How do you Start Learning A Language?

-
The First 2 Weeks

How long does it take to learn a language? How fast can you learn
Russian?  How much language can you learn in two weeks?

If you've been following my posts and YouTube videos of late, you will
have seen that due to recent cervical spinal surgery, my left vocal nerve
has been damaged and I've pretty much lost my voice for the past
month.  What's becoming one of my biggest linguistic challenges yet,
I'm currently on a quest to bring it back into action as fast as possible,
as I don't want the 'worst case' scenario that the doctor suggests of up
to a year without a voice to come true.
One other challenge that I have taken up over the past couple of weeks
is to finally learn Russian.  I know - it's been a long time coming. Ever
since I shot that video where 6-year-old polyglot Alice
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqt43hoZXk)  who speaks fluent
Russian, Thai and English was coaching me on counting in Russian, I
never got around to really studying the language. Why did I finally
decide to take it up?  We were sitting with a friend over some drinks
just after my surgery and he asked 'How good is your Russian?' - that
ignited something inside of me which right now I can say is a raging
'learning' inferno.

I'm going to share with you now exactly what the 2 weeks subsequent
to that fire inside of me being lit has led to.  It feels fantastic to be back
into the 'Stu Language learning' mode - I feel like I'm on fire, and
nothing can hold me back from becoming fluent in Russian - or other
Slavic languages aside from my own procrastination.

This Can Be Applied to Learning ANY Language

Just because I've been using these techniques for Russian, what I will
discuss is what I would do to learn any language.  There are some
quirks to the Russian language that may not be present in other
languages - however if you are learning a language, as you read
through what I discuss, think to yourself 'How might I apply that to my
own learning of X language?'

I have broken down the different things that I've been doing to learn
Russian into several particular subheadings.  These are just general
headings for the sake of being able to categorise my activities, but
really, they are all related and despite separating them here in this post,
my movement between the different activities and different types of
activities is quite fluid.

For those people who want the Cliff Notes of what I've done over the
past 2 weeks - and what I'll be talking about in this post, here you go:

(Note - I have been doing all of these things 'part-time' in that I have still
been working full time as usual.  These things have just become part of
every breathing moment I have outside of business - before bed, in bed,
in the bathroom, over meal breaks etc.  I have not taken time away from
my business to do these things.)
 1. Learning the Russian Script (Cyrillic Alphabet)

1. Sounds / Phonology

1. Patterns

1. Vocabulary

1. Listening

1. Reading

1. Using the Language

So now I'll go into a little more detail about each of these points -
remember, this doesn't just apply to learning Russian.  You can apply it
to learning any language.  Where I speak about other Slavic languages
here, when you're learning Thai, you can think of similar relationships to
languages that are related in one way or another - Khmer, Lao - even
Chinese languages and Vietnamese.  There are patterns that can map
across in a similar way.

1. Learning the Script

When learning any language, learning to write that language as the

native speakers of that language write it is always a priority for me.
 There are many different points of view when it comes to this, and
you'll see many heated arguments around the Internet when it comes to
the question 'Should I learn to write the script first?' in regard to
learning a new language. For me, the reasons that I want to learn the
script are:

I understand that there is a bit of a learning curve difference when

you're looking at learning a different script like Chinese, vs. a script like
Thai, vs. a script like the Cyrillic Alphabet which is used for Russian.  In
this case, the Cyrillic alphabet is for western language speakers a
much easier learn than say learning an Abugida system like Thai, or a
character system like Chinese. Even so, the principles / reasons that I
outlined above remain the same.

So how did I go about learning the script and how long did it take?

The Power of Google

First thing's first - Google is your friend.

I just started Googling 'Cyrillic Alphabet' and saved images of it to my

phone as well as cut and paste the letters and tables of the alphabet
into Google Keep (https://keep.google.com/) which I use as my 'go to'
scratch pad.

The helping hand of Google doesn't stop there - actually Google plays a
huge role in many of the methods that I use.

I then looked for sites with tables of the alphabet like the Wikipedia
Page for the Russian Alphabet
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet)

From there, I created a Google sheet that would become my

'scratchpad' for all my Russian learning resources that I collect that can
be collated in tabular form.

TRY THIS

Open up a Google sheet, and click on the A1 cell of an empty sheet and
type this:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alph
abet","table",3)

Magic!
What that does is import the 3rd table found on the URL's page, as text
into your spreadsheet.

Then, to ensure that it stays there, I just select all and repaste it in
place as text (deleting the formula out), so that I can then manipulate
the text.

I created a table that had all of the alphabet and forms of each letter,
the corresponding sounds and words that I then used for reference.

Google Fonts

One thing about the Russian script is that even though you have learnt
to decipher the new letter shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet, the reality is
that whenever a native speaker of Russian actually writes in Russian,
Russian handwriting uses a cursive form of the writing where the
shapes of many of the letters look quite different from the shapes of
the printed letters that you'd see in a book or printing out as you type
on a computer.

For that reason, I used Google Fonts (https://fonts.google.com/?

subset=cyrillic-
ext&preview.text=%D0%97%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%81%
D1%82%D0%B2%D1%83%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%B5%20%D0%9F%D1%80
%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%20%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%
80%D0%BE%D0%B5%20%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%20%D0%94
%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%B9%20%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%
BD%D1%8C%20%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%B9%2
0%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%80%20%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0
%BA%20%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B0%3F%20%D0%A5%D0%BE%
D1%80%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%BE,%20%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%8
1%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BE%20%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0
%BE%D1%85%D0%BE,%20%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%
D0%B1%D0%BE&preview.text_type=custom) to find cursive fonts in the
Cyrillic alphabet and then loaded them into my Google Docs Document
that I had prepared to teach myself how to touch type.

Once I downloaded and installed the cursive fonts in my laptop, I then

added the Russian Cyrillic Alphabet keyboard to my computer and
turned the keyboard map on and started to try and type the alphabet
without looking at the keys - only looking at the KEY MAP that you can
bring up on screen.  If you can't find a way to bring a key map of what
you're typing up on screen as you type, you can just go to Google
Images and search for 'Cyrillic Keyboard' image, print it out or keep it
somewhere visible as you type and by trial and error, start mapping
your fingers to the keys as you type the alphabet

By typing in the cursive font, you kill two birds with one stone as you're
learning to type in Russian as well as recognise the cursive letters as
opposed to the printed letters.
Note that in Google Docs, you can go to 'fonts', then choose 'More
Fonts' and you can type the name of the font that you found in Google
Fonts and choose that for your font formatting in the doc.  If you'd like
everything you type to be in that font, just click on the 'Normal' style
and click on the small 'Right Arrow' next to it and choose 'Update
Normal Text to Match' - then the base font for the document will be in
the new font.

Developing Native Handwriting

Especially when writing in Russian, given that native speakers never
write in the printed style, but rather the cursive style, if you're going to
be taking any notes while learning Russian, you'll want to be writing in
the cursive style.
In the past, I wasted reams and reams of paper just getting a new
script into my muscle memory.  I found an environmentally friendly
solution - I was able to pick up a little 'Digital Paper' sketch board that
cost me around USD$6 from a book store here and lets me practice
squiggling and doodling until my heart's content without wasting any
ink or paper.  Each time I fill a screen up I hit the button and 'bam' - it's
gone and I have a new page to start over on.  I took this everywhere
with me in the first few days of learning the Cyrillic Alphabet and would
practice writing every single word I read in Russian in cursive writing on
that LCD board.  It takes zero battery charge to keep the screen alive,
so what you write will stay on the screen indefinitely until you click the
'delete' button.

One other resource that I found was a fantastic introductory guide to

the Cyrillic alphabet  was the FSI (US Foreign Service Institute) Russian
Fast Course (https://www.livelingua.com/fsi/FsiRussianFast-Lessons1-
5.pdf) that they use for diplomatic families to get a crash course in the
language and culture before being posted to Russia. Other than the
learning the alphabet, this crash course also has a pretty good
introduction to all the key grammatical points - verbs, cases, gender,
sentence structure etc.

I found that the way that they presented the letter shapes and the
groups and sample words were very helpful.

Russian Keyboard Input on Mobile Phone

It goes without saying - if you're going to be taking learning seriously,
you're going to be Googling everything you see and hear - or are curious
about and a lot of that takes Russian input.  I use an Android phone, so
I use a combination of Russian handwriting input and a standard
Russian Cyrillic Keyboard on Android.  I use both of them all throughout
the day, entering things in on Google Translate and just searching in
general.  The great thing about the handwriting recognition is that it
recognises the cursive form of the writing, so you can reinforce the
cursive form of the writing into your muscle memory while you search
for stuff on your phone - which also embeds the spelling of words into
your muscle memory.  It's a win-win-win!

2. Getting the Sounds

A language isn't just text.  It's all about sounds.  Being able to read and
write can only take you so far.  Especially with Russian, the sounds are
actually quite challenging especially for native English speakers, and
there are some quirks when it comes to the phonology vs. the spelling
that can cause some real 'gotchas'.

Luckily, years ago Mike Campbell gave me a copy of a little book that
he wrote Glossika Beginner's Guide to Russian Grammar and Word
Order. (https://ai.glossika.com/free-download/glossika-beginner-guide-
to-russian-grammar-and-syntax)
This book is absolutely brilliant.  While I admit that it's quite heavy
reading if you don't have a huge passion for languages, what Mike
Campbell (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-campbell-660697116)
has distilled about the Russian sound system, orthography, phonology
and grammar in this little gem is phenomenal.

He explains little quirks of the language like spelling idiosyncrasies,

why sometimes 'o' is pronounced 'a' and vice-versa and how to make
sure you pronounce them correctly in the correct positions, as well as
having a more natural rhythm to your speech in Russian.

After going through this book of Mike's I was able to tune my ears into
little things that native Russian speakers I heard on YouTube were
doing, and then I would practice mimicking them, applying the things
that I'd learnt from Mike's book.
While Mike's book is specifically for Russian, I highly recommend
seeking out these kinds of sources for the language that you're learning
from motivated people who have gone through the experience of
learning that language that you're learning.  They will have done a great
deal of the heavy lifting for you and you can learn from their sweat and
tears.

Text To Speech
Over the past couple of weeks, text to speech has played a huge role in
my learning.

Here are 3 ways:

Google Translate's 'Audio' function lets you hear the text that you find
from translations.  Moreover, you can cut and paste paragraphs or
larger blocks of text from other places into Google Translate and you
can hear the spoken version of it.  While not perfect, it's enough to get
you in the right ball park - especially when it comes to the stress of
syllables.  One quirky thing about Russian stress is that usually only
one syllable in a word is stressed and pronounced 'clearly' and the rest
is kind of 'muddy'.  Mike actually goes into detail about how that 'mud'
is actually produced so you too can have well articulated, native-like
'mud'.
Google Translate's Audio can be used in conjunction with Google Lens
/ Google OCR.  If you have the Google Photos app on your phone, you
can take a snapshot of a sign or even a page from a book and you have
the option to capture the text.  That text then can be saved to the
clipboard or to Google Keep and copied into Google Translate - then
BAM - you have instant bilingual texts along with audio.  The cool thing
about Google Audio is that it will read the first time through at normal
pace, and the second time through (if you click the 'listen' button
again), at about 75% speed.

Mac OSX 'Say' program - I wrote an article a while back on a technique

that I use to make my own spaced repetition and audio flash cards.
 You can read it here. (https://mindkraft.me/how-to-build-the-ultimate-
vocabulary-building-tool/)  It involves getting csv lists of words and
using a Mac computer's built in Text to Speech (TTS) to read the words
out between English and the target language.  I still use this technique
to this day. You can use my code from the link.

3. Identifying and Linking Patterns

This is one of my favourite parts of learning a new language - noticing

patterns in the language and linking them to things that I know either
through the fact that they resemble or are related to the thins that I
already know from other languages, or because they are in direct
contrast to something that I already know.

An example of this would be the cases in Russian.  Unlike English,

Russian still has a very active and extensive use of cases which
basically mean that nouns will have different functions in a sentence.
 Depending on the function of that word, it will appear differently.

In English we still see remnants of a robust case system:

I gave her the book

She gave me the book

'Me' and 'I' are both referring to 'me', but they have different functions in
the sentence and so they change.
In Russian, the forms of every noun will change depending on gender,
number and function (case), so you need to start to internalise patterns
as you can't string a sentence together without the use of cases.  Many
will say just start using the language and the cases will come naturally.
While this is true to a point, I still like to know the mechanics of what
I'm doing and compare it to what I hear and do.  For this, I spent a lot of
time having fun with cases and matching them up with what I know
from my knowledge of Sanskrit cases.  It was fascinating joining the
dots and really helped internalise the way Russian deals with cases.

Another 'pattern' that has really helped me is the correlation between

the Russian sound system / spelling system and the Indic sound
system and Abugida - which the Thai script is based on.  The Brahmic
abugida is a map of the human mouth. It turns out that many of the
spelling 'rules' that are normally memorised by rote by Russian learners
actually make perfect sense when mapped to the Indic abugida -
palatised sounds, gutteral sounds etc. have certain letters that can and
cannot go with them.  When I visualise these letters in Russian in their
corresponding positions on the Indic map of mouth, I don't have to
memorise any lists anymore.  I just put my tongue in the position of the
letter and I know what letters may and may not follow them.

The Beauty and Intrigue of the Irregular

As a side note, for me, I find that diving deep into 'irregular' things in a
language - 'irregular spelling', or 'irregular verbs' or 'irregular
pronunciation' where the standard way of spelling or pronouncing
something, or choice of verb depending on tense strays from the 'rule',
opens up a road to really deep knowledge of the language and the
history of the people who speak it.   Some may say that that's just
information overload, but for me, I love it. All of these little trivia points
build maps inside of me that I can then string / attach new pieces of
the language and tie it into things that I already know in a way that
makes sense rather than just learning random rules and exceptions.

Cheat Sheets
There are many amazing cheat sheets that have been developed by
learners and teachers of language - and thankfully, there are some very
smart cookies that have learnt Russian before and been able to
condense an amazing amount of learning into some succinct cheat
sheets.

I downloaded these sheets

(https://cheatography.com/lammmas/cheat-sheets/russian-
cases/pdf/), printed them out in colour and took them with me
wherever I went.

The cheat sheets covered cases, conjugation of verbs, gender and

other key 'gotcha' points about the language.

I know, I know, most people will tell you not to sit and memorise
declension tables for languages like Russian and Latin, but for me, it's
my drug of choice.  I get a buzz from analysing these things - and I try
and put them into practice immediately.

One way I do put these things into practice is by then searching out
these declension patterns in real text samples - whether from books,
news articles or in posts from Russian friends in Facebook.

Mapping Russian against other Slavic Languages

If you have partaken in any of my language programmes over the past
20 years, or read my Cracking Thai Fundamentals book, you'd know
that I love to draw links between the language that I'm learning and
other dialects and languages that people in surrounding areas use.  I
learn languages to communicate (and be communicated to) by other
people - so for me, I don't just set my sites on learning a single
languages and all of its rules, rather I just learn 'language' and see how
it morphs across time, geography and people.

In saying that, I've absolutely loved mapping what I've been learning in
Russian with other Slavic languages - West Slavic, East Slavic, South
Slavic.

What I've done is for many of my word lists in Google Sheets, is create
the following columns:

Then, just as a rough reference, I use Google Translate's built in

function in Google Sheets to translate the equivalents in those
languages.  While not perfect, I'm able to see how sounds shift, how
certain words become popular in one strain and not in another as well
as see the orthography in each of these different language's scripts.
 As a result, I've also gotten my hands on books in Polish, Czech and
other languages in the list, and I've been listening to YouTube 'Slavic
Comparison' videos.  Yes - they exist.  There are videos where language
nerds who are native speakers of Slavic languages see how much of
each other's languages are mutually intelligible, as well as a whole
bunch of clips out there where weather reports from all the main Slavic
languages are put in one video clip one after another so that you can
compare them.  I've found that weather reports are great as you use a
lot of repetitive language - geography, numbers, temperatures and
weather based words like 'rain', 'snow', 'wind' etc.  Even after a couple
of weeks of learning Russian, I'm finding that I can understand many
other Slavic languages.

VIM, LaTeX and the Computer Terminal

I use the computer terminal a lot in almost everything I do.  I'm
currently writing this article in VIM as my wordprocessor of choice.

What I do is cut and paste swathes of text, tables, lists and anything
else that I can get my hands on and use data manipulation tools that
are available to me via the terminal through either VIM or through
things like SED and AWK.  See the article I linked to above about
making text to speech learning tools.  If you can learn to maniupulate
data using these terminal tools, you can accomplish amazing things.  
Very often, I'll download data that I'd imported into a spreadsheet -
wordlists for example, then export the sheet as a csv file and then
make my own custom versions of that data using terminal tools like
AWK and SED.  Doing it this way, I'm not limited to using other people's
resources - rather I build my own and get real life samples of what I'm
learning.  Once you become proficient at these tools, you can cover a
lot of ground in a considerably short amount of time.

I found several cheat sheets written in LaTeX which is a certain

standard for writing well formatted academic journals and books.  I
took the code and tweaked the sheets to add things that I wanted and
made them my own (for learning purposes).

4. Building up Vocabulary

Vocabulary is often a facet of language learning that makes or breaks

learners.  Without enough vocab, you're limited to reading boring, child-
like grey texts that teachers of that language have put together.  As you
build a bigger vocabulary up, you can start to access more and more
real life, interesting resources.

Aside from these 'First Words in Any Language' that I speak about here,
I have also build many different lists of vocabulary and sentences and
structures that are sorted by word type - Nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.,
word function - cases of words - Nominative, Accusative, Dative,
Instrumental, Genetive, Prepositional
5. Listening and 'Hearing' the Language

When it comes to learning to 'hear' the language, I find I need to know

what's going on in the mouth, so all of what I have explained above
forms the base of my listening.  Otherwise, I find that filters from other
languages that I speak kick in - especially from my mother tongue, and
despite using my ears to receive the audio of a language, my brain may
not be tuning into important things that are going on, and subsequently,
my mouth won't be able to make a faithful facsimile of what I hear.

As I learn each new thing about articulation, sounds, the way sounds
blend together in normal speech (Sandhi), the way sounds change
depending on stress etc, I'll then try and actively find examples of it by
listening to native speakers of the language online.

I've found some amazing resources online - and one of my favourite

YouTube teachers at the moment is Fedor from Be Fluent in Russian
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtMqRKjQcFJoq4TOIdHDiew).
This young guy is super passionate about learning language - and
teaching Russian and has really paid attention to how he as a native
speaker uses his mother tongue, and found a way to articulate it very
well to native speakers of English.  I highly recommend his site and
lessons for learning.

There are other resources out there - from Audio books, to language
comparisons online between the Slavic languages, to reading of poetry
and some clips out there just have hours and hours of repetitive
sentences and new vocabularly.  All of them have been useful at one
stage or another over the past couple of weeks.

I'm also an avid Audio Book fan, and I have a bunch of titles that I plan
to order this month on Audible.

6. Reading

Reading, reading, reading. I find myself reading Russian from the time I
wake up to the time I go to sleep.

The main reading highlights that have really been helpful over the past
couple of weeks are:
2. Websites

3. Real Books

4. Text Books

5. Church Slavonic and Old Slavonic

7. Using the Language in Real Life

So - two weeks into learning Russian and as you can see, I've covered a
reasonable bit of ground.  I am feeling very energised in my learning at
the moment and don't want to stop.  Because I've been doing all of this
along with my regular business / work schedule as well as raising our
baby daughter, I haven't been to put in as much time as I'd like to.  One
thing that I'm really missing at the moment is actually putting the
language into active, real-time practice with native speakers of
Russian.

It's still early days, and I think that in the coming weeks I'll reach out to
some Russian friends here in Thailand and see if I can start to catch up
with them - preferably face-to-face and really put what I've learnt to the
test.

I trust that this has given you a little bit of an insight into how I learn
languages.  Some people say 'Oh, you just have a talent for languages'.
 I don't agree - as you can see, I actually put in the hard yards when it
comes to learning.  I think that the only difference is that I really enjoy
all of this work, and the more I do, the more I enjoy it.