I see I have about 15 minutes for Thursday and I haven’t posted anything for today. It’s not that I want to post something every day for the sake of posting something daily, but I do like to say at least a “hey!”
And it’s not like I was goofing off either. Allergies and sinus troubles aside, I’ve tried to stay on top of my reading so I read for about thirty minutes on my lunch break. The other thirty minutes was me eating my food. And then I got caught in traffic due to an accident (praying that it was nothing serious for those involved) so I didn’t reach home until almost 20:00, ate dinner, discussed the finer points of politics, and spent the rest of my time until now reading and writing Russian.
Speaking of reading and writing Russian. Focusing on that for the past hour and a half, I realized that I have now been trying to learn conversational Russian off and on for about a year. A little over a year. There were chunks of time during the year where I just couldn’t pin down study time with me focusing on school work and such. And getting sick. But this year, this year, I have every intention to make it stick. Or at least progress. This year I plan for it to be more on than off and I think I found a method that will help.
About a week or two ago, I stumbled upon this iTalki article. Since I’ve been keeping a journal since forever and I love letter writing, why I didn’t stumble upon this idea sooner is beyond me. I have written phrases and tried to write my headings of journal entries in Russian, but having a dedicated journal in which everything is in Russian hadn’t dawned on me until reading that article. And you want to know something? I’m finding that I can recognize letters and sounds much quicker. My recall has been faster and I’m able to sound out the word faster as well. I have made process just by journaling. I’m not completely comfortable, but it’s working. Hopefully, the grammar rules start to kick in.
I’m pretty excited. And I’ve been consistent, so far, understanding that it’s just been two weeks.
So, hopefully, by December I can tell you that I’m just about reaching conversational levels.
We’ll have to see about that. More on than off, that should be my cadence for the next eleven months :).
Спокойной ночи!