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Improve your Russian accent
Input = output. Make sure you listen often to correct Russian, and your accent will improve
over time. Later you can always do exercises to help with specific letters or constructions to
finetune your speech.
21) Time will pass anyway, so it doesn't matter how long it
takes you
If you watch a video of me speaking Russian, you might think "I would like to speak Russian
like he does."
Remember: it took me 5+ years to get to this level.
That's a long time. So you may be unsure whether it would be worth it to spend so long to
learn Russian.
But to me, it felt like yesterday when I started to learn Russian words.
Time just went by so quickly.
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And because learning Russian was (and is) just a hobby, I never felt much pressure. I would
focus on living my life, and spend 30 minutes to an hour doing something Russian language
related. It never felt I needed to sacrifice something.
The point I want to make is this:
In a couple of years, you can either speak Russian. Or you can still dream about wanting to
learn Russian.
Time will pass anyway.
So you might as well just start to learn Russian, and improve a little bit every day.
And by the way: you'll be able to have normal conversations in Russian before the 5 year
mark. If you focus well, and have a good approach you can have simple conversations after
a month or 2, and normal conversations after 6 months to 1 year
😉
Time passes anyway
6 months may seem like a long time. But if you start consistently practicing and enjoy the
process, time will fly. And before you know it, you will look back and be surprised how good
your Russian language skills have become.
22) Plateaus do not exist, so stop worrying about them
Before Covid, we would travel to Russia about 2 times per year. One time in summer, and
one time in winter.
And almost every time in between those trips I would feel that my Russian language skills
were stagnating. I was practicing every day, learning Russian words and immersing myself
in Russian movies and TV series.
However, it would feel that it was all wasted effort to learn Russian. Some days I would
even feel as if my Russian was actually getting worse.
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However, when we would then travel to Russia, I quickly found out that my Russian had
gotten a lot better since the last trip.
It's difficult to not make progress if you're doing something day in and day out. How well
you speak, also depends on:
●
how well you slept last night
●
background stress
●
how much you've listened to Russian the days before
●
And a lot of other factors.
So if you ever find yourself practicing daily, but still feeling like you're not making progress,
maybe you just need to go out and try to have normal conversations.
You can book a trip to Russia. But that's often not a decision you can quickly make on the
fly.
Another solution to getting out of this 'plateau feeling' is to get a drink with a Russian friend
or colleague.
In the long-term alcohol is bad for language learning, as it hinders memory formation. But
in the short term a couple of drinks do wonders to get you to loosen up, stop overthinking
and see what you're really capable of.
Plateus don't exist
When you feel like you're no longer progressing, you're likely paying too much attention to
the details. If you're learning new things and practicing speaking on a daily basis, there's no
way you cannot be making progress. All you need to do is get out there, let go and test your
Russian. Then you'll see that you actually made a lot of progress in the Russian language.
23) Learn just one language at a time, and forget the 'polyglot dream'
Since starting the site and youtube channel, I've gotten countless emails of people telling
me that they want to learn Russian, but they're currently learning Korean. And they're also
living in France to improve their French skills.
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That's just too many languages to learn for one person at a time.
Now, it's great that this person has the desire to learn several languages.
However, in real life, this almost never works out.
It's like wanting to become a pro wrestler and pro soccer player.
You can become proficient at both, but getting good at both at the same time won't work.
This is the problem that many YouTube polyglots have created. You've probably seen
videos of Wouter Corduwer, Steve Kaufmann, Ikenna or Olly Richards. The videos have
titles such as "Polyglots speak 13 languages".
It's cool that they have such a dedication to language learning. It's a cool party trick. Most of
them know maybe 2 foreign languages at a relatively good level, 2 more at an okay-ish
level, and the rest they know the absolute basics.
This is still a great achievement. But for most of them, language learning has now become
their job. So they have plenty of time to put into it.
Learning your 7th language will also be a lot faster than your 1st foreign language.
The problem comes when you watch these videos and get inspired to also become a
polyglot. Or at least become inspired to learn more than 1 language. You become the kid at
the candy shop, and you start thinking about all the cool languages you can speak.
Now you're super motivated to learn Russian and Korean and Japanese and French and
Spanish.
That is not realistic for 99.9% of people.
Learning Russian to a good level (working proficiency) takes a couple of years at best. If
you're unfocused and don't practice consistently, you can spend 10 years and still not
speak at a desirable level.
If you start playing around with 2 or more different foreign languages at the same time, you
will drastically decrease your chances of ever becoming good in 1 of them.
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You'll become the person who at parties can impress people with the languages he can
speak. But put this person in a foreign country on their own, and they'll do a little better
than the average tourist.
The reasons why learning several languages doesn't work are because:
●
You'll confuse them, and start saying words from one language when you speak the
other.
●
You don't have enough time in a day to make meaningful progress in both of them.
●
You cannot immerse yourself in more than one language at a time.
Now that my Russian is good, people sometimes ask me: "So what language are you going
to learn next?"
My reply is usually that I'm not planning on learning another language. My Russian is good,
but it's far from perfect. I still have a lot to learn. I would rather spend another 5 years
perfecting my Russian language skills (and even then it won't be perfect), than start the
entire process all over again. I find the idea of speaking one language incredibly well, a lot
more appealing than speaking 2 foreign languages at a good level.
If this didn't convince you, and you still want to learn multiple languages: at least make sure
you only start the second language once you're at an intermediate level in the first. This will
decrease the chances of you mixing languages up, as you already have a solid base in one
language.
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