So also Russian? I’m still not saying I’m officially studying it, but I’m getting better at pronunciation-reading words and know most of the letters– there’s still a couple I mix up either with each other or in a false friends way. I’m learning to write them, too.

Mostly I’m mentally telling myself it’s just a fun distraction to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and pronunciation right now, because I’m wary of moving too quickly in the beginning? It seems like my Japanese learning was impacted a lot by my inability to be comfortable with hiragana/katakana, and I do notice I find it far easier to pick up vocabulary when embedded in sentences than otherwise.

I want to kind of reach a point where even if I can’t understand a text, I can pick up something written in Cyrillic letters and sound it all out and write it down with relative ease, before really delving into a lot of grammar studies, which are liable to distract me from the “boring stuff,” so I want to have a good foundation in the boring stuff first.

Although also right now it’s not actually boring yet. Maybe because I’m just doing brief forays as a hobby between my serious Japanese studies? Either way, I’m just going to keep doing that a little until/unless it does get boring, since it’s not costing me anything extra to have access to those materials. Actually I only have gone through the first three chapters in the lingualift text, because it’s pretty difficult to work through without a better foundation in pronunciation, so I just flip through the review on writing/pronunciation and simple greetings occasionally.

I can’t tell if the Russian text is not structured as well as the Japanese one, since I’m at such different levels, but I get the impression lingualift is probably not good for anyone who needs training on writing/pronunciation basics in general. The Japanese section has chapters on the writing systems, but like the Russian text, there aren’t any real exercises/drills to help you really get hiragana/katakana and pronunciation down, even though there are audio for most of the words. So you really have to do that as a self-study elsewhere if you’re literally a beginner entirely.

The creators are really responsive to emails, though. At least in sending you a response. I sort of didn’t expect it, but every time I leave a comment, they email me within a couple hours to thank me for the suggestion and/or apologize for inconvenience and explain where they are trying to take the site. So I’ve been considering asking them about more pronunciation/writing system drills, too.

Originally I meant this entry to be a shorter one, but somehow it’s gotten away from me into a half-review of the lingualift system…