Russian Log / 029

What I did today:

• lots of passive listening (audio book, music, YouTube Let's Plays)
• grammar (textbook)
• review (vocab + grammar)
• lots of sentence picking (different games in Russian)
• finished chapter 3 (textbook)

I was very active today! I finished chapter 3 of my textbook. Tomorrow, I will add the vocab and example sentences (+ explanations) to my Anki deck. 

I also listened for a few hours to russian music, audio books and YouTube videos. While I was watching russian Let's Plays, I looked for walkthroughs in Russian for this game. Since I can't understand the details of the story through the video (yet), I can use the walkthrough to fill the gaps. 

Then I relaxed a bit and played some old video games in Russian. I looked for sentences, where only one or maybe two words are unknown. Long and / or too difficult sentences are not yet within my reach, that's why I'll ignore them for now. I've found around 25 interesting sentences so far, which are also not too difficult. 

The good thing about looking up only sentences with one or two unknown words is, that I don't have to look up EVERYTHING. This way, I can play the game in a pretty normal pace. Not bad for an beginner, huh? XD

Seriously, simple little rules like these are an enormous help. With these, even an beginner can enjoy native material (to an certain extend) and can learn something without burning out.

Just make sure to choose something, that is either familiar (mabye a book or game you've read / played before in your native language) or that is quite easy to understand from context (games / books for children). I tried different games until I've found one or two that are ideal for this technique (mostly short and not too complicated sentences). In these games it's more likely to encounter sentences that are easy / short enough.

For example: The playable character is standing in front of a bin. Now you interact with the bin and you get the info "This bin is empty." Let's assume you didn't knew the words "empty" and "bin". Maybe you can guess the meaning of "bin" from the context (because you've interacted with the bin). Then you've just found the perfect sentence to learn the word for "empty"!

I added sentences like these to my Anki deck.