blaurebell wrote:klvik wrote:Due to a "shiny new toy" response, initially I was adding too many "unknown" terms per day which resulted in a week of overly long test sessions.
I actually don't use the test function at all, I just read! Words repeat, so the ones that are frequent and important will appear more often, usually in new forms, tenses and so on. You will end up remembering without effort just from typing in the dictionary definition for all these forms. There is really no need to remember every word you come across and the important ones will stick automatically. And the ones that don't appear very often are probably also not important enough to spend much effort on them!
5000 pages of intensive reading is indeed quite excessive, but I really found it a fantastic basis for French. I really have a pretty solid literary vocabulary now and enjoy reading in French a lot. It kinda happened by accident too, I just chose a long series and the story carried me along. With French it was Harry Potter and with Russian it's now David Eddings' Belgariad Saga. If I want to know what happens next, I have to keep reading, so it really helps to use page turners. Besides, I find the statistics motivating too!
I completely agree about the statistics. I really like seeing the number of known terms increase.
I don't know how long I will keep up with the test function, but for right now, at least, it is helpful. The vocabulary testing forces me to read some sentences several times which provides an opportunity for me to reflect on the grammar and the phrasing. I expect that I will continue using the test function for this first book and maybe a second, as long as I feel that I am still benefiting from all that sentence review. If I continue with LWT after two books, I would probably drop the test function. In the meantime, I am continuing with extensive reading on my Kindle (with almost no word lookup). If I weren't reading extensively at the same time, I think the exceedingly slow pace of LWT w/ vocab testing would drive me crazy.