Overview

This deck contains a number of short public domain Russian stories, from https://ilibrary.ru via https://github.com/victorvwier/russian_books/.

Each story is divided up into short chunks, with one card per chunk. The chunk of text is shown in context on the front of the card and the English translation is on the back.

This deck may be useful for intermediate Russian learners, at level B1 or B2.

Why use this?

Language learners get enormous benefits from immersive reading. But it can be very hard for intermediate learners to find texts at an appropriate reading level, and it's hard to feel immersed in a text while having to look up a lot of words.

This deck helps Russian language learners get into the flow of reading stories without needing to know all the words.

The stories are broken up into small chunks. This makes it easier to focus on a small part of the text at a time, which makes the text less overwhelming. It's extremely easy to move straight to the translation if a particular chunk of text is too difficult.

The deck also functions like any other Anki deck in that spaced repetition is used to improve learning, bringing back difficult cards for re-review. Of course, once you've finished a story you can completely ignore the reviews if you'd rather move on to something else.

The reviews can be surprisingly helpful - the first time you read the story, you build up a lot of context as you go along that makes it easier to understand what's happening. So it can be useful to see the cards again and learn them with less context, levelling up your ability to understand the text with the new words.

Recommendations

For a good reading experience, change the deck options as follows:

• Learning steps: 30m (or, some time longer than the time you'll spend on new cards in the day)
• New card gather order: Deck
• New card sort order: Order gathered
• New/review order: Show before reviews
• Interday learning/review order: Show before reviews

This will ensure that you can read a story in order (from start to finish) while minimising interruptions from reviews of cards you've already seen.

It works better if you click "Good" or "Easy" on cards that you didn't understand but don't want to learn, for example if the card uses particularly obscure words that you don't think are useful to know.

Caveats

1. The Anki cards are generated automagically by a script. It uses AI to try and chop up the text so that each card is understandable on its own, but it may not always get this right.
2. The translations are generated by DeepL. They are not perfect. In particular, Deepl translates each card completely independently from the others, so it can't use the context to improve the translation. But if you already have a reasonable grasp of Russian, then the translations are usually enough to figure out what's going on. You may still sometimes need to resort to a dictionary (or since the card provides context, you can paste the text with the context from the card into a translator and see if that's more helpful).
3. These are public domain books. That means they're old. The vocabulary in them can sometimes also be old.