I'm experimenting a bit before committing to the new activities. One thing I've been doing is experimenting with ways to learn more vocabulary in less time and improve my recall in unplanned/unstructured situations.
Memrise is a great help to learn to recognize words, but it doesn't help that much with recalling of said words during unplanned/unstructured situations. That's why I decided to try wordlists in the following way:
1) I would expose myself to the most frequent nouns within the 1000 most frequent words by means of a personalized Memrise course and by reading from time to time the list on the frequency dictionary. Then, another time, I would look at the meanings of 10 words and try to recall the corresponding korean words and write them by hand. Then I would revise my answers and mark in red any mistake I found or write in red the complete word if I wasn't able to remember it when I first tried to recall it. This was a very exhausting activity, but one that beared incredibly good results in the short time span I dedicated to it (I only tried it for a total of 20 words).
A few days later I discovered, here in this forum,
a guide made by Iversen which was about wordlists. I skimmed through it (it is a really long and detailed guide) and got some very interesting ideas and insights. With all of this in mind and my goal of improving recall in unplanned/unstructured situations, I designed my own attack plan. For this I made some preparations. I transcribed to an excel spreadsheet the first 376 most common nouns according to the korean frequency dictionary I've mentioned before. In one column I have the korean words and in the next one I have the respective meanings. Then I printed it and cut each word and each meaning in a separate piece of paper for a total of 752 pieces of paper which I've put into a small bag. So here is my plan:
1) Randomly take out 5 pieces of paper and read them. If they contain a korean word, I'll handwrite that korean word in a (big) sheet of paper and try to recall and write what I think it means. If the piece of paper contains a meaning, then I'll write the meaning in the big sheet of paper and then I will try to recall and write the korean word I think it refers to.
2) I'll revise my answers and mark any mistakes with red circles. If I didn't remember the korean word or its meaning, I'll look for the corresponding answer and write it down in red. I'll also write in red the right anwers for the ones I made mistakes.
3) I'll cover the first column (the one with my own initial answers) and, using the second column as a guide, I'll try to write what's missing (a korean word if I have the meaning, or a meaning if I have the korean word).
4) I'll revise my answers from step 3 and, if I made any mistakes or failed to recall something, repeat steps 2 and 3, covering as many columns as needed until I can recall all the information.
5) After I have success with recalling all the information related to all the initial 5 pieces of paper I'll put those pieces of paper in a little box I have. Then I'll go do something else.
6) At another time of the day I'll come back to the small bag and take out another 5 pieces of paper and start the whole process again.
7) Doing this for all the pieces of paper can take many days. After I finish passing all the pieces of paper from the small bag into the little box, I will put all those pieces back into the small bag and start again. I plan to do this until I can consecutively recall all the information related to each and every piece of paper.
As a way to expose myself to the information I'll be trying to recall, I'll use the personalized course I made on Memrise and I'll also skim through the excel list from time to time. I also hope that my continuous and extensive interaction with native material (listening to songs, watching TV shows, etc.) will provide me with additional random exposure to those words. And I'll also take the new
Viki's Drama Vocab Quiz whenever I feel like it.
As I want to have a reference point to see if this method works for me and how effective it is, I'll be making a little test (I'll talk about it in a future entry).