DISCLAIMER: I don't think I'm looking for advice here. I just want to yap about interesting experiment I'm about to conduct. I think not many languages are as similar as slavic languages are, so I think it would be hard to do it with germanic or even romance languages.
I know the title might seem weird, but that's actually the case. I'm a Polish native speaker and I studied Russian in secondary school. All I learned was Cyrillic script and like 100 new words (Yup language education is terrible here, like in most of the countries). That was like 10 years ago, but I can still read the Cyrillic script.
Yesterday I thought that it would be an amazing idea to learn Russian. However, I'm already a pretty busy person, on top of that I'm learning Japanese which is my main language now and I can't dedicate equal amount of effort to Russian.
I know I can't maintain the whole study routine, but reading something in Russian before bed wouldn't destroy my schedule. So I googled "russian graded reader" I opened the first link, I picked up B1 reader and I found out that I could read the whole story. Not effortlessly, not without looking up some words, but even if the word was entirely different from its Polish counterpart I could still figure out what it meant. So I could say that I had to look up the meaning of about 10% of all words. The whole process was quite pleasant.
The thing is I could understand it pretty well, but it was the first time I had seen most of these words. I couldn't produce any of these words if I were to write or say something. I know you need output practice to output things, but first you need solid base of passive vocabulary.
That's messing with my head. I already have a lot of passive vocabulary, but I actually don't have any, I just know what they mean. I've never learned them, I'm just figuring them out on the go.
So it's not really extensive reading. Extensive reading is when you know most of the words and you have to figure out 3-5% of the words based on context. I'm figuring out 90% of them, based on my prior knowledge of similar language.
Do you think that by using this method I can convert these "unknown but comprehensible" words into actual passive vocabulary, that could be eventually converted into active vocabulary?
P.S.
After writing all of that I realized that it's similar struggle that many heritage learners are facing, so I can just look for advice for them, but I'm posting it anyway.
[link] [comments]
from Language Learning https://ift.tt/Y2FNxCl
via Learn Online English Speaking
Comments
Post a Comment