zenmonkey wrote:... 8, 4, 2K words... after the fact.
Good point.
zenmonkey wrote:4) 60 days in, do a recall test on a sample from the original list.
You need to learn vocabulary anyway - can you make the experiment 180 days? Though having interim results every 60 days would be nice, too, maybe with a smaller sample size so as not to interfere the forgetting curves too much.
I wouldn't fix the number at 40 words a day. A limit may have you doing suboptimal things at times. Maybe some guideline like "to add new words at least 3 times a week" just to maintain regularity. And a realistic number of words close to what people usually do would probably make the experiment more relevant to people.
But my biggest question mark is: how do you decide how much time to spend when you goldlist or iversenlist? When I tried them, I found that it was totally up to me whether I wanted to chew my batch of words for 20 or 30 minutes, and that's a 50% difference already.