General feedback on my recording was that I was easy to understand, which matches my "in person" skills at speaking Russian. My accent isn't terrible, and indeed is better than most other Russian learners I've ever talked to. People are generally improved with how far I've come, and understand me unless I get too excited and slur my words together ( Read more... )

My Russian practice in the last couple of weeks has been ( Read more... )

My friend David asked about my flash cards, and I realized I had a lot to say. So here's a big brain dump on where I'm at with my studies.

I am still distinctly at the stage where I need flash cards, because I still need to incorporate a lot of words into my vocabulary. I have annoying gaps to work around. I'm getting better at it as I practice ( Read more... )

Okay, I managed to stay awake enough to write a small essay to post to lang-8. Hoping the commenters are kind to me. But not to kind. If there are corrections, I want to make them and then put them onto cards. I still had to spend a lot of time looking up spelling of words, but importantly, not any of the words I've recently added to flash cards. ( Read more... )

I told someone that I'd make a short post about Anki, so here goes ( Read more... )

Making better progress reading "Design for How People Learn", a book about teaching I bought last week. I need to suggest it to people in the office; it has some very approachable material for writing online courses ( Read more... )

I started a new plan a few weeks ago, but I want to refine it. Going back through my old notes, here are my goals ( Read more... )

Following up on the earlier Russian post and some comments I've made in Facebook posts ( Read more... )

I've made recent facebook posts about my Russian studies, but I haven't posted on Livejournal in ages. So a long update about my Russian practice ( Read more... )

A common question I get when I mention that I'm studying Russian is "Do you know how to read the alphabet?" The underlying subtext of the question is almost always that this is difficult. No, the alphabet for Cyrillic is one of the easier parts of Russian. There are only 33 characters, after all. This isn't Chinese where that many new characters ( Read more... )