leosmith wrote:The following was taken from a discussion here:I ask because I've done some informal documenting of time I've spent using certain techniques in my learning, and I've found that my improvement in conversation is almost directly proportional to the number of one hour conversation where I briefly noted and later memorized vocabulary and sentences that I lacked or didn't understand. Like yours, my classes were also 100% target, and other than the noting process which only took a few minutes, were just as you described; no corrections unless they truly didn't understand me.
To be perfectly honest, I've been using this method for a long time now, and the only things I compared were periods when I read 2 hrs/day vs 30 min/day, periods where I did the exercise mentioned above vs conversation with no memorization and periods of 5 - 7 hours conversation per week vs 3 or less hours per week. As I mentioned, the overwhelmingly best indicator of level in conversation turned out to be the number of hours spent conversing and memorizing. I was quite surprised that 2 hrs of reading wasn't noticeably better for conversation than 30 minutes for the single data point of myself.
This was very interesting. Can I ask what method you used to learn vocab after your conversations? Flashcards, Notebook etc