Acquiring Languages the Natural Way

This is a blog about my various language learning experiments. Currently I am learning to speak Russian. My future bucket list includes: Ukrainian and Irish, perhaps Latin. But I'll wait and see when or if I have time for those.

You can follow my Russian progress on my other blog: Acquiring Russian The Natural Way

The idea of 'acquiring' a language vs 'learning' comes from people like Stephen Krashen, Steve Kaufmann, and Jeff Brown. And methods like All Japanese All The Time, the Mass Immersion Approach, Refold.la and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS). However I'm not necessarily looking to avoid speaking too early and I've come to appreciate the power of memorising lots of words and set phrases.

The core resources that I use are listed below (depending on the availability for my target language are):

Anki Or a beginners app to brute force memorise around 500 of the 

Glossika For reading, listening, pronunciation practice and absorbing sentences.

Fluent Forever: Pronunciation Trainer For learning to recognise and produce the phonemes. 

Fluent Forever: Word List As with Anki for a basic vocabulary.

LingQ.com Or a similar reading app for vocabulary acquisition, and working through the Speakly monologues if available in the target language.

Speakly For learning vocabulary in context, the monologues/stories and dialogues. 

TaalHammer For learning vocabulary and sentences.

Plus any YouTube channels with native content or comprehensible input.

For Russian in particular:

101 Conversations in Simple Russian: Short Natural Dialogues to Boost Your Confidence & Improve Your Spoken Russian

Anki Decks: Most Common Russian Words)

Roots of the Russian Language: An Elementary Guide to Wordbuilding

New Penguin Russian Course Beginners

Head over to Acquiring Russian The Natural Way to find more resources and to follow my progress.