How I Learned Russian in Three Days… Okay, Okay, It Was More like Three Years

And what I learned about language acquisition in the process

If you’ve spent much time trying to engage in language learning or acquisition online then you’ve certainly run across the standard “get fluent quick” scam: they promise the moon as long as you just do a few simple things. Listen to something while you’re asleep. Space your flashcard repetitions. Pay them money. And in a matter of weeks or months, they guarantee you “native speaker” fluency. What does the process of learning a language actually look like? It's measured in years, not weeks or months.

For the last three years, I’ve been studying, learning, and acquiring the Russian language. Over the course of three years, there were countless plateaus, frustrations, light bulbs going off, and breaks (one that lasted multiple months). But at this point I’m finally beginning to reach my goals: to be able to converse in the language casually and read news, and hopefully, eventually history. I am far from mastering the language — that would take many more years — but I can make my way through conversations and news articles with the proper motivation and support.

But the process hasn’t just been about learning the language. I’ve learned all sorts of things about Russian history and culture which have been important for learning how to acquire language as well. So, here I’ll try to summarize not only how I’ve been acquiring the Russian language and how I stayed motivated for three years of it, but what I learned about language acquisition along the way.

Manufacturing Motivation

If you’re looking for motivation in your language learning, what better approach than a game? It’s fun! You learn and you don’t even have to try! Right? Like, that’s actually true…. Right? I spent a solid year plus working through the Duolingo Russian tree. Duolingo helped me get comfortable with the Cyrillic alphabet and got me some basic vocabulary. But unfortunately, it didn’t do too much for me beyond that. I spent many more months working through Duolingo lessons that were offering me little benefit. As I wrote about before (“I completed the entire Russian Duolingo course. So I’m fluent now, right?”) Duolingo’s fundamental flaw is that it doesn’t use normal language. Sentences may come one after another, but they are completely unrelated. There are no ideas being shared. There is no content. Therefore, unfortunately, as I began transitioning into more listening and reading I still struggled with the easiest options I could find.

But when I began exploring other approaches to language learning, I ran across Steve Krashen’s Comprehensible Input hypothesis. Krashen argues that the key to acquiring a new language is input (things we read or listen to) that we can understand. The language has to be simplified to the point where we understand 90+ percent. According to the hypothesis, with a steady stream of comprehensible input will also come incremental gains in language… language acquisition. I decided to switch gears in my language study toward language acquisition through comprehensible input (more on that below).

But I missed all the things that Duolingo did to manufacture motivation and create a sense of accomplishment. There were no more points or rewards or visual progress. So as I researched and found more easy Russian content (input) to read and listen to I created a spreadsheet to track my progress. I started using a simple 1–4 scale for rating how well I understood each thing and color-coded it green-yellow-orange-red (from completely not understandable to completely understandable) so that my list of accomplishments would grow. I even added the date each time I read or watched something, so that I could return to it and see how I did on the second, third (fourth, fifth, etc.) attempt. Sometimes I could see improvement in a matter of a month or two. Other times it was over a year before I saw it. I even added a link to my spreadsheet to the home screen of my phone to make it as easy as possible to return to it consistently.

As I began my process I of course had all the energy in the world. The beginning of a new project is always the most exciting time. But eventually, my energy for more input began to wane, even with all the color coding. I was fortunate to study a language like Russian that has a huge amount of comprehensible input available online for free. There are many, many Russian teachers creating content. But while the spreadsheet approach did help for some time, there came a point when I started to get bored with someone I didn’t know introducing themselves to me in a video and talking about their day. No knock on the Russian teachers, they do great work, but a video talking about simple topics, followed by another video talking about simple topics, followed by another, etc. can get boring.

Mind as Machine

But with the help that color-coded spreadsheet did offer, the comprehensible input approach led to the acquisition. I progressed from videos labeled beginner up to videos labeled intermediate and from readings labeled A1 through readings labeled A2 even up to some labeled B1. I made real progress. Progress I could track and progress I could feel. The progress I was not making while using Duolingo. But oddly enough, the solution to my motivation challenge, as my manufactured motivation ran out, involved complicating my adherence to the comprehensible input hypothesis.

The term “input” probably conjures up images of machines, churning out output based on the input they’ve processed. Or perhaps you think of a mathematical function producing a predictable, linear relationship as input produces output through a series of repeated procedures. Is language learning a simple mechanistic process? It certainly isn’t an uncontroversial opinion.

Now, Stephen Krashen does talk about comprehensible and compelling input. The word “compelling” improves the picture of input language acquisition markedly. Because if I’m trying to acquire a language largely on my own (that is without a teacher I’m seeing on a regular basis who organizes my study for me) I only have so much energy for input — I’m also finding and collating my own content, making all the decisions about where to focus or not. But if I can find compelling input, then the input is the payoff after the work it takes to find it.

So what’s my beef? Didn’t comprehensible input teach me to speak Russian? Well, not exactly, but it was certainly more effective than Duolingo. And it does help explain my progress in speaking (since I had such little explicit practice). But, nonetheless, something seemed to be missing. My stream of input kept coming, but I wasn’t always ready for it. While Duolingo had no content, my beginning to intermediate videos and reading had content, but content that interested me only inconsistently.

Communication and Communication

And it was with a switch in content — toward communication that I cared about — that I saw my latest improvement. I leaned into my nerdiness and started creating lists of language-learning resources that covered content I was interested in — this mainly meant history. Eventually, I began exploring content created with Russian speakers in mind (as opposed to language learners). Although content about news and history was difficult to find that I understood much, content about hockey was available. And fortunately, the language used in sports journalism was simpler so that I could understand some of the simplest sources of journalism given my extensive background knowledge on the topic without a huge amount of demotivating translation work. And this is where I saw motivation shift. Instead of trying to motivate myself to study language (using green owl apps or color-coded spreadsheets), I was tapping into my natural motivation for certain topics that I’m interested in, fascinated by, and positively nerdy about. Over the past year or so working on this kind of content, I have finally begun doing what I set out as my original goal — reading the news in Russian. Now, it is still a slow process. I can’t sit down and easily read any news article I run across. But, I’ve progressed through sports journalism and now I can generally read short news blurbs and understand them with only a small amount of translations. If I’m motivated I can read full-length articles (especially if I find ones with an easier grade-level equivalent); this takes multiple readings and more systematic translation for unfamiliar words though. I haven’t mastered it to the extent that I eventually want to, but my path ahead is clear.

I think compelling, comprehensible input captures some of what helped me learn. But I think it simultaneously misses some of the most important insights. In the end, the most powerful motivator for language learning is wanting to communicate. It’s finding someone who wants to communicate with you and with whom you want to communicate — because you have some shared interests. Now this doesn’t have to be in person. My communication has mostly been one-way, mediated by the internet and sites such as YouTube. But when I found language teachers who talked about history, travel, and politics, I ate up their content voraciously. They wanted to communicate with me (or at least someone like me — a Russian language learner interested in history who was still struggling with the complexities of content created for Russian speakers) and I wanted the communication to be successful, not just because I wanted to learn the language (although importantly I did), but because I wanted to know what they had to say about history. Absent this motivation to communicate about something, I had to use games or game-like approaches to keep me going — or some kind of relentless (perhaps, mythical?) willpower. The problem with the game approach is the more that someone else has been tinkering with the game, the less useful it becomes (see the green bird app). And the challenge with willpower is that we only have so much of it. What we have an endless supply of as humans is a desire to connect with other humans, to spend time on things we’re passionate about, and to understand a story well enough to feel something. For me this is the key to language acquisition — connecting, engaging in our passions, making sense of the world, and feeling things through a new culture and language. And there remain infinite possibilities for language learning content that help learners fulfill these possibilities. So, if you’re a language teacher creating online content, perhaps think twice about creating another video explainer about fine grammar points and instead consider how you can help learners connect, make sense, and feel through the language. You may just be the person who starts them on that multi-day, er, multi-year, journey of language acquisition.