Table of Contents

At the time of writing, I have put ~180 hours into learning Russian while largely following the Refold method. I am nowhere near my goal of fluency yet, but I can generally follow podcasts (with transcripts) targeting A2 learners at around level 4 comprehension.

I have had a tough time finding immersion resources for my level, so I thought that I would write down what I’ve been using. First, I will level-set on terminology with the tools I’ve been using, then I will share a (roughly) chronological list of resources I’ve used while immersing.

Tools

Immersion

LingQ

My favorite immersion tool so far has been LingQ. It has its fair share of frustrations (occasional UI hiccups, no lemmatization of known words), but it has become irreplaceable in my learning.

The primary way I use LingQ is with imported material. LingQ lets you import arbitrary text, pdfs, etc, and upload accompanying audio. There are a few content creators who offer mp3 downloads of their podcasts and transcripts, and simultaneously reading / listening to these on LingQ is fantastic.

LingQ has four “levels” for every word (plus a non-level indicating that vocabulary is well-known), which I use as follows:

  • If I don’t recognize a word at all, I mark it as 1.
  • If I recognize the word, but I don’t know it, I mark it as 2.
  • If I know a word, but occasionally I forget the definition or get it mixed up with another word, I mark it as 4.

Then, if I have mined a word, I mark it as 3 to help me remember not to mine it again. Note that I do not use LingQ’s SRS feature. I only use Anki for flashcards.

Language Reactor

For watching Youtube videos, I have enjoyed using Language Reactor. It adds dictionary lookup to subtitles, and its auto-pause feature (which pauses at the end of every subtitle) is great for intensive immersion.

ChatGPT

While ChatGPT is often confidently wrong, I have found it very helpful for broad-strokes explanations. If anything, it gives me a starting point (and google-able terms) to investigate on my own.

Flashcards

Anki

Anki is the best. I switched over to the FSRS scheduling algorithm some time back, and it has been phenomenal. I have fewer reviews per day, yet I am also retaining more information. My FSRS retention is set to 85%.

In the beginning (<100 hours?), I relied heavily on Anki. I felt that it was important to build my vocabulary base as quickly as possible, even if it came at the expense of immersion time, and I feel that was worth the cost. Anki took between 20-30 minutes per day when I was grinding out cards (at 20 new cards per day), but it made my immersion much more fruitful.

Since completing the first 2000 cards of ru15k, I have switched to sentence mining, and I only add 10 new cards per day. My daily review load is between 10-15 minutes per day, which gives me plenty of time to focus on immersion.

Vocabsieve

For sentence mining, I use vocabsieve. Setting up vocabsieve is straight-forward, but finding material that lets you cleanly copy-paste was surprisingly challenging.

Most of my sentence mining now comes from LingQ, with occasional random sentences from other material.

Time tracking

I’ve used Toggl Track to keep track of my language learning time. There’s no real value in it that I’ve found, e.g. I’m not using the duration to benchmark myself or inform my strategy, but I like seeing numbers go up. I am using the following categories:

  • Study
    • Anki
  • Intensive immersion
    • LingQ
    • Youtube
    • Kindle
  • Free-flow immersion
    • Youtube
    • Kindle
    • Podcast

Note: I am not keeping track of my passive immersion time. It’s nice to have, but the ROI of passive immersion has been very low for me. I haven’t found it useful to track.

Content

Anki decks

ru15k

I started off using a ton of other different decks, but the ru15k deck was the only one that stuck. Other decks based on frequency lists all seem to use the same list, which is terribly out-of-date and includes words like “colonel” early on. The order of this list has felt much more sensible, and the example sentences have been much more useful.

I did this deck up through the first 2000 cards at 15-20 per day, then I switched to sentence mining at only 10 cards per day. If I ever run out of sentence-mined cards for the day, I fall back to this deck to make up the difference.

Sentence mining

After I established an initial vocabulary base with the ru15k deck, I switched to sentence mining with vocabsieve. I try to mine around 10 cards per day from my immersion material, which usually comes from LingQ.

There are tons of great resources out there about how to choose what to mine, but this is my rubric for whether I should mine a sentence or not.

  • First, does the word seem useful?
    • Every word is useful, of course, but some words have higher ROI than others. The word “cat” will be more helpful to learn as a beginner than the word “metamorphosis”.
  • Second, do I completely understand the sentence containing the word?
    • This goes a little further than just selecting 1T sentences, or sentences that only contain one word. I try to choose sentences whose grammar I understand without much difficulty. If I am reviewing the card, and I understand the highlighted word, I want to make sure I have no problem understanding the entire sentence.
  • Third, is the sentence short enough to fit on a flashcard?
    • Long sentences take a long time to review, so I prefer sentences on the shorter side. Perhaps 10 words or fewer. If a sentence is almost good enough, I will occasionally trim it myself by deleting clauses, removing filler words (very common in podcasts), etc.

If it meets these criteria, then I will mine the card.

Immersion material

For this section, I will try to list things in ~approximate chronological order that I used them. This list brought me from a brand-new beginner to a decent A2.

Separate Youtube account
Orthogonal to the list itself, I have appreciated having a separate Youtube account for my Russian learning. The recommendation algorithm is surprisingly helpful.

Condensed list in chronological order:

First, I started with Inna’s Comprehensible Russian - ZERO BEGINNER playlist. I watched every video, some of them multiple times. This was phenomenal for a complete beginner.

Then, I moved to the next playlist in Inna’s series, Comprehensible Russian - BEGINNER 1 playlist. I started to get bored around half-way through though, which led me to look for more language-dense resources.

Next, I found Sergey and his playlist In Russian From Afar - Beginner Videos (A1). I loved his videos, and I watched most of them more than once. Vasya and Zaika are hilarious.

At this point, I was feeling somewhat comfortable as an A1 learner, and I wanted to try something other than Youtube. I ended up settling on Olly Richard’s 101 Conversations in Simple Russian, which is a mystery novel set in Moscow split into 101 bite-size chapters. I read this on Kindle alongside the corresponding audiobook. Ultimately, I ended up going through this three times: once intensively at my desk, once passively while driving to work, then once again intensively at my desk. This book was above my level, and would have been better suited to an A2 learner, but I loved it. The story was surprisingly gripping, to the point that I couldn’t put it down at the end! (Although, I think part of that was from the excitement of finishing my first novel in Russian).

After that book, I needed a palate cleanser, so I went back to Sergey with his playlist In Russian From Afar - Elementary level (A2). This was still slightly above my level at the start, but I grew into it before too long. I didn’t finish this entire playlist in one shot; I ended up coming and going a few times to go through the next things in this list.

Note: Around this time, my content consumption became less linear.

Despite telling myself that I needed a palate cleanser, I found myself wanting to try reading again. The sense of accomplishment was addicting, and more than anything, I found myself missing long-form content. I found Olly Richard’s Short Stories in Russian for Beginners and dove right in. This book was more challenging than the earlier book, probably falling somewhere between A2 and B1.

This is around the time I discovered LingQ. I changed from primarily watching Youtube to primarily listening to podcasts and following along with the transcripts on LingQ. This was a much more language-dense way to immerse, and I found that I was getting better exposure to “real” conversational speech. My first podcast was Sergey’s In Russian From Afar podcast, with transcripts from his Patreon. After getting through all of his A2 podcasts, I started listening to Kak Pushkin, which also has transcripts available.

While going through Sergey’s A2 podcasts, I began feeling confident enough to remove some of the guardrails, and I tried watching whatever appeared in my Youtube recommended section. Through this, I discovered Russian with Max and Russian with Dasha. Their videos often don’t have levels marked, but their “beginner” videos have felt suitable for A2.

And that brings us to now! I am still going through Kak Pushkin, but after that, I have the following content lined up:

Grammar

Like any good Refold-er, I rarely study grammar directly. I have tried both methods, classroom-style grammar-based curriculums and immersion-based learning, and I agree with the recommendation that learning grammar by repeated exposure is more effective.

With that said, I do think that it helps to have a basic understanding of the structure of the language and general linguistic terminology. If you want to understand why a word is changing, it helps to understand that Russian has declensions depending on case and approximately the function of each case.

I have been using The New Penguin Russian Course for this. Other than looking to it for targeted questions, I’ll sometimes read through a chapter when I’m bored.