After uploading the transcript of episode one of series one of кукня there were 363 blue words. I passed these through the multiple choice flashcards over a period of 4-5 days and then translated some of the text and watched some of the video. I found this an exhausting process. Particularly the translation. It is true that I understood the text and video better, but the amount of effort involved is quite daunting. Some of the text I just couldn’t grasp. I am now wondering if this approach is counter-productive. My idea now is just to select phrases to learn that I can actually use in conversation. Otherwise, I just feel fagged, depressed and fed up!
If you’re talking about 90%+ comprehension at the sentence/phrase level, which is my personal goal, I disagree.
Those numbers might be ball park for someone who mainly does listening/reading, or maybe someone who is immersed and counts all hours of exposure towards the total, but imo they don’t apply to someone using a well balanced learning program.
I’ll use myself as an example. I understand 60-70% of the linked podcast (I only listened to the first 5 minutes or so; maybe it gets harder?), and according to my spreadsheet I have about 650 hours of listening under my belt. This is attentive listening, not much of it done during immersion.
As has been pointed out before, learning one’s mother tongue is very different from learning a second language as an adult.
Of course, it’s useless to learn by heart all words you’ve come across a text.
At the time of sheetpapers I had 3 sheets - for the most important words which I really learnt by heart, for not so important words which I read through once a week and for not important words which I read through once a month.
I assume you’ve tried different amounts of cramming and had questionable results in the past, which is what prompted you to post this. You might have observed the following: if you study only one hour a day, you make definite progress, and seem to get a high return per hour of cramming. But if you spend 4-6 hours a day, you know you aren’t making 4-6 times as much progress, and sometimes it even feels like you aren’t improving much more than when you only studied 1 hour/day.
Now if you’re comparing 1 hour with 6 hours, and thinking the additional 5 hours isn’t doing any good at all, it’s most likely a false perception. It’s hard to judge your own progress sometimes. But if it’s 3 hours vs 6 hours, you might be right in thinking that your immediate progress isn’t any better. I wrote a post about this a couple years ago:
Imo, what’s going on here is your mind needs time to sort out a lot of what you’re cramming in. In addition to too many hours, things like anxiety, self-doubt, boredom, etc can add to this inefficiency. This is described in Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis. I call this quantity of inefficiency that needs time to be sorted out a bow wave, like the wave that occurs in front of a boat that actually works against the boat’s progress.
I study fairly inefficiently by the above definition, quickly building up a big bow wave. The solution that works the best for me is to take periodic breaks. This allows the bow wave to dissipate, or lets my mind sort out what I’ve learned and start using it. I call this spurt learning.
Another thing you can do is study less. This will reduce your bow wave, meaning a higher percentage of what you learn will stick immediately. The disadvantage of course is less overall progress.
Some people study very efficiently, don’t suffer much from the bow wave effect, assume learning vs hours spent is linear, and that long hours with few breaks have no significant disadvantages.
So back to the question, which I will restate as “how many hours per day should I study to achieve optimal performance a few months from now?” The answer, as is almost always the case in language learning, is “it depends”. A super efficient studier might need 10hrs + to be optimal. A really inefficient studier might experience seriously diminishing returns after 2 or 3. So it’s up to you to decide what’s best in your case. But one thing that I’d recommend for everyone in this situation is to back way off and try to do less stressful, less time consuming activities in the language in the period of time just before going over there. Everyone, even the efficient studier, builds up some amount of bow wave, and you can’t ride that wave unless you release it.
Wulfgar, thank for your interesting and useful post. After studying daily for four months I think I have built up a huge Bow Wave! The only problem is, I need my daily fix! I have tried to back off a little and not to be so intense. I am also trying different approaches which I think helps. Sometimes, I feel frustrated and fed-up with the whole process and at other times I just love it! I think that sometimes, just doing less when frustration sets in is the best way to dissipate the Bow Wave. I think I might try taking short breaks to refresh my enthusiasm. I am afraid that if I leave off learning for too long that I will give it up entirely, because it will be easier to pursue other more enjoyable interests instead of the hard slog of language learning!
That’s cool. You actually remind me of myself before I deleted my first massive (20k+) flashcard collection. It was a hard and somewhat lengthy process before I got used to learning in spurts.
I like that phrase: learning in spurts. I think I might try this approach as it may alleviate some of my frustration. Sometimes, I try to imagine that I am beginning all over again and then I realise that I am starting from a much higher level than before, which is encouraging.
Sorry, I just noticed this! I’m not sure what I would classify my level, maybe it was early intermediate. I could read newspapers and get the gist of most articles, and have reasonable conversations with native speakers, but would scratch around for words a bit.
I started importing newspaper articles initially because they were short, easy to access and the lingq import thing works well for it. I used Facebook mostly for this, I just liked a whole heap of Russian news pages and Facebook would send me articles, after a while its algorithm knew what I read so it would send me topics I was interested in. Made it a bit easier 
As I knew more words (and I was missing listening), I thought I would give reading and listening to a full book a bash. I just import the whole text and the system breaks it up into 2000 word chunks, which work out about 20-25 minutes of audio ( I didn’t bother with importing audio because I have an app that comes with the audio books).
Russian is probably a bit more grammatically complicated than Chinese, so many of the ‘new’ words in blue were actually just variants of words I already knew in their basic form. If I had 200 blue words, not all would be truly new. If I had 400, then it was getting to the stage that lingqing took just too long. I remember the first book I imported and at the start I thought, wow, I have 300 unknown words here in every section, that will be a slog, but by the halfway point the remaining ‘chapters’ had around 80 -150 (out of the 2000 in the section), most around 100, and by the end the lingqing was much less of a task and I was flying though it (relatively speaking!) and I could really enjoy it. That’s the great thing about lingqing, seeing the number of new words in future chapters go down. It really motivated me.
I avoided any of the classics, too many rare words, and started with non-fiction, which, because I read newspaper articles initially, were a lot easier - mainly about politics, economics and history. Novels were a bit more difficult, they took a while longer but I knew I had to move on from non-fiction at some point! Then again I was advised to start with Harry Potter (I didn’t) so I guess there are easy novels available, they just didn’t interest me.
When I studied Mandarin Chinese 50 years ago I went at it 5-7 hours a day. I listened, I read, I wrote and I spoke. I came away with the conclusion that the more intensively you pursue the language the better you will do, and the efficiency increases geometrically. Get stuff you are interested in to read and listen to, and make the conversations meaningful.
So, say you’re in an immersive environment and you use the language so much that your mind turns into mush. Is there any point in pushing yourself even moreif you want more progress? Or is it wise to take a break? I want to travel abroad and make the most out of an immersive environment, and I’m wondering the best way to approach it.
No.
I have not had the experience of having my mind turned to mush. I simply enjoy my involvement with the language.
Krashen mentions that some people have trouble with non-transparent speech. I’m definately one of them. I have to make a conscious effort to relax. The good thing is my brain is no longer trying to pick out Russian in a stream of Hebrew, so I know something has changed, but I know there’s still some internal resistance.
If you are going into an enviroment as difficult as Russia, avoid any additional stress, i.e. situations where people expect you to perform complex language tasks the first week! Preferably, there would be someone bilingual there, with whom you already feel comfortable.
Steve, living in Montreal, had a nice half-way house before he went to a country with a socio-political culture that wasn’t so different from N. America.
I think before i go back to Russia, I’d gradually incease my exposure to audio and speak almost daily to a tutor for a month or two.
Me neither. I just wish my eyes never get tired. Fortunately there is always radio.