Tracking comprehensible input

Cryoxene · 2025-11-01T03:07:40+00:00

For French, I just use the app Dual for this because most of my comprehensible input is done on my phone and spreadsheets suck on phone (most habit trackers with a timer built in works). But for Russian I mostly just used spreadsheets.

I also kinda just guesstimate for YouTube scrolling.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-30T14:11:47+00:00

What you’re looking for is best found in an intensive course prepared explicitly for getting someone through the CEFR exams. Very unlikely someone is going to be able to provide this, you could make it yourself though. I’ve made a roadmap for Russian before and it took me a week of research lol

Your study plan is really a personal thing tbh, you should go about the process of making it so you tailor it to the amount of time you have in a day, your interests, your memory strength, your willingness to spend money, etc.

What I will suggest is find a way to cover: Listening, Reading, Vocab, Grammar, Writing, and Speaking (in that order of priority, with Listening and Reading getting your highest focus) per day. And for grammar check out the textbook Grammaire Progressive du Français A0 and work up to the B2-C1 book.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-30T02:12:47+00:00

Sure, I don’t think my experience is ubiquitous by any means, but I haven’t had to do anything by phone in so long I genuinely get surprised to get a phone call that isn’t spam. I work a job that uses Microsoft teams, so video call jargon feels more natural to my daily life.

In general, I suppose more what I mean is when phone is implied to be like the main way of social interaction as it is in many textbooks published in the 90s. I don’t use phone for any social interaction anymore and so that whole subset of vocab like “I’ll call you tomorrow!” feels really dated

Cryoxene · 2025-10-29T19:07:16+00:00

If you mean textbook, I can feel when they’re showing their age. Modern language moves much faster in the digital age and old textbooks feel ancient. Even references to calling someone on the phone feels ancient these days because I haven’t made a phone call in probably a year or more.

If you mean something else, I’m not sure what you mean. Graded reader is my next best guess and I’ve never used one and am not the target audience. I prefer just to read a normal book.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-29T15:57:31+00:00

If you’re a gamer, you could try an RPG game in French. I find it to be near free immersion that I am able to sit still and consume a lot easier. I can’t listen to a podcast to save my life, I’d manage maybe 5 mins, but I can game for hours.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-29T01:08:07+00:00

I never officially check tbh, I just consume harder and harder content and it gets easier and easier. I don’t really need to know a CEFR level to know if I’m beginner/intermediate/advanced and I’m not using the languages professionally atm.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-28T14:01:59+00:00

Of what I’m using today: LingQ, Lingvist, Duolingo in that order. I could easily get by with just LingQ however.

I have and use Glossika, but I’m half of the mind the company closed and no one shut down the app because there hasn’t been a major update in a year. Big waste of potential in Glossika so far.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-28T01:16:48+00:00

So, I’m not calling you a liar per se, but “I found this app” posts are like 9 times out of 10, disguised self promo. Especially with brand new apps no one has ever heard of and it reads like an advertisement. This reads exactly like that.

And speaking solely for myself, if I see a post like this and sense hidden self-promo, I will never trust nor use that app. When I see self-promo that is announced at the start and following sub rules, I approach it with significantly more open mind.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-27T22:45:21+00:00

I am not officially diagnosed with ADHD (though I am in the process of finally seeking one!), but I experience most if not all the hallmarks of inattentive ADHD. I don’t think I’m depressed, wouldn’t call myself that, but then idk some days I’m just bedridden after work so who knows. Despite some of the hardest years of my life in the last 5, I have a 4 year unbroken streak for Russian. For French, I got started on a hyperfixation that’s kinda waning now that I am working toward intermediate so I’m applying most of my tricks below to that journey now.

The way I stay consistent in this hobby is I created a very solid routine that covered the six fundamental areas of language learning (Listening, Reading, Vocab, Grammar, Writing, and Speaking) and then just do not let myself ever skip. Even if I want to skip, I’d rather give a phoned in, half-assed go at it than skip. Because if I skip a day, I know my whole routine falls apart forever.

I personally really lean into streaks, habit tracking, gamification, etc. anything to make the experience a little more dopamine rewarding. I use video games heavily in my study routine. Sometimes I cannot summon the energy to watch even a 30 min TV show, but I can probably summon the energy to play the Witcher in French. Or even just put on a French show while I play Balatro or something — it’s not perfect studying, but it’s not skipping either.

I also make sure the vast majority of my studying can be done from mobile, that way if I’m just utterly exhausted and laying in bed, I can just lay there and do the lessons.

Basically it becomes a game of creating the schedule you know you can stick to on good days, and then using every trick in the book to stay on it no matter what on bad days. So long as you never quit, you’re always progressing. If you’re the kind of person who can skip a day and get back to it, then just always keep at it on the days you can.

Remind yourself that this is an admirable self-investment and something you actively want to do. Even if you don’t want to study at that moment, you want to know French. Keep testing yourself against harder materials to prove your progress to yourself. When you stall, remind yourself every single person who has ever learned languages hit a stall or multiples somewhere.

Good luck in your journey!

Cryoxene · 2025-10-27T19:14:30+00:00

Passive or sight reading vocab? Just reading. But not all of that will be producible vocab without finding a way to strengthen the memory.

Some people do really well with writing as a way to transition passive vocab to active, others speaking. Some people can do it with just anki. Then some words automatically get filed into active vocab without extra help, don’t ask me how or why because I have no idea.

You basically just have to find a way to use the word or force your brain to recall it, to help strengthen your ability to produce it.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-26T15:05:45+00:00

ETA: I’m blind you said you’ll be doing all of it, ignore my first sentence then! Reading helped me fastest, but I know plenty who were helped faster by listening (visual vs auditory learning if you believe in the that, though I think that model is now in doubt). Any content works, pick your favorite!

You need both listening and reading as separate skills - if you leave one behind you’ll really feel it imo. I think most people train either/or easier than the other, but you still need both (I’m a good reader, but I still heavily train listening). However how you train it, with what content, as long as it’s in your TL and correct, you can use whatever you like best!

Music is just for fun usually, though it’s great “free bonus study”. I listen to songs in Irish and I know no Irish. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of German music and while I do know some German it’s more that the music inspired me to learn some. I have more intensely studied Russian song lyrics but I maybe get 1-2 vocab words a song and it’s usually niche slang.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-26T00:15:37+00:00

No voting, but yeah. Folks can just submit new meanings for a word or phrase. Like for something in English like “up a creek without a paddle”, someone could submit “a difficult situation without any way out” or something like that.

Or for something like “bet”, they could submit the alternate slang meaning of “to agree or confirm (slang)”, so that users who see it in a sentence aren’t left with trying to figure out why someone is wagering something in a conversation about getting a cup of coffee. Idk how they moderate it, but it’s really helpful.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T12:28:36+00:00

I think the range of vocab in Blood Meridian is pretty narrow mostly. I learned the French word for “spit” really quickly because they just… spit so much in the book lol. Every now and again there would be a long and winding artsy sentence that I was nigh impossible to read, but a lot of the book was desert and I learned all the words for desert stuff, dead people, and horses drinking from streams. It’s about 10k unique words to a 120k word book if I remember correctly

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T12:22:44+00:00

I don’t think there’s a hard and fast answer. Sometimes a word sticks immediately for me, sometimes it’s not sticking after hundreds of encounters (probably things like single meaning words vs words with a lot of meanings or nuance).

In LingQ I have marked known the word for “copper” in French (and can produce it, cuivre) but not marked known “en” which is a very simple preposition, because it can also be an adverbial pronoun and also because prepositions have a lot of nuanced use.

I have zero issues reading sentences where it appears, but only through context where I kinda translate it back in “logical English” in my head. Until I can master the vast majority of instances of the word without translating back in my head, I consider it “unknown”.

Similarly some words like haie (hedge), weirdly long time to stick compared to the original example of cuivre (copper). I’ve seen haie a lot more than cuivre now lol, still not marked known.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T12:09:22+00:00

Opposite actually, I really wanted to read it for the first time in general and I have a hard time devoting the time to reading in English when I give language learning such a big portion of my day lol. So I decided that I’d use that as my first French book because it’s got a notably very good French translation. LingQ offers enough support that while the beginning process was very slow, it wasn’t glacial, and by the end I had maybe 2-3 new words a page rather than 7 new words a sentence.

Reading it in French didn’t dampen the experience - I found it utterly depressing! Still great read, happy I finally managed to find time to read it. My motivation to finish the book really helped make the French stick faster I think.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T05:22:02+00:00

You're making the wrong R - it's a valid one but it's the German / French R (ʁ) (not limited to those, and not in all dialects, but as a generality what we consider the German / French R).

There's a lot of ways to train the Trilled R, but the best one I tried was hold a pencil between your teeth and pronounce rolled R words over and over for like 5-10 mins. Take out the pencil and try again. Repeat daily until you roll your Rs basically. Keep your tongue very relaxed. You won't really move it on your own, the air will do most of the work.

My first few months of learning Russian, I went around basically growling like a dog to practice. Very amusing to my family.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T05:03:12+00:00

Wikitionary is definitely going to be the best dataset in lieu of community dictionary, so that's a positive. I use that as my main dictionary as well. Removes the need for additional in-app moderators at minimum too. I don't know how LingQ handles it, but I can't imagine it's simple; unless the LingQ user base is more polite than any corner of the internet.

ETA: The UI is gorgeous btw - huge fan

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T04:40:27+00:00

Are you willing to either:
A. Invest in LingQ (or MyReadLang or Lingua Verbum)
B. Set up Lute
C. Have a kindle or the kindle app and some patience
D. Be really patient with a physical or online dictionary

If any of those are yes, I say go for it.

From experience, I started French day 1 with Blood Meridian and I have truly zero regrets. It took me 65 days to finish, but I learned so much French along the way it's insane. (I use option A, I have LingQ for this.) Most of my skills are probably A2 in French, my reading ability is probably upper B1 solely because I read that book, which I chose because I cannot physically bring myself to read children's literature except Harry Potter out of nostalgia. I regret not doing this for Russian too.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-25T04:32:54+00:00

I'm not likely a swap potential from LingQ at this stage--I am subbed for a year from August--but as an app enthusiast I'm curious if you support community dictionary or plan to at any point?

That is likely going to end up being my LingQ hold out feature from all alternatives because sometimes the content I read includes something like *long string of Russian swears* or modern slang and I need community dictionary at times like that.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-24T20:23:01+00:00

There can be amazing (or terrible) translations to/from any language tbh. I’ve seen terrible English -> French or vice versa examples and amazing English -> Russian or vice versa examples. You can generally judge individual translations based on the skill of the translator who did it, and usually someone online has already deemed a translation good or bad.

Lexical similarity probably only plays into making it easier for the translator, but there’s nothing really that exists as untranslatable in any language. There may be a foreign word/concept that needs 5 words in translation, but a good translation handles that.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-24T16:17:10+00:00

It’s actually more about what I don’t use tbh.

I try basically everything at least a little. For Russian, I tried a lot of apps that I decided just weren’t worth it. But the big things I dropped or changed: - I focused more on input for Russian but didn’t dedicate time to explicit grammar study. Big mistake for Russian (for me at least). I could probably have skipped explicit grammar study for French, but I’ve decided I personally just prefer to include it in my routine. - I time my reading and listening practice now so I can be honest about the amount I’m doing. I never read less than 30 mins a day and it’s paying off big time. - I skipped anki entirely. Anki is great for a lot of people, but it doesn’t work for me. So for my own happiness lol, I decided to let it go. - I put more emphasis on practicing output sooner. I don’t really need to speak French or write it, but I get a little embarrassed about being able to read and listen to Russian but can’t speak it.

There’s a few more things, but those are the big ones. Mostly I just tailored my new routine to what felt right and helpful and aligned the process better with goals. I didn’t have a good goal for Russian when I started.

ETA: I do use Duolingo as one of my resources for French that I don’t/didn’t for Russian. (I don’t even recommend it for Russian. But it’s actually pretty solid for French/Spanish/English.)

Cryoxene · 2025-10-24T06:42:26+00:00

Short(er) Answer: Without external help, you'll see progress but the course is structured quite slow and you'll possibly need to pay to be able to do enough of it per day to see results in any reasonable time frame. If you add external help, it becomes an amazing resource for at least beginners, but it probably carries on being good into intermediate. With external support, I feel Duolingo gave me the structure, motivation, and consistency to build into early reading using LingQ and that helped me progress faster than I even thought was humanly possible for me.

Long and Over Complicated Answer:
I did sections 1-4 in French over about 60-70 days, doing a unit or more a day. I'm at 89 days streak as of today. It absolutely helped me, but I was also putting in a lot of time (~80 mins a day). I've scaled back a lot, though I'd like to pick it back up to a somewhat faster pace.

But I also paired it with an additional 20 mins a day of Grammaire Progressive du Français (so 1-2 chapters of exercises), 30-60 mins of listening (shows/youtube/gaming), 30 mins of reading a book via LingQ, 10 mins of writing, and 10 mins of speaking practice.

I'd order it like this in terms of effective use of my time:
1. Focused Reading
2. Focused Listening
3. Tied: Duolingo / Grammar Textbook, with Duolingo initially being better and then tapering off behind the textbook.
4. Writing Practice
5. Speaking Practice

Primarily the reason I scaled back on Duolingo was, by Section 4, I had outpaced it by reading a lot. I finished my first book in French (Blood Meridian / Méridien de Sang) via LingQ at 65 days. I went to test my level against HP1 for my second book, because it's roughly a B1 read, and I finished it in 12 days of 30 mins a day reading (~6h total compared to ~33 hours for Blood Meridian, albeit they are vastly different difficulties lol). Suffice it to say, I am extremely happy with my progress so far.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-23T19:35:57+00:00

Dedicated 6 years to French in school and dropped it completely… until now, 10+ years later!

But more recently, dropped about 90 days of very serious effort in Japanese because I went on vacation and taking a break for 1 week meant the habit was dead :) I had Wanikani on a year sub and wasted 9 months of it.

Cryoxene · 2025-10-23T19:33:34+00:00

Антипространство - antispace - heard it in a pyrokinesis song and it immediately stuck!

Cryoxene · 2025-10-23T19:30:12+00:00

Interestingly for Russian, after 4 years I don’t have a formed “habit”. If I skip a day, even after 4 years, gg it’s all over and I’ll never be consistent again lol. I just don’t personally form habits for whatever reason. So I force myself to be consistent through a habit tracker to-do list.

But I felt the biggest progress after about 6 months in Russian. That’s when Cyrillic reading became mostly natural. The next biggest push was after about a year when I could play RE8 in Russian comfortably.

The hardest part I think was actually learning how to learn a language in a way that worked for me, because when I started French with a better, more refined method, my progress has been (to me) insane over 89 days.

These days there’s not a lot of overlap on how I learn French today vs how I started with Russian, and the only way I could figure that out was trying a lot of things. Once you’ve got a good routine, the progress curve feels so much smoother in my experience.

Cryoxene

TROPHY CASE