I would like very much to read some opinions about what I have been thinking.
My first language is Spanish. Until now, I have devoted my time to learn German and Italian by myself.
But what I really love to do is reading Chess books. The most interesting books about this subject are, in my opinion, written in Russian.
There are some English translations of these books, but, as I have heard, are not very good. Apparently, the translators, in many cases, have done a very bad job.
I am planning to learn Russian from scratch to be able, eventually, to read these books. Therefore, I am not interested at all in output. And my goal is to read input that I have already read in English.
How many months would be necessary to achieve this goal? I think I do not need a very deep knowledge of the language.
Why concern yourself with how long it will take? Jump in and start learning. It may be months or it may be a couple of years depending on how much time you put in. The fact that you have a specific goal and material that interests you should put you on the path to success. Stay in touch with other language learners as they will help keep you motivated. The people that use Lingq make lots of progress and share their ideas. Each has a slightly different path. Best of luck to you.
People ask these questions mainly because they have no experience with the process, but Russian is a medium/hard language. It won’t take as long as Japanese, Arabic, or Mandarin, but it will take longer than Germanic or Romance languages if you are coming from Spanish as your native language.
The good news, the language becomes much easier if you are more focused on reading and comprehension, as the language’s primary difficulty, the case system, is much easier to understand than to speak it correctly. The alphabet isn’t (too) difficult to learn. It may look intimidating but it is just an alphabet with around 30 letters and you can learn them quickly (i recommend youtube for that).
It took me a good 6 weeks or so of listening to “who is she” and beginner stuff before I got a handle on the pronunciation and sound of the language which is pretty weird at first. I am still a long ways away, but If you are using lingq you could upload books and articles and plow through them within a few months even if you don’t know many of the words as you can get comfortable with alphabet.
If you want to be able to pick up a paper book and read it fluently, or have an in depth conversation without trouble…that will take some time. Everyone sort of picks up different languages at different paces. Person A will learn Chinese quickly and struggle with Russian while person B will have the opposite experience even if they speak the same native language.
If you go at it a good hour+ every day it could take anywhere from 9 months to a couple years to really get a handle on Russian. It won’t matter though because you can pretty quickly get to a point where learning the language doesn’t feel like studying but just enjoying content.
I have read about 500k words here on LingQ and I can understand about 2/3 of the first Harry Potter book. I can usually guess words through context.
That is impressive. I am in the same area of known words for german and I find German Harry Potter to be quite difficult. Lot’s of complicated descriptions, word play… it’s not an easy read like I was expecting.