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Typing Russian without a special keyboard can time-consuming. But when there's a will, there's a way.

 

diez minutos de espanol. But I'll try to do better.

 

Day 4 of learning done. Did some more letter memorization from Wiki page (I'm almost done with the block letter of the alphabet) and some Duolingo.

It is so indeed! But at least it's not Chinese lol.

 

I'm not sure how they do it in Chinese but I know that the Japanese use the latin alphabet and romaji and then they choose options. In Japanese there are 2000 kanji to learn. Plus two different alphabets - Hiragana and Katakana. I used to know them but I got stuck in Kanji, which is too complex in meaning and pronunciation. Therefore I decided to stick with some easy languages, like Spanish. English and Spanish cover most of the world. I could add Portuguese, which is very similar to Spanish, and I could communicate with Brazilians and central parts of Africa. But I'd rather master Spanish first.

 

Day 5 done. Finished all the block letters from Wiki page, got all alphabet memorized. Now I need to start reading and practice recognizing letters faster and faster, until I am fluent in reading!
I got some old Russian books here that I got for free, they are kind of crappy romance novels for 40 year old soccer moms though lol, so not sure how much I will like them. And that's assuming that I can even understand them, I am not sure about the reading level I am at. But I guess that's not the point, the point is to train the brain to recognize letters—I can always look up meanings of the words as I go. I do have to find something more fun to read though, and possibly something easier, but this will do for now; will see how many words I remember from high school days.

Spanish is also on my list, but after I'm done with Russian to a satisfactory extent the German is next on my list, maybe Spanish then. Or maybe I could learn them both (Spanish and German) at the same time? What do you think about learning more than one language at the same time? I did that in high school when English was mandatory and another foreign language was mandatory also, but unlike English you could pick that one, and I did pick Russian. But it's not like I had a choice to only focus on one.

That's pretty cool. I don't know where you're from, but I guess Spanish is more useful in America and it's adjunct parts probably. Here in Northern/Eastern Europe Russian and German is pretty dominant, if you know these two you can probably get around very well, even if you don't know any English.
Few hundred years ago, before English language ruled the word, if you were interesting in exploring diverse literature and art, or wealthy and free enough to afford to travel, German, Russian, French and Spanish was pretty much mandatory. These days you can go almost everywhere and chances are that somebody will speak at least some English, almost all books are translated to English, etc. I kind of like it, cos if we speak the same language we can connect easier with other cultures and people—bring us all closer—but I also dislike it, cos whatever pride, prestige and perception of intellectualism there used to be was associated with being a polyglot is kind of gone for the most part—just a random early morning thought.

 

Bad idea. It's an excuse for the brain not to focus on the subject. The question is if you want to master the language or you just learn for fun. If it is your past time, you can learn several languages, but if you want to be fluent, you need to explose yourself to one foreign language and "suffer" in order to see the fruits of your labour later on.

 

Not exactly, when I was in Tenerife this summer, it was hard to communicate in English. It was only used by some of the hotel staff. Wherever we went and wanted to ask about anything, Spanish was needed. Even if we lost our way, it was hard to find a person speaking English. However, I like the sound of it.

Moreover, when I went to Britain for a 3-week language school, I fell in love with this language. I didn't travel abroad a lot. But I love English because it gives me access to a lot of culture for free. I also know that the Spanish culture is great but I'm cut off from it because of my poor level of Spanish.

I'd suggest learning languages for fun. Your motivation will last longer. If you learn it to be a polyglot, you may burn out after you get stuck with something hard. Translation technology is getting better, so in the future there will be no demand for translators. However, speaking a language at a really high level will allow me to connect to people and will give me a sense of self-pride because I'll master something hard and others won't bother or won't be determined enough to devote so much time and effort to achieve what I want. But I'm sure it will pay off. I already enjoy understanding some memes in Spanish or some chunks in lyrics. It's my nofap SKILL and my gym for the brain. And nothings else matters.

 

I observe it all the time. Language unused dies pretty fast.

 

Day 6 done. No Duolingo; spent like 60 minutes reading the language, maybe more. Not the novels I talked about though, but doing some online tests, because I wanted to find out my level. I did 3 tests and it said I need like 10 to 15 minutes to finish each test—spend closer to 25 minutes instead—my reading was excruciatingly slow! At least I can read now, once I have memorized the letters, but I need to read syllable by syllable and often times mistake letters and it takes me rereading the word couple times to figure it out—I don't enjoy it at all! I guess it's just growing pains of learning, gotta push through that.
I googled some free online tests and did three of them, first one was more than 50 questions and it said that I am at B2 level. Then the other one did not gave me level, but I answered 23 out of 25 questions right and it said my Russian was excellent lol. And the the third one was just a Youtube video for A1 level proficiency, it had 30 questions and I got 25 right, it said that I am decent at A1 level but still need to learn a lot until I can move up. So the results were all over the place and probably not too accurate—I definitely do not feel like I am B2 for sure...
All the tests I did were only reading tests though, so while I might do somewhat decent in understanding words and simple phrases I can not speak or write much, cos my brain can recognize the word when I see it, but I can't recall them when need to speak them! I guess that's what they call passive vocabulary vs active vocabulary—my passive vocabulary is somewhat decent, but my active vocabulary is crap. So yea, maybe I could be close to B level in comprehension, but definitely nowhere close in terms of communication and self expression in that language.
Gonna try reading these novels that I have later today, will see how that goes.

Alrghty then, no learning two languages at a time for me! I definitely want to become fluent in them as fast as possible and not just casually mess with them for years but still be at low level; if I can get my Russian up to where my English is now in 5 years time I'm gonna be happy. I have no idea how realistic that goal it though; my English is about C1, but I never put any effort in to learn it, it just kind of happened as I kept using English side of the internet over the years—I wonder is it possible to go from A1 to C1 in five years with some effort, and could that be done faster, or would it take longer? I know it's a silly question, cos it depends how much I study, but... ya know...

What languages are you learning?

Yea, I guess it depends where you go too, but even being able to talk in English at hotels, airports, restaurants that focus on tourists, etc with service staff is a modern luxury I think. If you want to talk with normal locals I guess it's harder then.
Yea, I am definitely not learning for the sake of being a polyglot lol. I'm just saying it feels nice to be respected and admired for something you are good at, ya know.
It is fun for me to learn, well, maybe not always the process itself, but it is fun to work towards something hard and rewarding for sure.

 

Your each language skill may be at a different level. Reading is trained most easily because there's a lot of interesting content on the web. Listening is harder because you don't have time to look up any words and some words are connected to each other or "casually" pronounced. There are homophones - that killed my interest in French. I might say that listening is like reading on steroids. The next skill is writing - you can train it while writing messages, posts or keeping a journal (but it's hard to train). Finally, speaking is hard if you have no one to talk to but you may talk to yourself. It's also like writing on steroids. You don't have time to think and look up words.

When it comes to vocabulary, I simply cram it from my notebook and add it to Anki, sometimes I also use other apps like duo and memrise for Spanish. I also have an UDEMY course for grammar and vocabulary. Several self-learning books and something which I would describe "learn grammar and vocabulary while you read a simplified novel" books. But it all takes time. I sometimes skip a lot of things. I procrasinate some of them. Especially the latter.

You need to hit B1 level with grammar and vocabulary. Then you will start to enjoy it more. But you can't learn grammar by listening or reading. You'd have to be bombarded with the language as if you were a child for most of the day and see and hear the language in context in meaningful situations and be focused.

Sometimes self-discipline is the key to reach a hard-dopamine goal that will pay off later. The problem is that easy-dopimine sources guarantee a dopamine spike where some hard challenges require immense time and effort (especially at the very beginning) to master them. It's easy to give up and all the time will be wasted. That's the problem with the skills that we admire in others. That's why they are admired. They are hard to obtain. We see only the outcome but we haven't seen the "painful" process of acquiring them. We also may be "doing" them wrong and that's why they don't stick. Everyone is different. As D.Goggins said, "we have different floors and ceilings". But we won't know our ceiling until we try really hard and I assume those ceiling may be elevated by effort.

 

tres horas de espanol

 

I did my reviews for Spanish.

 

Day 7 done. Did some reading again, another online test haha, way harder reading this time in this test though, but it still said I was "Advanced 3", whatever that means—I don't feel advanced lol. I think I might be getting slightly better (faster) with recognizing Cyrillic letters though, not sure.

Oh I'm sure of it—it's all over the place! What holds me back the most with reading is different letters; if I read Russian with Latin letters (as in Chitat na russkom jazike Vs Читать на русском языке) I am doing way better! But with listening it's way easier (I listened to some YouTube videos in Russian) cos there is no barrier of symbols and I can just go directly to sound, even though you are right that there are many words I do not understand due to pronunciation or how fast they talk, but I understand them when I read them slowly. As far as speaking and writing my active vocabulary is maybe at 1st grader level at best? But I do talk better than I write, due to same reasons, but not much use to only be able to talk with children.

Right on! We should take pride in doing hard things cos that's where the learning and growth is.

By the way, did you know that apparently the Spanish is one of the most useless languages to learn: Top 10 most useless languages to learn.

 

Not my problem. And it's not. If we followed this way of thinking, all other languages other than English would be useless.

 

Did you click the link to the video? It was supposed to be a joke. But the joke doesn't really work unless you bite the bate and click the link lol. I found that guy just couple days ago, he makes jokes about languages. Never mind I guess...

 

I took it seriously but I watched the video Thanks @Ūruz. He says this language is useless and that is useless but he bothered to learn them anyway. We're good, Uruz. Don't worry.

 

@Ūruz Today I've read a bout Rowdy Gaines, an olimpic swimmer, that he had tried a lot of sports before he realized that swimming was his passion that stuck in. I recalled my own path to Spanish. I have tried German, Japanese, French, Italian and Portuguese, but it's Spanish that I really like, no matter what. My number two right after English which has been my passion since late childhood.

 

Spanish, morning pracice. I need to cling to something.

 

Day 8 done; nothing much, just some Duolingo for 15 to 20 min. I have Anki downloaded, gotta start taking those Duolingo words and adding them to flashcards.

That's wonderful to hear, I'm happy you found another thing you love man, that's amazing.

 

Spanish morning practice.
@Ūruz if you do anki on your laptop, you can add images to faciliate memorization. I also add gapped sentences.