A language learners’ forum

My belated status report:
I planned to learn my words with the key-word-method, drawings, stories and a few free recall-repetitions based on Dominic’s rule of 5 as an experiment. It worked really well. I got a satisfying retention rate with free recall (29/30 in correct word order even!) but it wasn’t sustainable for me. It took me more than one hour to draw the key-word connections and build stories around the words (4x 1 story with 7 to 8 words per day). The first 10-15 words (2 stories) were quite okay but after that, it wasn’t fun anymore to draw pictures and find stories for the words. On the contrary: It was a drag. So, after 5 days I stopped, took my "regular" French Anki deck and just increased the number of new words per day from 15 to 30. It’s not the best solution because my spaced learning intervals are designed for a longer “learning period” than one month, but Anki is an easy, quick and not so taxing solution for me. I'm done with ALL my French vocabulary - new words & repetitions of old words - (5k Anki deck which I'm 2/3 through) in round about 10 minutes a day.
I had to skip 3 days until now, but I was expecting that.

BTW, In the beginning I also experimented with ChatGPT because I thought at least one repetition with the new words in context might be a good idea. I asked ChatGPT for an A1/2-level story in French containing my first 30 words. I got a story written in Passé simple** (!) and half of the prompts were missing. When I asked ChatGPT what tense the story was written in, the answer was: Imparfait! WRONG-WRONG-WRONG-WRONG! *Imagine Dr Cox from Scrubs saying it like the chime of Big Ben* WRONG-WRONG-WRONG-WRONG! What a huge disappointment!
(**Passé simple isn’t beginners' stuff. My French textbook level A1-B1 doesn’t teach Passé simple at all. In German schools Passé simple is taught in the 6th year of 9 years learning French as the first 2nd language with the goal to reach B2/C1.)

Hi folks,

Well, it was a fun ride but think I'm going to get off here, at 570 words! I wrote a couple of days ago and thought I could push through, but it's not worth the cramming. I'm using the Assimil lessons for Russian and the current lessons have about twice as much material in them as they did in the beginning. I've done 18 lessons in three weeks. And it's starting to feel like loading up my plate at an all-you-can-eat-buffet. This is a lot of material! I don't want to stuff myself to the point of...well, you know I know the material really well so far, and I've even started activating some of the lessons. I sure would hate to cram more lessons just to get more words for the challenge. Like I said... buffet.... I can't take any more. I'm full!

I'll still take the final test and report it in my log (for my own personal edification). It just won't be 900.

Here's wishing everyone good luck on the final etappe!

Sharing for comic relief a few words that I especially like from my list this month. I may need corresuscito as a ward against mountain thunderbolts. This appears to work in Rome, but may be ineffective elsewhere and requires willing partner with good magic skills. Debating somewhat between linguarium, neurospaston and interdiarius as possible side hustles.


Hope everyone else is doing well. I am enjoying the challenge to such an extent that I have started compiling a French list as time allows for next month and hope to have it finished prior to challenge start.

My challenge is still going well, but I'm not sure I'll be ready to do another one in August. In fact, I wanted to suggest that it might be more convenient to have the challenge run every other month rather than every month with 31 days. There's no real need for the 31 days anyway with that system, because we could just do the test on the 1st of the next month. The benefits I see of this is that it would give us time to let all that vocabulary sink in a bit more before starting on a new batch, and it would also make it easier to find the time for other things, like studying grammar (which, as it happens, is something I need to do in August before my exam).

I don't mean to suggest that we don't run the challenge now in August, as I don't want to disappoint those who have already started planning for it. In fact, I have to some degree started planning for it myself, and I haven't decided yet if I want to try it or not. It's just that I'm increasingly starting to feel that it won't be as good in August as it was in July, and I think that in the long run, it would be better to have regular on-off intervals.

In response to postponing the challenge, I am flexible and can potentially defer a prepared list to September instead of August as needed (or do it both months with two separate lists). I haven't the foggiest idea what a bi-monthly grammar challenge would look like to complement this challenge, but having one has been on my mind since multiple people now have mentioned how this challenge cuts into grammar time (in German that would be Hammer time officially I suppose). Having such a challenge would also bolster participation since different members may be more interested in grammar than are interested in vocab and vice-versa.

Every two months would work also. Via the knuckle rule, July and August are the only months with 31 days that fall consecutively (edit: Nogon mentioned January and December as well). Doing it every other month would make for a precise six challenges per year, whereas the current rule makes for seven every year. Having some extra flexibility on the exact test date is also probably worthwhile since, for some people, month-end can be super busy on the last day or the first day but not necessarily both (think accounting for example). Lots of ideas are possible and most seem like they would work fine.

coldrainwater wrote:In response to postponing the challenge, I am flexible and can potentially defer a prepared list to September instead of August as needed (or do it both months with two separate lists). I haven't the foggiest idea what a bi-monthly grammar challenge would look like to complement this challenge, but having one has been on my mind since multiple people now have mentioned how this challenge cuts into grammar time (in German that would be Hammer time officially I suppose). Having such a challenge would also bolster participation since different members may be more interested in grammar than are interested in vocab and vice-versa.

I really like the idea of doing alternating vocabulary and grammar challenges, since I also feel like my grammar study fell off a bit this month. It's difficult to think of how it might be set up -- languages have such different grammatical structures that it seems like it would be hard to create a grammar challenge as fun or as simple as this vocabulary challenge that would work for everyone's target language. Something time-based would possibly work (30 minutes of dedicated grammar study per day for 30 days, for instance) but I'm personally less drawn to a challenge like that, and it's missing the end-of-month testing component that this vocab challenge includes. Something to think about further...

You can count me in with Japanese for August, but let's be clear from the get-go...I ain't gettin' on no plane, Hannibal!

Actually, this kind of challenge would work very well with the kind of thing I'm planning to do next month. One of the things we are supposed to learn for my exam is the participle system in Russian, which has four different participles and a gerund, and the formation of them often varies a bit depending on the class of verb. I have a decent overview of the system, but the tricky part is actually being able to form the correct form of a particular verb. So this is what I'm going to work on now.

I have started to go through my "501 Russian verbs" book, picking the verbs I know or should know. I enter the infinitive into my spread sheet, together with the participal forms of the verb, so that each row has all the forms of one verb. What I'm going to do next is to work on these column by column in Quizlet, in the same way that I'm currently doing with the vocabulary: I'll have the program give me the infinitive, and then I have to produce the present active participle of that verb, for example. This can of course be done with any part of the morphological system of any languages (to the extent that a given language has any of it): present tense paradigm, past tense forms, cases, etc.

For languages with a lot of morphology, like Russian definitely is, I see this type of thing as a very natural companion to a vocabulary challenge like the one we are doing now, because you need the morphology to start using those words.

coldrainwater wrote:Via the knuckle rule, July and August are the only months with 31 days that fall consecutively.

December and January are another pair of 31-days-months.

Thanks for the correction Nogon! I knew I probably wouldn't get any dates out of this nor do I handle them particularly well when I do have them.

To the group as a whole, here is a link to my French list that I plan to use for the next challenge: 30:30 Vocabulary Challenge - FR. I have more work to do on it but need to pause and focus on the current month. Feel free to use or borrow from it as desired. Entries are from Wiktionary.