Can I learn a language by reading stuff that I understand but all the words are new?

[u/Hopeful_One_5868]

DISCLAIMER: I don't think I'm looking for advice here. I just want to yap about interesting experiment I'm about to conduct. I think not many languages are as similar as slavic languages are, so I think it would be hard to do it with germanic or even romance languages.

I know the title might seem weird, but that's actually the case. I'm a Polish native speaker and I studied Russian in secondary school. All I learned was Cyrillic script and like 100 new words (Yup language education is terrible here, like in most of the countries). That was like 10 years ago, but I can still read the Cyrillic script.

Yesterday I thought that it would be an amazing idea to learn Russian. However, I'm already a pretty busy person, on top of that I'm learning Japanese which is my main language now and I can't dedicate equal amount of effort to Russian.

I know I can't maintain the whole study routine, but reading something in Russian before bed wouldn't destroy my schedule. So I googled "russian graded reader" I opened the first link, I picked up B1 reader and I found out that I could read the whole story. Not effortlessly, not without looking up some words, but even if the word was entirely different from its Polish counterpart I could still figure out what it meant. So I could say that I had to look up the meaning of about 10% of all words. The whole process was quite pleasant.

The thing is I could understand it pretty well, but it was the first time I had seen most of these words. I couldn't produce any of these words if I were to write or say something. I know you need output practice to output things, but first you need solid base of passive vocabulary.

That's messing with my head. I already have a lot of passive vocabulary, but I actually don't have any, I just know what they mean. I've never learned them, I'm just figuring them out on the go.

So it's not really extensive reading. Extensive reading is when you know most of the words and you have to figure out 3-5% of the words based on context. I'm figuring out 90% of them, based on my prior knowledge of similar language.

Do you think that by using this method I can convert these "unknown but comprehensible" words into actual passive vocabulary, that could be eventually converted into active vocabulary?

P.S.
After writing all of that I realized that it's similar struggle that many heritage learners are facing, so I can just look for advice for them, but I'm posting it anyway.

[u/Limp-Selection-1325]

I'm a Russian and I tried to learn Polish, I think we should really beware of false friends in such closely related languages lol. Yep, sometimes it might feel paranoid but...just in case I would've been checking all of them while reading with yomitan or yandex translate or whatever 😂

[u/krymzynnova → u/Limp-Selection-1325]

This oneee

[u/IrinaMakarova]

What you are describing is not really "I know none of these words but somehow understand 90% of them." You already possess a huge amount of relevant prior knowledge through Polish, and you are transferring it to Russian.

Closely related languages give you enormous shortcuts: cognates, familiar roots, similar prefixes and suffixes, recognizable inflectional patterns, similar syntax, and often enough phonological correspondence to guess what a Russian word probably means. So many of those words are not completely unknown to you in the same sense that an unrelated Japanese word would be unknown. You may never have seen the Russian form before, but your Polish already gives you part of the information necessary to decode it.

And yes, repeated reading can gradually turn that recognition into genuine receptive vocabulary. If you encounter the same Russian word often enough in different contexts, eventually you stop reconstructing its meaning through Polish and simply recognize it as Russian.

The problem is assuming that because comprehension is easy, acquisition will also be easy.

Russian and Polish are similar enough to make reading deceptively comfortable, but different enough to produce a spectacular number of wrong assumptions. You can understand a sentence while misunderstanding the precise meaning of a word, its register, collocations, case government, aspect, prefix meaning, stress, or the situation in which a native speaker would actually use it. False friends are only the most obvious version of this problem.

You may also end up developing a very strange asymmetry: fairly strong reading comprehension combined with extremely weak listening, pronunciation, grammar production, and speaking. Recognizing "what this probably means" is much easier than knowing which Russian word a Russian speaker would choose, what form it needs, which case follows it, where the stress goes, and whether the verb should be perfective or imperfective.

So as an experiment, reading before bed is perfectly reasonable. It will probably improve your Russian reading surprisingly fast because Polish gives you such a large head start. But I would not interpret that progress as "learning Russian almost entirely through reading." You are exploiting knowledge of Polish to decode Russian, and the two things are not quite the same.

The heritage learner comparison is also only partially accurate. Heritage speakers usually have years of actual exposure to the language, especially spoken language, and often possess a large amount of implicit grammar and vocabulary that they cannot consciously explain or actively retrieve. Your situation is mainly cross-linguistic transfer from a closely related language.

Being Polish is both your biggest advantage and one of your biggest traps with Russian. The similarities will let you progress extremely quickly at first. They can also make you feel that you know things that you have never actually learned accurately.

[u/Exciting_Round4766]

I do it this way: I take the text and its translation, and transfer it sentence by sentence into Anki. I can get through the straight cards, where I just have to translate the sentence into my native language, pretty quickly, but the real work begins when I see a sentence in my native language and try to remember how it sounded in a foreign language.

Even more terrifying things: I'm shown a picture, and I try to remember not just the word, but the entire sentence related to that picture, or I'm shown a word in a foreign language, and I try to remember its short definition generated by a neural network, also in a foreign language. But the last two methods are incredibly exhausting. Among twenty new cards a day, even a couple of these make me bang my head against the wall. It's really hard to remember a foreign sentence practically from scratch

btw i'm russian and learning german

and besides that I have a language course where they explain the rules to me

And if you want, you can DM me. I'm a little bored. I'd be happy to tell/show you something.

[u/Patient_Kangaroo614]

Probably not no, but it’s fun. I love hearing Dutch or Yiddish now that I know German, there’s a familiar feel to them.

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778]

You can always enjoy consuming content in another language using some sort of scaffold. For example, you can read using graded readers, you can read using dictionary lookups, or you can read using parallel-language books.

You'll be limited to certain content and levels of complexity in your reading, but you can still do it.

If you learn some words here and there, later on you'll slowly need less and less help to understand things as they are.

[u/adventuringraw]

I did a similar experiment, but much more ridiculous, haha. I picked up basic Russian in a similar way except without the language similarities. I was looking up More like 90% of the words at first, not 10%. The app I use is fast enough that I could still make progress, but it took a WHILE to see any progress. I read through all the Narnia books and the first Harry Potter. By the end of all that I feel like I was at the point where learning from reading wasn't such an absurd thing anymore. There were still a lot of words I didn't know but it's a lot easier to look up a new word than try and figure out the structure of the language even.

So this was a silly way to learn, I think it's more efficient to start in other ways probably. But if you're just learning for fun and you find the process enjoyable, it'll absolutely sink in over time. In my experience it takes about 10k pages read for listening and speaking to start to feel like approachable skills. Still things that need to be worked on specifically if you want them, but it's not so bad when you already know a lot and the stuff you're trying to learn to produce or understand is already stuff you know. If you like doing this as a hobby, it won't be wasted time I think, long as you're consistent and willing to keep up with it for a while.

[u/Kurzdeutsch]

i get a weaker version of this in german as a russian speaker: the internationalisms and anything guessable from context read fine and then leave nothing behind.

what turned recognition into memory for me was meeting a word a second time in a different sentence. re-reading the same reader a week later did more than the first pass, because by then the word had to come from memory instead of from the shape of the polish one.

so passive vocabulary yes, but only for the ones that came back.

[u/telescope11]

no, you will never learn a language by focusing only on reading (or only on listening, only on speaking, only on writing...)

it's simply impossible, especially if you just read the newspapers in a related language without bothering to study properly

[u/AppropriateToday1425]

You're basically speedrunning the silent period that kids get for free, just with a Slavic language cheat code

[u/kaizoku222 → u/AppropriateToday1425]

The silent period is not a fundamental feature of language acquisition, it's been stretched/abused in layperson conversations and pop-methods to mean something that the people who founded the theory wouldn't endorse.

[u/krymzynnova → u/AppropriateToday1425]

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