by a native skpaeer)BUT ANOTHER REASON FOR MY COMMENTING HERE is this:(2) I read about your method, and it seems my own experience overlaps with yours by 70 percent, 大概.I am experimenting with learning foreign languages by reading frequent word entries in a monolingual dictionary for foreign learners (most European languages at least are well provided with those).I do not try to remember them actively (with a flash card program or some such gimmick those I would consider inferior as the format does not allow for multiple senses and tons of examples easily).I just read the dict like one could read a book an exciting book, which I do not need to break from (all explanations are within).WHY? to break from the frequency cage THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE here.Most common words cover largish parts of texts (e.g. 2000 could come to 80% for non-specific texts ) therefore if one tries to acquire new vocabulary from reading, as is often suggested, one has to fight against the frequency conspiracy words beyond the first 2000 will come up after thousands of frequent words, and only in one of their senses.By reading a dictionary you beat the Frequency Conspiracy against you you are presented with all meanings, in correct contexts and collocations, in examples drawn from natural corpora.You save enormous amounts of time by not trying to get vocabulary from reading.THEREFORE reading a dict becomes one's major method of language acquisition.As dictionaries do not come with soundtracks, I read them in my own internal voice, at this stage.This remains almost my sole practice until I acquire PASSIVELY 2000-3000-4000 话.THERE IS ANOTHER MAJOR REASON for this: there is no known human intellectual ability, perhaps, in which passive skills would not cover areas several times as extensive as those in which one's active skills are manifested. Language is no exception.It is utmost stupidity in all language courses to demand that new vocabulary and grammar would be remembered and used, all of it, immediately upon learning. NO! get yourself presented with 2, 5 times more of correct language first.It coincidentally avoids being crushed by excruciating effort, as just reading' a self-explanatory text, which a monolingual dictionary is, is pleasure, not painThen I switch to (一) correcting how the lang sounds, 和 (b) to activating my knowledge.(一) comes as a Harry Potter book in the target language (there are few if any without translations) accompanied by an actor reading the full text (是, best actors have been hired and produced audio versions of those).With say 3000 至 4000 thousand words passively in my head already (took me about 1 month of reading Robert dictionaries for my French about 2 hrs per day), it's a pleasure, not a toil.The froggy actor (在 3/4 the full speed, modern digital recorders can slow it down without actually distorting the tone of the voice or making it unnatural) is buzzing in my ear, I stop the recording at each and every sentence making sure it registers in my head, and so it goes on. All properly said, 同 100% native intonation and ways to convey emotions etc as the actor performs with gusto on the audiobook version I have.This sentence-by-sentence reading/listening is different from just watching some Potter-based movies with rewritten dialogues.And the next stage is ACTIVATING this all.第一 by rereading already studied chapters, then by retelling them to myself in my head, then by starting to write all kinds of opinions, micro-essays, or doing scenes suggested by regular textbooks only now, when those have long fell below my level of knowledge.THEN and only then it would be listening to radio/TV (i.e. recognition of unknown language) it is useless to try to recognize speech when you have no idea what those words and/or idioms meanGRAMMAR is something that I go on very lightly, it's actually not as important as many, many examples of words in correctly constructed sentences picked from language corpora, i.e. 100% natural native speech which are supplied by the monolingual learner's dictionaries P.P.S. If you are interested, I could recommend you a couple of dictionaries for learning Russian for reading.One is based on the Longman Activator , i.e. contains about 600 thematic, notional categories written as dictionary entries, good for just reading The other one is mimics the famous Collins COBUILD definitions style and covers about 7000 most frequent Russian words (which are marked in bands, so one could pick the first 2000 , or the next band to, 说, 3000 或 5000 and so on).Both can be found on the NET

I heard that same story. now since hearing you have torn one apart, it makes me believe maybe it was started by the battery manufacturers to make you buy another battery you wouldn't have needed cause you just destroyed one.