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Week 3: усилия (effort)

A few of you have commented about how I have the intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. At the risk of making myself sound less awesome, that’s only partly true. I do want to learn Russian, but I had more intrinsic motivation to learn it when I was over there for three weeks than I do now. (If my wife didn’t speak perfect English then that’d probably be different.)

There are a couple reasons why I don’t have a ton of intrinsic motivation to learn Russian. One is what I already said about not living there and also not having it as a necessary part of any communication that I do. The other reason is that it’s hard. This is a totally new language with a new alphabet, which doesn’t at all build on my understanding of a Latin-based language like Spanish. At this early stage, the challenge level is still beyond my grasp, especially knowing how long it can take to learn a language. I’m not exactly sure what learning theory to incorporate here to explain the gap between challenge and ability, but I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite of “flow.”

This is trying to teach me different ways of saying "have." I have, you have, they have, etc. It's hard to track a consistent pattern to remember these words and how to use them.

So instead of relying on intrinsic motivation to push me along, I am relying on effort, thanks to last week’s Dweck article that got me thinking more about this. Up until this week I was typically studying Russian for about a half hour three days a week, but this week I’ve been taking time to study every day, usually just doing one lesson a day, which is at least 20 minutes, and also means that I’m applying “distributed practice.”

This one is teaching me the plural and gender forms of adjectives, in this case the word "green." Green apple, green bike, green car, green pens. Except in Russian. 


In the Martinez book he references Dweck when talking about “incremental theory,” which is when you see your intellectual abilities as the result of experience and effort. It’s nice to know that you can increase your capacity to learn something, but this also says to me that most things won’t come easy. In addition to the daily, more consistent effort, I’ve also been doing every lesson at least twice so that I can better work this stuff into my long-term memory. On page 57 Martinez talks about “write time parameter.” This says that it takes about a minute for information to get stored into your long-term memory. There are already several words that are sinking into my long-term memory that I am able to recall. And occasionally I’ll say a Russian word that comes to mind without remembering what it means. But at least it’s there.

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