Questions about memorization and reading?

Recently I came up with a goal to learn 20 words a day (I like manually writing the words and meanings on flashcards) , in addition to my five hours a day of listening, reading, glancing at a few grammar rules, lingQing, writing, and class time at the university… (Speaking with my Russian professor at least 1 time a week)… What are your thoughts on this?? Also, when I am reading ( I am learning Russian, btw) is it good to translate the Cyrillic directly into English? Or read the Cyrillic out loud? Or just think of the meaning? I just want to be certain that I am doing this correctly, and the most efficiently!

Thanks,
Joel

I would advise learning Cyrillic and reading directly from the Cyrillic. You will find that you will slowly pick up many minor points and nuances of the Russian pronunciation if you do it that way. I do not think that Romanization or transliteration are good ideas.

I think reading the Cyrillic out loud is probably a good idea.

will you be able to keep doing
it?

I agree with Greg. You needn’t to transribe the cyrillic, you can get accustomed to it during a month.
However, I recommend you not to read out loud, but listen to many lessons by native speakers and repeat after them.

From what you’ve written, it sounds like you don’t converse enough. Also, I’m assuming you’ve already studied pronunciation and drilled it enough to be comfortable with it at the syllable, word and sentence level. If not, you’ve got a problem, and you need to fix it before you do anything else.

I don’t understand your translating question - are you asking if translating from L2 to L1 in a specific translation exercise is a useful? It is, but probably not as useful as translating from L1 to L2. If you mean something like pausing to establish an english meaning to every sentence while doing your normal reading, conversing, etc, then no, it’s generally bad idea. This will slow you down, and be a hindrance to you especially when you converse. If you are doing some sort of intensive listening or reading exercise where you want to be sure to understand the meaning to each sentence it’s ok. But when you are just reading extensively or conversing, you should just get used to reading/hearing L2 and understanding the meaning without attempting to translate to L1. This is hard in the beginning, but it gets easier.

Reading out loud is highly recommended. I’m confused by evgueny40’s comment below, because you will never learn to read if you always listen to a native speaker’s recording before repeating a sentence. Reading out loud forces you to pronounce everything, and doesn’t let you cheat.