30:30 Vocabulary Challenge - August 2023

[rdearman]

Ok. But the next one doesn't start until October.

[coldrainwater]

Checking the calendar, test day is upon us once again. This month I managed 866 out of 900 for French.

Exact results can be seen on the FR_FinalTest tab under 30:30 Vocabulary Challenge - FR

Testing Technique
I came up with what I think is a helpful innovation for my own personal testing. Instead of typing out each answer, I spoke them aloud, immediately checked validity and keyed the bit value of 0 or 1 for scoring. This allowed me to complete the exam without exhaustion and on a relatively busy workday.

Initial Learning
In concise order, I settled on WordReference as my primary reference website. The French list turned out to be substantially harder for me than the Latin list and I ended up using several additional learning aids. For SRS work, I grabbed Google images and included TL/NL definitions on the back of each card. My usual etymology trick wasn't helping for some reason, so I adjusted by abandoning it. Context sentences were not helpful for me in SRS, but I found a way to make them work by keeping them in a separate notepad file to mimic a normal reading experience better. My primary take-home is that the quality of the examples I chose mattered more than the specific technique I used. It was anyone's guess as to which one I would pick up first (sentence, TL definition, NL definition, image).

Review
Like last month, I was fairly careful not to let my SRS lists accumulate to more than 200 daily reviews. The main reason is that I once again wanted a very heavy focus on leeches and new unknown terms and almost no focus on terms I felt confident with. I had a tougher time picking these words up compared to Latin last month, so I compensated by increasing the review frequency and also taking advantage of the short testing window by outright deleting the cards if I felt I could remember a term more than about 3-4 days. I reviewed the entire list on days 29 and 30 then tested against it today.

Other Notes
I am happy enough with French, that I am confident this will be my next focus language, so the challenge has provided just the impetus I needed. I have a lot of ideas for future challenge months. An opaque language will be fun to try as TL-NL passive. Moreover, some active recall is not out of the question for French directly or French->(German, Spanish or other Romance). I would probably reduce the list difficulty for active output.

[coldrainwater]

On the light side of things and similar to what I did last month with Latin, I managed to flag a few words from my French list that I thought worth sharing. This time around, we have a class of thieves linked surprisingly to Marvel comics and Spiderman (Le Cambrioleur). In Latin we had daythieves. Travel this time around is by buckboard (hippomobile) optionally carting a [flopée] of goods powered by ox (monobovin). For each language studied, a representative creature of the night is also in order. For Spanish, I remember choosing erizo (hedgehog) and in French, the loup-garou (werewolf) seems obligatory. The decision for German is pending more scientific inquiry. Somewhat less scientifically minded, the planned language learning method for French is learning via par à-coups. Finally, Qui dort dîne may be my favourite on the list due to its simple backstory with wide and universal applicability. I think it will make for a decent journal title as well.