I am approaching 60,000 words marked as known. When I hit this goal I would like to shift into a new phase of learning. To date, I have focused on acquiring passive reading vocabulary (what Lingq is best for). In the new phase I would like to focus more on listening and speaking so that I can have conversations in my target language, Russian. Any ideas on working on listening and speaking would be appreciated, whether in Lingq or elsewhere.
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There are many platforms where you can get lessons from tutors, including LingQ (Preply, italki, etc.). You can improve your speaking and listening skills by communicating with native speakers of the language you are learning.
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Listening to content is equivalent to reading a lesson with new words. Find lessons to listen to where you think has the highest words count where you have already moved words to known but haven’t heard it yet.
Use platforms for conversations such as preply or italki.
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With 300 hours of listening already done, you already have a decent foundation. I guess you can already understand most things, right? Unless the audio has poor sound quality, right?
I’ve clocked a bit over 500 hours of Russian listening (predominately as reading while listening to YouTube videos) and my listening comprehension is not too bad. I can watch YouTube videos decently. I’m mainly held back by my lack of vocabulary, which is far less than yours.
Listening
Just pick some podcasts or YouTube videos which you understand most of what is being said and just listen. With Russian, their pronunciation doesn’t differ super much across the population compared to other languages (though there are many second language speakers of Russian, so they have different accents, eg. Armenians, Kazakhs, etc.) and Russian pronunciation doesn’t differ super much from the orthography, at least compared to other languages such as English. With that said, the focus would be on stretching your listening comprehension, so focus on audio which isn’t super easy and you need to concentrate to understand, as this pushes your limits. Conversational podcasts or amateur YouTube videos are good for this. If you keep trying to push your listening comprehension limits, then you just need to put in the hours. Many, many hours, depending on the exact goal you have.
Speaking
You can use the platforms mentioned above by @vet8t6z79pc4 and @chytran. You can find Russian tutors there at price similar to the going wage of the countries where the Russian tutors live (Russia, Turkey, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc.), which may be well-priced, depending where you earn your salary.
I recommend to book trials with a few different tutors before choosing one (or two). Some tutors are definitely better than others and you have to figure this out from trialling them yourself. You want to be chatting with people you have rapport with and you work well with. It makes it a more enjoyable experience.
I also recommend thinking what you want out of your tutoring session and taking control of it by telling your tutor about your goals and which methods you want them to use because, if not, the tutor will probably end up giving grammar exercises or going through a textbook, which isn’t focusing on speaking practice.
For instance, you can tell you tutor you only want to be corrected a max of once every five minutes. From my experience, if I don’t limit the amount of corrections the tutor gives me, because I’m not at an advanced level, I make lots of mistakes. I find they’ll try and correct me almost every second word cause my pronunciation is off or I wrongly declined the adjective, etc. I find this very frustrating and don’t like this. But that’s just me. As you are at a higher level than me reading-wise, maybe you don’t need this rule.
If you want to practise speaking, you want your tutor to be good at listening and asking questions. This is not something that comes natural to everyone, hence why you should trial multiple tutors. At the very least you can always pick a topic beforehand and ask an AI to write you a list of questions in that topic and send it to your tutor before class, getting them to pick their favourite ones to ask you.
As my goal is to practise my speaking, I end up speaking the majority of the tutoring session by far. My tutor just directs me and occassionally I ask in Russian how to say a word, then go on to describe it. Or I ask if they understand, and they’ll respond by summarising what I said, which ensures that I made sense.
If you have a strong base of the language and haven’t done any speaking before (or writing), initially speaking will be hard cognitively and it’ll require a lot of mental effort. At the beginning, you’ll make lots of mistakes, but you’ll increase your skills very fast. For instance, in my case, I’ve actually been able to speak in Russian for quite a while and I only have 20 or so hours of speaking practice at the moment (eg. in a tutoring session I may speak 45+ minutes, so I would record 45 minutes in this case). I can have entire conversations in Russian, albeit with plenty of errors. My main limitation is vocabulary. I’m not fluent by any means, but I’m definitely understandable and can talk about a range of topics. With such a high vocabulary already, you’ll see rapid growth in your speaking ability.
Maybe it goes without saying, but as a rule of thumb, you’ll probably want to put more time into listening than into speaking. This is for two reasons:
- at least in my experience, listening comprehension grows slower than speaking fluency, so requires much more time.
- listening is the basis for speaking, so improving your listening will actually improve your speaking to some extent, but less so the other way round.
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Thank you for your thoughtful and helpful reply. It will hopefully help other who come across this thread also. Your listening and speaking sounds far superior to mine. Hence, my need to move into a new phase and focus. I’ll probably be focusing mainly on listening comprehension for a while.
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No worries.
Even one tutor session per week adds up. You just schedule it and next think you know months have passed and you’ve done a dozen tutoring sessions. At the moment, I only have one session per week.
Maybe my speaking is better than yours at the moment, but with your large passive vocabulary and strong reading abilities, you’ll progress rapidly in speaking ability. You’ll overtake me in no time.
Same as listening comprehension. I’m really limited by the amount of vocabulary I have.
P.S. For example, to reach 20 hours of speaking, that’s 45 minutes speaking per week for half a year (26.7 weeks). My experience with only having 20 hours of speaking is I’m partially decent (albeit I do have 500+ hours of listening). Maybe you’ll be more or less than my level by then, but you’ll be not too shabby. You won’t be held back by vocab, unlike me, at the very least. It still surprises me how little speaking practice is actually needed to be conversational-ish (B1), if you have the foundation of listening comprehension and vocabulary.
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