[leap_ahead]

Not quite giving you any tips, but a word of warning. Avoid learning Russian through Russian-language community sites based on user-submitted content such as comments, posts etc. For the last couple of decades we've been seeing a trend of getting more and more people who are illiterate in writing, with the last three years seeing an explosive epidemic on our hands. It is now very rare to see user-submitted content written with the quality ready for publication. Speaking of reasons, there are many. Young people don't like to study and become smart so they don't read books anymore. Basically they hang out online and learn illiterate language from each other, such that these incorrect forms of speech have now proliferated to every corner of the web, polluting everything and affecting the rest of the Internet users, gradually replacing the correct forms with the wrong ones in their minds.

If I were to take HN community for example, this level of quality writing many display while expressing their thoughts cannot be found on the Russian community sites anymore.

There is also a staggering amount of hate speech and insults of all kinds. Most of it is not moderated as this style of interaction has become the standard way for most users. If it were to be moderated, it would mean wiping out over 90% of the user-submitted content resulting in a substantial drop of traffic, so nobody is doing it.

Many people (myself included) are now ignoring Russian sites seeing them as dumping grounds, preferring to stick with the international community instead.

Read books, not the modern ones, but those from at least 30-40 years ago. That's where you find a rich beautiful language in all its colors and the depth of thought.

[xaybey]

I don't know exactly what you're referring to (I do read pikabu sometimes). I've always heard writing correctly is less important than writing at all. Do you suggest that this isn't true, that sloppy grammar isn't something that can be improved later?

[leap_ahead]

I was trying to highlight the fact that if you intend on improving your Russian by hanging out on Russian community sites, you're going to be learning broken language and will be doing yourself a disservice in that regard.

I realize I talked about a local problem that the global community is unaware of. In short, people are becoming increasingly illiterate, as in they cannot compose grammatically correct texts, coherently express their thoughts and sometimes cannot understand certain words from the imaginative literature from just 50 years ago. People used to have large bookshelves at homes during Soviet times, now the majority doesn't read anything except what they can find on social networks. As it is, they unlearn correct language and learn broken language from their own illiterate fellows. If you attempt to interact with the community online, you will learn wrong things. And I cannot say if it would be possible to relearn the corrected variants later. Better not go down that road.

Basically I'm talking about: wrong spelling of words, non-existent words, wrong expressions, wrong combinations of words, ways of constructing sentences that are wrong and incomprehensible, not to mention a large amount of curse words. You really don't want any of these.

As to the language itself, while it is massively different from English and related languages families, it is a natural language derived from the lifestyle of our ancestors. Words are sufficiently different from each other to be easily recognized and sometimes their sounding alone can give you an idea of what these could mean like something good or bad or whatever emotions they might express. Way better than learning German words for instance.

I'm struggling to give you some useful advice, not being a language teacher however I'm not quite sure where I can help. I'm dwelling on that though.