Experiments: Gold List vs Anki vs ....

[smallwhite]

New words only ever go into a Bronze Book. I consider all the books and page format gimmick. The whole thing is just 11 distillations @70% to me.

[zenmonkey]

New words only ever go into a Bronze Book. I consider all the books and page format gimmick. The whole thing is just 11 distillations @70% to me.

Absolutely - but add to it that a lot of it is psychological - there seems to be a lot of focus to doing it slowly and mindfully. It's low tech and low rep. I can see how this will most likely work nicely with my intermediate German where comprehension of sentences is already high, I'm nor convinced it will be that useful for my A1/A0 languages...

[emer1ca]

After the third distillation (D3), I've got something like 8 words left, right?

I pick a Silver book, open it, write the date on the top left corner, write down 25 new words -including the 8 words left at D3- and repeat the process over and over. Did I miss something on the way?

Anyhoo, Im gonna keep a close watch on that topic, may the force be with you zenmonkey

Consider the silver a distillation of D3 so if you have 8 words --> 5-6 that you are going to write into the Silver headlist which you combine not with new words but with other D3s from your Bronze book. So 5 lists now make one 25 item entry in the Silver book...

Alright.
Firstly, thanks for pointing that out : "consider the silver a distillation of D3" because I completely missed that step.
So I wind up with 5/6 words and the 1st page of my silver book.
I write all of them down and that's all. I'm done for 2 weeks, right?
I shrink it down to 3 words 2 weeks later for D5.
And so on and so forth until D7. I move on to D8 (namely the Gold book) if there are still some words left, right?

Provided I got all of this right, what's the Gold book for? I mean, by the time I get to D7, how many words are left? Not that much, right ? What's the point to use another book to write down 2 words in it.

OR..I'm just dumb as a bag of hammers

I was just meant to fill up to 25 lines with the 5/6 left.
So basically, let's make it even dumber since I go full retard tonight..
Let's say my 5 words left are : red, blue, green, yellow and brown.
I write each of them 5 times until I get my 25 lines filled up?

ex.

- The red car.
- The red bottle.
- The red ballon.
- The red bicycle
- The red table
- The blue line
- The blue pen
- And so on.

I think you got the gist.

I'm sorry guys, Im a bit slow on the uptake sometimes

--

EDIT: Alright, I think my little brain eventually figured it out

I was watching Gold List Method for learning to L/T memory part two but I wasn't paying attention to the audio because of Uncle Davey's terrible accent I think I wrapped my head around it...FINALLY. So, basically.. All my D3s turn into D4s until I get these 25 lines filled up. That's all haha. And as zenmokey said, make sure I distilled them before writing them down.

Any chance you guys organising a dummy award or something with the dumbest post ever written? Because I'm pretty sure I would stand a good chance for the next ceremony.

[smallwhite]

Bronze Book pages 1 to 5 => Silver Book page 1
all 25 words (in Silver Book) in one go.

[Brun Ugle]

The headlist is 25 words which gets distilled in the bronze book to 17, then 12, then 9. Then you combine four of those lists of 9 into a list of 25 in the silver book. However, something I was not aware of and Uncle Davey just made clear on Facebook, is that the numbers are not set in stone. If you really can’t remove 30% of the words, you’re allowed to keep some extra lines, and if you remember more than 30% of the words, you can cross them off and have fewer lines in your next distillation. I find that with most of my lists, I do remember about 30% on the first distillation, but more than that on the second. I thought I was cheating a little when I had extra lines or had fewer lines, but apparently the method is flexible.

[smallwhite]

I consider all the books and page format gimmick. The whole thing is just 11 distillations @70% to me.

Absolutely - but add to it that a lot of it is psychological - there seems to be a lot of focus to doing it slowly and mindfully.

It's called Goldlist and not Slowwrite though. And I can't imagine someone taking something as generic/ancient/mundane as writing words out carefully and calling it their own method. But who knows, maybe the secret lies in what colour ink you write in.

Btw, found some small experiments here: thread Anki vs. Gold Lists vs. Iversen-style Wordlists from polydog.org. I quote one of Iversen's posts where he compares results, but there are other people's experiences and experiments as well.

Goldlist...
the [...] 99 words could be divided into 18 known, 8 'something in that direction' and 73 totally wrong or no proposals...

'do-nothing' list...
the [...] 99 words could be divided into 17 known, 10 'not-totally-wrong' and 72 total failures. That is, practically the same dismal level as with the goldlists...

[jeff_lindqvist]

I'm not ready for this experiment yet...

Let us assume that you learn 30% with each distillation - do you only add 25 items per week? Per day? Twice per week? Has anyone found the "perfect" study material? (Say, a textbook where each lesson has a list of 25 new words) What if the material you're working with has 50 items and you want to learn them all? One list "today", and the rest "tomorrow"? Or do you add them to another page with "today's" date on it? (=Meaning there will be two lists to review in two weeks.)

Has anyone found the perfect number of new cards for Anki? You can change a lot of settings, but assuming you don't, how many cards would you add each time, and how often? How many cards out of a list of 25 will have "disappeared" into the distant future if you choose Hard next time it shows up? Is Hard (or Good, or Easy?) somewhere close to a 30% distillation?

If you want to give the two methods a fair comparison, would 25 new cards in Anki (instead of the default 20) be similar to a list of 25 items? If not, why?

At the moment, my only deck which constantly feeds me with new words (50 per day) is Portuguese (simply because I imported a huge list of cards at some point). Czech and Cantonese depend on what I add from the lessons. If it's more than 50, the rest will show up next day (and interfere with the cards I then might add). But, based on this number of New cards and my "low" rating (usually Hard), ~1000 cards still reach mature status in one month (see this post from four weeks ago).

(Maybe I'm the only one thinking about this )

[Iversen]

Smallwhite has been kind enough to dig up the results I got from comparing the gold list system, the do-nothing system (aka 'lazy') and my own three-column system, and the message where I compare then at polydog's place contains the following summary:

First I took my original 4 goldlists with 100 words, covered the translations up and checked how many I knew by writing my best guesses at the meanings - but it turned out that I mostly didn't even have a plausible proposal for a meaning. I happened to see the translation of one word, so I had to eliminate this word - the remaining 99 words could be divided into 18 known, 8 'something in that direction' and 73 totally wrong or no proposals. It was a fairly gloomy experience.

Then I checked my 'do-nothing' list, where I had chosen 100 unknown (or only vaguely known) words about one month ago and not done anything after that. Here I overlloked one word, and the remaining 99 words could be divided into 17 known, 10 'not-totally-wrong' and 72 total failures. That is, practically the same dismal level as with the goldlists.

Suitably disheartened I proceeded to check the result of my own three colum wordlists, which I had reviewed twice since I made them (plus one time where I just looked them through), and that was like leaving a black cave: out of 100 words I know 64, 10 were not too far off the mark and only 26 were totally lost or wrong. These results lie reasonably close to those I found in my Serbian experiments

And once again: these were my results, but since I'm a heavy user of my own system and an interested, but slightly sceptical neophyte with the goldlists it isn't unexpected that I get the best results with the former. Nevertheless it was disappointing that I didn't get better results with the goldlists than with just jotting down 100 unknown words down on an A4 sheet and letting that list rest in a dark and quiet place.

The Serbian experiment which was discussed in the same thread was different. Here I basically worked through all pages of a Serbian dictionary, and I tested the part of the dictionary I had been through with my own three-column wordlists against the part I hadn't used that method on, and I did this by doing complete word counts on sample pages from the two parts of the dictionary. And it was here I found that I had gone from knowing (or being able to guess) roughly one third of the words to knowing two thirds of all the words on the respective pages in the dictionary. But of course I also did the usual recall checks during my repetitions, although during this particular experiment I took care not to see the translations before I copied the Serbian words the the repetition sheets, and I counted the number of remembered words.

I am fairly sure that I still have the original test sheets from both tests lying around somewhere, but otherwise the thread at Polydog's place gives a fairly good summary - and it was written while I still remembered the results (and also knew where I had put the test sheets). Besides it was very interesting to have another member, Peregrinus, running a related test roughly at the same time. But then Peregrinus was blocked for some obscure reason, and I stopped writing there myself.

[Xmmm]

I tried gold lists for about a month because I was intrigued by the old-school, offline mystique. Physical notebooks, handwriting, etc. It seemed like a welcome break from being glued to the screen.

But I got uncomfortable very quickly. Partially for what Iversen mentioned (do you really know those words that drop off at the first distillation or will they come back to haunt you). Partially because I started to worry "what if I lost the notebook." And also, more importantly, because of the ankidroid phone app. The one activity I can do waiting at the lunch counter or doctor's office is anki. Why fight it?

So I reshuffled everything to make my old-school, offline mystical activity grammar exercises in workbooks.

[Brun Ugle]

I'm not ready for this experiment yet...

Let us assume that you learn 30% with each distillation - do you only add 25 items per week? Per day? Twice per week? Has anyone found the "perfect" study material? (Say, a textbook where each lesson has a list of 25 new words) What if the material you're working with has 50 items and you want to learn them all? One list "today", and the rest "tomorrow"? Or do you add them to another page with "today's" date on it? (=Meaning there will be two lists to review in two weeks.)

Has anyone found the perfect number of new cards for Anki? You can change a lot of settings, but assuming you don't, how many cards would you add each time, and how often? How many cards out of a list of 25 will have "disappeared" into the distant future if you choose Hard next time it shows up? Is Hard (or Good, or Easy?) somewhere close to a 30% distillation?

If you want to give the two methods a fair comparison, would 25 new cards in Anki (instead of the default 20) be similar to a list of 25 items? If not, why?

At the moment, my only deck which constantly feeds me with new words (50 per day) is Portuguese (simply because I imported a huge list of cards at some point). Czech and Cantonese depend on what I add from the lessons. If it's more than 50, the rest will show up next day (and interfere with the cards I then might add). But, based on this number of New cards and my "low" rating (usually Hard), ~1000 cards still reach mature status in one month (see this post from four weeks ago).

(Maybe I'm the only one thinking about this )

You can make as many headlists per day as you want, though David suggests no more than 10 per day and you need to take at least a ten minute break every 20 minutes (ie after every new headlist) to properly rest the long-term memory.

I don’t think there is any perfect material, but any material will do. Also, a word might take more than one line if you also need to include grammatical information, so even vocabulary lists of 25 words wouldn’t necessarily be able to be plugged straight into a headlist as is.