30:30 Vocabulary Challenge - July 2024

[Quabazaa]

I will be participating with Egyptian Arabic

[tomhal]

Result after thirty days of learning in the final assessment test:

L1 to L2 - I actively remember 353 words
L2 to L1 - I actively remember 695 words


My vocabulary learning was somewhat chaotic. At first, I picked out unfamiliar words and phrases from a simplified book for students of Russian, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The bilingual book comes with a high-quality Russian recording. The downside was the use of some words that aren't commonly used in everyday Russian. I tried to memorize the words by repeatedly listening to and reading the first few chapters.

In the second third of the month, I picked out words and phrases from a Russian textbook. Then I read the texts in the textbook and tried to memorize the words from the texts. I didn't use any of the grammar exercises. This activity was more boring than repeatedly reading Anna Karenina. On the other hand, I got more practical words and phrases.

In the last ten days, I spent a lot of time listening to the podcast Russian with Max. I considered purchasing a membership for the paid section of Max's program, but so far, I haven't needed the transcripts. I understood most of the content without any problems, and every day I wrote down words I didn't know and words I found in the dictionary related to the podcast content.

In September, I'm going to Armenia for quite a few days, and I need to refresh and improve my language skills. This contest came at a perfect time. I plan to continue working with Max's materials in the coming month. I'll probably end up getting the membership as well to support his tireless efforts.

In addition to the mentioned materials, I watched two series in Russian on Netflix. I read the first twenty pages of the novel Inostranka by Sergei Dovlatov and watched Russian videos about traveling in Armenia. To practice speaking, I paid for five lessons with a native speaker on Italki.


My results aren't exactly stellar. On the other hand, I don't know the number of words, outside of the selected 900, that I've picked up and at least passively absorbed.

[rdearman]

it is 900 more than you knew before.

[MapleLeaf]

My experience with the July challenge:

I decided to restrict it to French, and only to words I encountered in my efforts for the Super challenge. I did not want to use vocabulary lists or the equivalent, but wanted to see if I could use this challenge to prompt my reading. I started out with the French translation of The Wizard of Oz, getting 40 new words from its first page alone. I petered out on July 23, having only gone through a third of The Wizard of Oz, half of a second, easier, book, and ended up with a list of 653 words (37% from The Wizard of Oz, 23% from Un été à Montreal, 24% from Duolingo and the rest from random sources).

I'm not testing to see if I successfully remember any of these, but I plan to try these two books again in the future.

[WingSuet]

I'd like to try this challenge too, even if I missed the last one. Does anyone have the link to the spreadsheet?

[coldrainwater]

Does anyone have the link to the spreadsheet?

Yes, the link to the spreadsheet template is in the first post on July 2023 Challenge.