I’ve decided to do the [100 Hours in 40 Days Challenge]. To briefly summarise, it’s about dedicating 100 or more hours of language learning in 40 days. I began this challenge on the 21st of August but left it until now to post my introduction.
My goals for this challenge:
1) I listen to a lot of Russian music, but not so much just general speaking. My goal is to listen and read along to multiple audio books during this time period with the intention of improving my connection to how words look and how they sound. I’m also using these books to be expanding my understanding of vocabulary and grammar. Not so much to jump to the level of complete understanding of these books but more to get a better feel for the language in literature. I’m also going to make a lot of use out of Easy Russian and just generally immersing myself in hearing spoken Russian more.
2) I really want to develop my understanding of grammar. I can recognise quite a few words, but my lack of understanding with grammar holds me back a lot and it also means I can’t do much with the vocabulary I have. My tutors are currently going through some grammatical concepts with me but I’d also like to work through grammar exercises myself.
3) I want to complete the Memrise Russian’s 1-3 course. Course 1 and 2 are meant to cover A1 vocabulary (and to some degree some grammar). Here the goal isn’t so much to memorise all of it by heart, but simply to have a lot of exposure to the language (relating to 1). But I do hope to be continually drilling these Memrise levels throughout the 40 days.
4) I really need to improve with Lingvist, and aim to be doing at least 100 cards a day. It’s a good resource that I definitely need to be getting back into the habit of using. It’s definitely the app that helps with memorisation the most for me, but I’m hoping that as I use my other resources more there’s a continual cycle o reinforcement from one app to the next.
5) I really want to finish the Duolingo English to Russian tree and the Russian to English tree. I was pretty far through both of these trees before I reset my progress and kind of fell out of use with Duolingo. I feel like Duolingo works best for me when I use it to drill topics and constructions I struggle with, but I can’t do that when I don’t have the trees completed.
6) Write in the language more. I definitely haven’t written nearly as much Russian as I should have. At least not when it comes to writing about things that I want to write about. So I’m hoping to at least attempt to write more paragraphs.
Most of these goals are based around improving my listening and my vocabulary and grammar. To some extent by focusing on these I’ll also improve my writing and speaking, although I do have tutors for those specific things so I feel less of a need to explicitly have my own personal goals for these things.
