This is a modification of
13 000 Russian sentences sorted from easiest to hardest, shared with the author's permission. Many thanks!
I really liked that deck but found it still had some issues, mainly:
- There were too many similar or redundant sentences.
- The sentences weren't grouped by the new word they introduce, so it wasn't very convenient to pick up new vocabulary.
So my goal was to reprocess this deck to bring it closer to the quality of
Spoon-fed Chinese, which it's inspired from.
Here's what I did:
1. Eliminate sentences that contained the same set of 6 consecutive words (up to permutation, and considering different forms of a word to be the equal). This removed a bit less than 2000 sentences.
2. Analyze the whole deck to figure out the frequencies of words (this worked better than using an actual frequency list).
3. Sort the cards by their least frequent word (the "new word"), grouping different forms of a same word together.
4. Limit the number of cards that teach a the same new word (at most 3 as a base rule, but if there are many different forms, keep them all). This step drastically reduced the number of cards to about 7600 cards.
5. In every card, emphasize in bold the new word that is being studied (the original sentence is available in another field if you don't like that).
Overall, this should make the learning experience much more convenient and you won't have to spend a lot of time deleting useless notes. Don't forget that you can customize the cards all you want and switch things around easily!
Of course, it's not perfect, and here is a non-exhaustive list of issues:
- I didn't change the TTS. It's decent but has occasional glitches, and sometimes messes up the stress or mixes up е and ё. Remove the card when that happens.
- Just like the original deck, the sentences start out quite hard, so this is not suitable for beginners. You'll need to acquire some very basic understanding of Russian first (for example with Duolingo).
- Because the number of sentences is limited, it is unavoidable that sometimes more than one new word is introduced at a time (in which case only the least frequent one is bolded). However this should not be too frequent.
- Although it's trying, it won't teach you Russian on its own. Make sure you use other resources, especially for grammar.
The code I used for this is available here, and more technical details are coming soon:
https://github.com/vlecomte/sentence-study-order