example, in English, you have: be, and, of, a, in, to...all of which are pretty useless to merely memorize because they rely on other words to mean anything.

So, with all this context, my study habits are now as such:
1. As mentioned before, I have minor dyslexic tendencies and so I put more effort into getting auditory samples rather than just reading things. Even just the Google Translate robot voice helps a lot.
2. I try to study in the morning when I'm more alert and retain things better.
3. Spend 20 min listening to phrases while also reading them and then repeating them.
4. Spend 20 min on the grammar book.
5. Spend 20 min on the Comprehensible Russian channel.
6. I limit study to an hour a day because I lose alertness and retention and motivation if I go longer than an hour. Learning a language is an endurance sport.

I am making slow progress here. Now, given how social language is, I think I would learn much faster if I was in an environment surrounded by Russian-speakers. The problem with at-home study is it decontextualizes a language and can make it slower to learn. So I am hoping to make connections that lead to more friendships with Russian-speakers at the language class I just enrolled in to close this gap.

[Lemur]

FYI - tried and failed: I started using Chat GPT generated children stories to get my target language input, but then quickly found out the input wasn’t actually very comprehensible. Grammatical errors mostly but then with sentences that make no sense in any context…i.e “The boys played fun kick.” “Kick is a fun game.”

Better way to do this: find online non-profits in your target language/country that do free downloads. There always is one. Example: canvas.ph

[AnalyticalEngine]

I also had similar mixed results with Chat GPT. For reading, I have had better experience with bilingual internet spaces, like reddit or language discord servers, as they often have dedicated spaces for low-level, A1-type chat. Also watching comprehensible input channels on YouTube with subtitles on in your target language also helps.

I also found out just recently a library the town over from me has trilingual resources in English, Spanish, and Russian, so I'm going to check that out and report back.