Acquiring Languages the Natural Way

This is a blog about my various language learning experiments. Currently I am only learning to speak Russian. My future bucket list includes: Ukrainian, Norwegian and Irish but I will wait until I'm at the B1 level in Russian (The CEFR Levels) before I seriously attempt those. I may dabble in Norwegian earlier since it's a Germanic language that won't cause confusion with my Russian and supposedly the easiest language for English speakers to learn.

You can follow my 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).

In short my approach is based comprehensible input, lots of exposure, not worrying about output (speaking) or grammar until later in the process.

The core resources that I used, depending on the availability for my target language are:

Anki 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 For reading, vocabulary acquisition, and working through the Speakly monologues.
ListLang For vocabulary acquisition and retention.
Refold.la For an overview of a method I broadly follow and the discord community.
Speakly For learning vocabulary in context and the narrated monologues.

Plus any YouTube channels with native content or comprehensible input.

For Russian in particular:


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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning to read ancient Latin with Luke Ranieri and LingQ

When researching language learning I discovered a book that supposedly teaches you Latin, entirely in Latin:  Lingua Latina per se Illustrata Familia Romana . There is no other language present in the book. It starts with very short sentences and slowly introduces new vocabulary and grammatical concepts, relying on the reader's underlying understanding shared by Indo-European language speakers. Since I started my Russian acquisition journey in the summer of 2020 I've come across many people sharing their enthusiasm for languages. One of those is Luke Ranieri ( Lukeranieri.com ) who runs two YouTube channels  Polymathy  and  Scorpius Martianus  where he shares his interest in Latin amongst other things.  I've discovered that not only is the text of this book available on  Lingq.com  but it also has an accompanying narration by Luke (he also has a different set of recordings with a co-narrator on his YouTube Channel). I bought a bunch of the Lingua Latina books, including tho
Read more

30 Day Comprehensible Input Experiment: Toki Pona

Image
If you don't have first hand experience of using comprehensible input to acquire a language, are somewhat skeptical of its efficacy and are not sure about investing potentially hundreds of hours into watching or listening to comprehensible input then here's a 30 day challenge that takes around 10 hours in total. The video series teaches you the con-lang (constructed language) Toki Mona through a series of 30 videos each lasting roughly 20 minutes. Toki Mona only has 137 words and has a simple grammar.  The aim of the course is to show you how you can learn a language with comprehensible input and motivate you to apply the same principle to other languages. I don't have time to follow the course just yet but I'd like to give it a go at some point. I don't need to prove to myself the importance of comprehensible input but I think it would be fun to be able to add a language to my repertoire for relatively little time investment. Especially if I can convince some frien
Read more