Montmorency wrote:PeterMollenburg wrote:Montmorency wrote:I don't use an automated/computerised SRS system, but I do use Huliganov's "Goldlist" system which is a manual & handrwritten one. It could be described as an SRS, but it's much more flexible than ANKI-type systems and leaves it up to the individual much more.
However, my log isn't really about techniques, and at the moment is mostly a list of podcasts / radio programmes I listen to plus a few other things.
I have also used Iversen's wordlists.
I'd not heard of "Goldlists" before, so I had a read... How do you find it? (I need to re-read the methodology to fully grasp it- too tired to take it all in now). And how did you find Iversen's wordlist approach?
Goldlists: - Well, first of all, the method always appealed to me. You are in control and it is low-stress, or it should be. Actually, because David James says you should only work for about 20 minutes at a time, I was making it stressful for myself, trying to write down 25 words in 20 minutes, especially if I hadn't "gathered" the words somewhere already in advance. David is probably a quicker writer than I am and is obviously more used to it, so maybe he could always do it in 20 minutes. But anyway, I learned just to take it easy and take a bit longer if necessary, or do it in two or more chunks. Also, I wasn't as well-organised as I could have been; David is an accountant and good organisation is probably second nature to him. He does say he applied some ideas from accountancy to this method.
Does it "work"? Well, let's say I still have an open mind on this.
I must admit that for the moment, I'm not actively Gold-listing, although I do have two "Bronze" books that I can go back to and resume at any time. Although I put Goldlisting proper on hold, I did carry on writing down words and phrases in another notebook (now books), but not in Goldlist style, and I haven't been reviewing them, and I made no effort to "learn" them. In principle, when I resume Goldlisting, I'll use the words/phrases in these books as my source material (or some of it), but only if necessary. Because I'm hoping that I will find I know a lot of them by then, and in David's way of doing this, you don't bother to Goldlist what you already know (or even half-know). The principle is to minimise repetition.
However, I haven't been rushing to get back to Goldlisting, partly for various domestic reasons, but also because I've been kind of wandering around other ideas. I often keep coming back for example to Professor Arguelles, and have watched a lot of his videos many times and read his old postings on HTLAL. I am intrigued by the way he says when he is learning a new language, he doesn't really have a way of explicitly learning vocabulary, and he certainly doesn't/didn't use SRS. He starts off with things like Assimil, and then goes on to other parallel texts, and carries on reading texts of increasing difficulty (more or less on the Krashen i+1 principle, I guess).
Then there are people like emk (and others I've read about on HTLAL) who have done incredibly well with massive reading. I'm not doing massive reading at the moment, but I am doing fairly massive listening, and I hope to increase my reading gradually in the near future. Either way, the aim is massive exposure to vocabulary from native sources.
So my ideas are fairly fluid at the moment. I definitely do not have the strong work ethic and devotion to language that Professor Arguelles has (nor half his talent, probably), and I don't have the up-to-date technical knowledge that emk uses to augment his studies, although I do use technology to a certain extent.
Iversen-style wordlists
Well the first thing to say is that they definitely work if you use them. However, I found them fairly stressful, even if it was only self-inflicted stress. The first stress is when you have to consciously memorise it, and come up with some mental mnemonic or whatever. And the second stress is when you come to self-test (and you might repeat this one or more times).
The one thing I have kept from my wordlist days is Iversen's tip to delay writing down the meaning of a word for as long as possible. He writes down usually 7 TL words at a time, and looks them up one by one (or he might be working from a dictionary), but he only writes down the L1 translations after he has written the full list of 7 TL words, so he's holding all 7 meanings in his short term memory for that time. His theory is that this helps it to move to long term memory.
David James also has theories about short and long-term memory, and claims that the thinking behind his Goldlist is based on the research of Hermann Ebbinghaus (learning curves and forgetting curves). From what I've read of Ebbinghaus, I'm not actually convinced that his work supports the Goldlist method. But having said that, if it works, I don't care about the theory, and after all, Ebbinghaus was just one researcher, his work was done a long time ago, and on a very small sample. And GL seems to work for David...
Thank you montmorency,
I genuinely appreciate this well thought out reply to my inquiries.
I've realised I believe that flashcards do not do what I hoped they would do. I mean they probably help for recall and drilling phrases etc, but they don't seem to be giving me much of a feel for the language. I think I'm too slow- I analyse far too much and stop and start too much losing all flow. Plus I'm wanting to draw away from technology a little- whether it happens so much is another thing. Still right now I like the idea of writing over typing, of doing over stopping and entering and of large dusty dictionaries occasionally utilised on the desktop to looking up every word i don't know in my electronic dictionary. Of course we change our ideas constantly and I may return to flashcards, who knows, but for the time being I think i'd like to set them aside for a good while.
I'm not a fan of mnemonics. I used to use them a lot, and it felt natural to me, when i was a child, but now, it feels unnatural, even slow.
I really appreciate the breakdown and experiences on the Goldlist method you discussed. However I'm gravitating towards Professor Arguelles methods. I think if I use a decent course (Assimil currently), translations are provided, and review in second wave expected, so why use flashcards? Combine that with some extensive reading (sometimes easy readers, sometimes bilingual, sometimes electronic with perhaps a little dicionary use) AND some intensive reading with word lists contained down the columns (French learning mag's), then I think it will all tie together naturally. A good mix. I can't necessarily see a desperate need for SRS using these combined materials, i'd have some intensive study and some extensive, and i'd be using some short term memory with the translated word lists in the columns of the articles of my french learning mags calling on short-term memory, but the rest would rely on long-term memory.... I'm just not sure yet whether I will write down some word lists. Perhaps I'll create my own method or do an emk style list in which if by the end of the book/chapter/whatever point i'm still not picking up the meaning of some words, i could look them up from a list created while reading....
We'll see, thanks again for your great reply montmorency... Good luck with your studies!
) in a number of ways.
(I numbered them and reviewed entire lists, which probably isn't a bad idea per se)
