I’m not worried about how long it took. I’m interested to know how many hours it took.
Thanks. I’m averaging about an hour a day of various kinds of Russian input+study over the past two years. I’m tracking all my progress on my blog: https://acquiringrussianthenaturalway.blogspot.com
Your own language acquisition method is similar to mine. How are you doing?
i.e. can you understand nearly all of russian with max with no problems?
No, I wouldn’t say so. When I watch some of his videos there are parts where I understand pretty much what he’s talking about and parts where I have no idea. So it comes and goes within a video.
Edit: I’m guessing my recognised vocabulary is around a 1000 words (if I take into account what I’ve read on LingQ, plus where I’m at in the Speakly app).
Sounds like you knew it was going to be harder but deep down (maybe even subconsiously) you didn’t believe it, haha. Your post has basciallly validated the very reason I’lll never touch a “harder” language (for native English speakers) like Russian - I just don’t have the time it’ll take to get good at it. I salute you for even starting,
Nice to know French comes “easy” if you know Spanish. I can understand a fair bit of Italian just from knowing Spanish. I guess it’s similar with French, I just haven’t tried to listen to any.
Ha maybe.
I think I’m still right but I definitely missed something. I kind of have had an epiphany though.
My thought is that spoken language is much easier than written language (and especially literary). I think that is still accurate.
However…what I have realized is that there is a massive difference between the vocabularies of an educated speaker of a language (who has a massive amount of specialized knowledge) and that of an uneducated speaker.
If you’re happy being able to speak at the level of an 8th grader, and be illiterate, I believe it is possible to reach that in about a year. But you will struggle to understand the conversations of educated grownups.
So TLDR: I would have been fully right if I was comparing “how to get fluent” for 99% of human history pre-industrializaton.
One of the ways i seemed to improve when i plateaud was to handwrite my lessons. It seemed to help things stick in my brain