Do you have an exit plan for isolated vocabulary study?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Big_Dog, Jul 17, 2014.

  1. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 27, 2014
    Messages:
    93
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Spanish
    "Un cobaye" is a guinea pig ("cochon d'Inde") actually, just like Spanish "cobaya." It's easy for me to remember this because I had lots of conversations in Spanish with a Japanese woman who is learning the language and had one as a pet. Some native speakers used to tell her teasingly, "Tú sabes, se comen en América del Sur," heh.
    Big_Dog and Cainntear like this.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    Nice post and welcome to the forum.

    But I think that the hypothetical danger you mention, of becoming a slave to Anki, is for the long term countered by your point about the spacing effect. For a static number of words, reviews become ever more spaced apart, and the daily number of reviews shrinks accordingly. Now in the short to medium term, where as I mentioned earlier newer cards and more frequent reviews for same consume a lot of time, then I guess one might consider Anki to be a slave driver that consumes a disproportionate amount of time compared to other activities. But this is why I and others try to figure out different, more optimum and less stress, ways of using Anki, as in the thread I started for Anki with minimal failing, or the current experiment I am doing of using Iversen word lists for initial learning and then Anki to act as a control for the majority of words and a tool to mop up the most difficult words.
  3. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish

    The forgetting curve and the fact that testing/retrieval of facts aids more in learning than merely reading them again, are the heart of SRS. You seem to object to the pain/misery of that process in regards to words that you either did not find in enjoyable/memorable contexts, or which you deem unimportant for you. As I pointed out earlier, no low frequency word is in itself important, rather the sheer mass of them are, as an exclusionary device to lessen the total number of unknowns in free extensive reading and listening. So for the most part, if you are concentrating on having that mass of relatively low frequency words consist of more enjoyable or contextually significant individual components, then that is great.

    But what of mid-frequency vocabulary? Not all of that range of vocabulary in the 2000-9000 word family range is necessarily going to be fun, or found in more memorable/enjoyable contexts. Yet every native speaker not only knows them well, but is constantly exposed to the concepts or objects they denote, despite those words not actually cropping up much in daily speech.
  4. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    :)


    Anki actually has features built-in to try to avoid these effects, and unless one continues to select the exact same hardness level on subsequent reviews for each member of such a pair, they will over time not show up close together. Plus as a last resort, assuming one is conscious of such an effect, one of the pair can always be intentionally set on a different review track, which is what I occasionally do for word pairs where I experience some confusion (along with simply studying them briefly side-by-side).
  5. emk

    emk Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2014
    Messages:
    23
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    French
    Basic Languages:
    Egyptian_ancient
    It's perfectly possible to learn a large amount of vocabulary without recall stress. Looking back at the last 30 months, here's a very rough estimate of how I spent my time:
    • Extensive reading, 10,000 pages: 400+ hours.
    • Anki, reviews: 90 hours.
    • Anki, card making: 75 hours, give or take a lot?
    In the book that I'm reading right now, roughly 99.9% of the text is transparent, either because the vocabulary is obvious and automatic, or because it's trivially transparent based on cognates and other French words I already know. And if you go back and look at my French review graph, you'll notice that there are a lot of failed cards in the beginning, but almost none in the last 24 months.

    Based on these experiences, I'm willing to argue that it's unnecessary to do high-stress reviews. Viable alternatives include:
    1. Comprehension cards. If you understand the word in context, pass it.
    2. Micro-cloze cards, where perhaps only half a word will be clozed (in context), and a definition will put on the front of the card. If you fill in the cloze correctly, you pass. This is actually an active recall card, but it's far easier than a typical L1<->L2 vocab card.
    My problem with bare L1<->L2 cards is that they feel like I'm trying to memorize phone numbers: a large amount of information without any surrounding context. The two formats above require a lot less effort—they feel more like commercial jingles or top-40 song lyrics that I memorize without ever really trying. And yet the exponential forgetting curve still seems to work, at least for time intervals of less than a year.

    Unfortunately, I can't find a frequency dictionary that covers the 5,001th through the 9,000th most common headwords in French. All of the larger French frequency dictionaries that I've found count inflected forms, not headwords. But I do have a copy of Harrap's Mini Dictionnaire here, with 45,000 words. Opening it randomly to page 506, I count:

    Known words

    effroi effronté égal égaliser égalité
    égard égarer égayer église égoïsme
    égorger égout Égypte eh! éjecter
    élaborer élan élargir élastique élection
    électricien électrocuter

    Transparent (words I would understand perfectly fine in context)

    effusion (emotional outburst), __ du sang (bloodshed)
    égoutter (to drain)
    égratiner (to scratch)
    élancé (slender)
    électrogène (generator)

    Guessable (words I might puzzle out in context)

    éhonté (shameless)
    électroménager (electrical appliance)

    Unknown and opaque

    églantier (wild rose)
    égosiller (to scream one's head off)
    égrener (to pick off (rasins), to shell)
    élaguer (to prune)​

    The only one I feel a little guilty about is égosiller, which is useful and I know I've seen it before. The other unknown and opaque vocabulary feels pretty marginal, although églantier is a very pretty word.

    If I put this in graphical form, I get:
    [​IMG]
    So based on this and other information, my guess is that I have pretty good coverage in the 2,000 to 9,000 range, and probably pretty reasonable coverage in the 9,000 to 20,000 range. After that, vocabulary is more of a fun hobby than a necessity—if my biggest problems are words like églantier (wild rose) and élaguer (prune), I can safely assume that my vocabulary is sufficient for most purposes.

    Thus, at least for a Romance language, I think extensive reading (using parallel texts in the beginning) and modest amount of time devoted to easy-to-pass SRS cards is a viable strategy. Especially for those of us who will be reading anyway, and who only need to change the language. This isn't to say that focused vocabulary work is useless or anything—lots of people seem to enjoy it in the beginning. But there's no reason to spend a year living in Anki hell if you prefer to read books and do easy SRS reviews on a part-time basis.

    But at the same time, I know that I'll sooner or later start adding new Anki cards again. It's fun, and words like égosiller can always use a little boost. But there's no rush.
    Peregrinus and Big_Dog like this.
  6. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 27, 2014
    Messages:
    11
    Advanced Languages:
    English
    Well it was not my intention to come across as contentious or condescend, so I'm sorry if that was the case.

    In this context what I wanted to mean with "fact" is anything about a sentence or a piece of text that's difference from what you would've expected (probably because of the interference of your other languages). So you have to ask yourself, with the language I've already acquired, could I have produced that sentences myself? Maybe there's and article there that you wouldn't have used, or you expected the subjunctive instead of the indicative, etc.

    Honestly, I think we are splitting hairs with this one. There's nothing wrong with seeing a word outside of a single card, be it something you read yesterday or just another card in Anki.

    Perhaps we should clarify what we mean with context, but anyway that's certainly not my point with context. In principle my only caution with contextless words is that that they are more difficult to remember. On the other hand, easily retrievable cards can be good, even if they contain just a single context, if they can serve as patterns. For example, a sentence like "ironing is dangerous" teaches you the word iron and the rule that in English when a verb works as a noun you have to pick the -ing form. That's two facts, and it's good context.

    Well, as I said in another post, in the case of flashcards I don't think that remembering the sentence by heart, so to speak, is necessarily a bad thing, and anyway if you want to be on the safe side, you can add multiple cards for all the features that caught you eye in the sentence. Nothing breaks in the algorithm, and that way you make sure that you can produce every one of them inside this one context, and then just hope that your mind can see the pattern and produce sentences in different contexts.
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2014
  7. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 27, 2014
    Messages:
    11
    Advanced Languages:
    English
    That's true, as long as you keep the failing rate like it should be (about 10% I think). Some people can't manage to do that. There can be a number of reasons why words become more difficult than it should, like learning them in isolation, or when you can't tell apart the different phonemes of the language, or the alphabet or spelling system seems alien to you, etc.
  8. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 29, 2014
    Messages:
    343
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Catalan, French, Italian, Scottish_Gaelic, Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    Corsican
    Basic Languages:
    Dutch, German, Irish, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Sicilian
    So the mnemonic didn't help me remember the meaning. QED.
    Peregrinus likes this.
  9. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jan 11, 2014
    Messages:
    1,039
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Swahili, Thai
    Basic Languages:
    Korean
    Nice, especially number 4.
    I agree with you. A deck can spin out of control, and this has happened to me in the somewhat distance past when I used to use Supermemo. This is one of the main reasons I started the thread, so thanks for confirming that it's not only me.
  10. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    By "spin out of control" I take you to mean you stopped doing daily reviews for some period of time and then were confronted by a monster number of reviews. If that is the case, then Anki provides a way back, which is to allow you to specify only doing so many reviews a day, with Anki selecting the missed ones that were due first. Alternatively, if you use sub-decks, you can could just determine your own path back.

    If instead you meant what Rodri was referring to, as in a high fail rate and thus the daily number of reviews ballooning as a result of same, then I would first look to fix the underlying problem(s). Which could be too many new words per day, too conservative of failing, not taking the time as you go to disambiguate troublesome words that interfere with each other, etc. I grant that neophytes won't know these things, but that is where forums like this can help, as well as the Anki support forum.

    Now of course there is another global reason for lots of words being difficult and thus resulting in lots of fails, which is a language in a different family with almost no cognates or common roots with your L1. But there is a remedy for that as well, which is to stop and make a study of that language's morphology and roots, assuming such exists, which it may not for smaller languages, at least in one's L1. In that case you would have to do the heavy lifting yourself and use a good, thick dictionary to deduce such connections for yourself. And after such a process, return to Anki (or ER as the problem would exist there as well).
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2014
  11. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish

    You seem to have made an impressive leap in vocabulary since the post of yours I mentioned earlier from 2012. Of course you may also have underestimated the then current state of your knowledge. Either way, the size of your French vocabulary is at a very advanced level.

    I agree that for Romance languages in particular, that ER alone or supported by a more minimal use of Anki/word lists/GL is both more feasible and less inefficient.

    WRT to mid-range vocabulary, I mentioned earlier that I need to get back to mopping that up for German with the use of of a 15K entry thematic book I have. This is probably where thematic type of books shine, in introducing such mid-range as well as high range vocabulary, if that is, they go past 5000 headwords, which is where many stop. The other difficulty is finding texts to use for ER for that range of vocabulary, at least as to a relatively small number of same, either fiction or non-fiction. How many books or popular magazines are going to use L2 equivalents of paperclips and thumbtacks, whisks and ladles, bobby pins and curlers, common children's games, and just all the stuff of our daily lives? It seems that it would take a truly huge number of such books and magazines to mention all that mid-frequency vocab.
  12. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

    Joined:
    May 1, 2014
    Messages:
    91
    The title of this thread is "Do you have an exit plan for isolated vocabulary study?". Well, if you know or can guess roughly 87,9 % of the words in a 45.000 word dictionary (cfr. emk's impressive statistics above), then I think the exit will happen more or less automatically because the last 12,1 % of the headwords are so obscure that you won't need them, and if you nevertheless find them in a text they may be obvious in that context for a person with a solid foundation in a language... or they are so specialized that you need an explanation because you don't even know the corresponding word in your own language.

    When I advocate the use of wordlists or other formal systems I think of learners with far less background than emk has got in French. I can't point to a specific treshold because the diminishing return happens gradually, but I can say that I am thinking in all seriousness about doing a round of wordlists in Italian, which I know sufficiently well to have dreams in it (that was actually what happened this morning). But I have been using an Italian-Serbian dictionary to learn Serbian words, and it struck me that there were a bit too many of the Italian words I didn't know - and I want to do something about it. But apart from sporadic mopping-up operations I hardly ever do wordlists in my best halfdozen or so of languages, and even in those that are slightly more rusty it happens in wawes rather than as a daily exercise.

    When I read texts for pleasure I may jot down a word if I have pen and paper ready, but the majority of the new words I use in wordlists come from texts I sit down to study intensively. They hardly ever come from spoken sources because I don't want to stop listening just because there is an unknown word, but sometimes I look words up because I needed them for thinking or writing in the language, and then it is natural that I want to memorize them properly - and for me that means including them in a wordlist. I do dictionary based wordlists when I get tired of looking things up all over the place and decide to use the equivalent of a word supermarket instead of wasting my time on looking for berries and toadstools in the woods. Fullblown A to Z operations like the one I'm doing right now for Serbian are however far too labour intensive to do for more than one language at a time, and I don' think I have ever done more than one for any given language.

    Otherwise there wouldn't be time for anything else, and that would be like preparing food all day long in the kitchen without ever having a decent meal yourself.
  13. emk

    emk Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2014
    Messages:
    23
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    French
    Basic Languages:
    Egyptian_ancient
    Note that I use a variation of my reading + SRS approach for Egyptian as well, and it works tolerably well there, too, despite the lack of cognates and the unfamiliar writing system. With Egyptian, I actually find that having cards with context is really useful, because Egyptian grammar is weird, at least compared to IE languages, and getting lots of repeated exposure to how things work in context is actually really useful.

    Yeah, that's my unfair advantage. I get most of my intellectual vocabulary from books, but I get certain day-to-day vocabulary by actually living in French. Overall, merely living in French wasn't enough to get my level above B1, but it helps a lot with certain kinds of vocabulary.

    Be careful not to read too much into those statistics: I just grabbed the nearest dictionary off the shelf, flipped randomly until I saw a full page of words in French, and counted. Any number of things could throw this count off:
    1. Page 506 might not be representative.
    2. When the cover claims "45,000" headwords, they might mean 22.5K English->French headwords, and 22.5K French->English headwords, or something else ridiculous like that. I didn't bother to check.
    3. English speakers get a huge number of French/English cognates for free, including words like élection and électricien. What really counts are how many words like égarer and égout I can recognize at a glance.
    I can say with a high degree of certainty that I know at least 15K headwords in French, and 20K is certainly possible. But please don't multiply 87.9% times 45,000 and expect that to tell you much, other than that I know a bunch of words.

    Back before the Super Challenge, my French vocabulary was probably in the 5K word range, or probably less when I first started extensive reading. So there's a case to be made that this data should be intepreted as "Emk has a decent vocabulary in French because of reading and SRS," and not as "These techniques work when you already have a big vocabulary." And again, I'm not claiming that this approach is magic, or even that it works any better than world lists or Gold Lists.

    My claim is more modest: Anki cards with context can be a pleasant, low-stress addition to extensive reading, and if you take them together, it's possible to learn a lot of vocabulary in an agreeable fashion. It's possible to abuse the SRS algorithm and delete cards on whim, and still learn. And there's no obligation to give up at any point, because the same techniques that work for lesson 10 of L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique are still useful for picking up lovely, rare words like églantier "wild rose", which are admittedly somewhat hard to learn via pure extensive reading due to their rarity.

    But at the same time, a lot of this comes down to personal style: I love reading fiction, and I dislike writing things by hand, so of course I love any method which involves ebooks and a nicely-organized database that gets synced between my computer and my phone. Somebody who loves a good pen and nicely-bound notebook might take far more joy from Gold Lists.
  14. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 29, 2014
    Messages:
    343
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Catalan, French, Italian, Scottish_Gaelic, Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    Corsican
    Basic Languages:
    Dutch, German, Irish, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Sicilian
    1. Related forms are juxtaposed, so one common root can account for much of a page (eg electr-, egal-)
    2. If you're on a page that covers a prefix, things get very unbalanced. é seems to be a prefix (Latin ex-, maybe?) in several of those words.
  15. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    Is there even a substantial enough of a corpus of ancient Egyptian to read extensively? The big disincentive to learn Old English for example, is that after reading Beowulf, one has exhausted a significant part of the extant literature.


    This is easy to remedy by checking the beginning of the dictionary to ascertain the actual number of French entries, and then choosing 9 more pages at random, perhaps avoiding the first couple pages of a given letter to avoid abbreviations, which would then replicate the way Iversen makes such estimations. Assuming you care enough to do so (you did make a very nice graph so why not get better inputs for it?).
  16. Montmorency

    Montmorency New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 28, 2014
    Messages:
    13
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    German
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Danish, Welsh
    @emk: Apologies if I have already asked a similar question on HTLAL, but I'm interested in how you progressed your extensive reading from where you were at the 5K word (or less) level, to where you are now. You say (I think) you learned no more than ~10% of your words through Anki, and most of the rest from extensive reading. You use e-books, so am I right in thinking that you basically got through them by using a pop-up dictionary on the e-book reader, and only occasionally inputting that into ANKI if it was of particular interest, and that for the most part, you would presumably just go, aha, so this means that, and move on, and eventually these words just stuck?

    If I remember correctly, Professor Arguelles means something slightly different by extensive reading. I think I've heard him say he gets himself up one way or another to the "98% percent comprehension level", and from then on he reads extensively and can pretty much work out the unknown words, or will use a dictionary for the occasional obscure one. He gets up to the 98% level by various means including Assimil, parallel texts and translations, shadowing and scriptorium. But if I understand correctly, he doesn't really use ER to actually increase his vocabulary significantly.
  17. Montmorency

    Montmorency New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 28, 2014
    Messages:
    13
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    German
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Danish, Welsh
    @Peregrinus: I think I basically agree with your stance as outlined in the beginning of the thread and the use of "isolated vocabulary study" in the thread title is a little loaded. As you point out, it's perfectly possible to get your words from native input sources such as books, newspapers, radio or TV programmes etc, and these can lend as much context to your vocabulary items as you want to include. This is what I always did with word lists and is what I am doing now with GL. (I have never used an automated SRS).

    I would perhaps prefer to call what we are doing here "explicit vocabulary learning".

    Do you need an exit strategy? I think that one would carry on doing it so long as it feels useful, and when it stops feeling useful, one would just drop it. So, no, I don't think one needs an explicit exit strategy in advance.

    I do agree with Iversen (and I think Big_Dog) and disagree with you (and David James) on production, however. I now think that this is important from an early stage for all sorts of reasons. I didn't always. I used to be more than happy just to learn passively, and I think it made me lazy (or more lazy). The more I just listened or read, the less inclined I was to open my mouth. Maybe not everyone is like that. But we definitely need to learn how to pronounce the language fairly accurately from an early stage, so that we can then at least read it with a reasonably accurate "inner voice" (and occasionally out loud), which will increase the value of reading over and above its value for vocabulary learning or the love of the story or whatever.

    Can I say that I am quite excited on your behalf with the great progress you have made in German vocabulary in a short time (especially when I think of my own slow progress...). If you aren't doing so already, can I suggest you try some of the podcasts from wdr radio? There's quite a nice range of choice on there from the popular to the fairly highbrow, and with your level of vocabulary, you should get quite a lot from it. http://www1.wdr.de/radio/podcasts/
    (They've changed the layout from when I was going there every day, so I don't know my way around it so well, but hopefully you will find something you like that is suitably challenging).

    Big_Dog likes this.
  18. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    @Montmorency,

    Thanks for the reply and welcome to the forum! Re production that is another topic for another thread. Thanks for the radio recommendation, but I already listen to Deutschlandfunk and Antenne Bayern daily, as well as NDR documentaries and drama on youtube (Tatort & cheesiest soap ever Sturm der Liebe).

    As to vocabulary progress I am pleased with what I have been able to learn this past year. But I actually view my comfortable pace of an average of 30 words/day as slow. It gets most of the job done in a year though. When I get done with my hybrid Iversen-Anki experiment, I am going to try to ramp up to 60/day. The only reason I don't now is to not change too many things for the experiment. Whether I could keep up such a pace would depend greatly on the success of the hybrid method in keeping future Anki reviews from mushrooming, i.e. trading more time up front for less later.
  19. emk

    emk Member

    Joined:
    Jun 3, 2014
    Messages:
    23
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    French
    Basic Languages:
    Egyptian_ancient
    We actually have quite a lot of Middle Egyptian text. They spent thousands of years writing, and the desert is amazingly good at preserving things. But you can get a good overview of the really interesting stuff in a couple hundred pages of reading. The hardest part is that there are actually several languages involved over the course of 5,000 years of written history: Ancient/Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. And Middle Egyptian was a written, literary L2 for a good chunk of Egyptian history, which means that there are weird grammatical variations and unfamiliar vocabulary that occasionally leak through from various spoken dialects, making it difficult to get a handle on the finer shades of meaning.

    So extensive reading can help with Egyptian, but there's almost always going to be an intensive component, too.

    I tried two strategies that were especially useful:
    1. Reading French translations of books I had already read 5 to 10 times in English.
    2. Reading with a pop-up dictionary and highlighting sentences with interesting words for bulk export to Anki.
    As for the mental feel of the process, well, it's easiest to explain in terms of the "model" I mentioned earlier. Here's a picture:

    [​IMG]

    "Decipherable" is what Krashen refers to as "i+1 input." It's the stuff you can somehow understand here, in this particular context, perhaps after cheating or merely staring at it for while. In any given text, all three catagories of language can co-exist: Some parts of the text may be opaque, others may be mostly decipherable, and yet others may be completely automatic.

    Here's how extensive reading contributes to this process:
    1. Cheat. If I encounter an unknown word often enough, I'll eventually see it in a self-explanatory context. Or, you know, I can just use the pop-up dictionary. Or parallel texts. There's a lot of ways to cheat if I get creative.
    2. Consolidate. Extensive reading does massive amounts of work here.
    Here's how Anki sentence cards contribute to this process:
    1. Cheat. When I make Anki cards, I look a lot of things up in the dictionary and mull them over briefly.
    2. Consolidate. If I can't see a word in 20 different contexts, then I can at least re-read the contexts I do have.
    Iversen's word lists and Gold Lists, as I understand them, are mostly about step (1). They're used to quickly bootstrap up to the point where extensive reading can handle step (2).

    One thing that I've found enormously helpful is to be laid-back about entire process. Sure, I forget some words. Sure, I delete Anki cards, or read paper books without a dictionary. But none of this matters, because the whole system is being continuously fed with new input. And if a word actually matters, I'll see it again soon enough, and have another chance to learn it.

    Two of my favorite parts of this process are (1) discovering words in a "perfect" context, and (2) discovering a strange new way to use a familiar word. But I suspect that most of the real work happens well below a conscious level.
    Montmorency, Big_Dog and Peregrinus like this.
  20. Montmorency

    Montmorency New Member

    Joined:
    Jul 28, 2014
    Messages:
    13
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    German
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Danish, Welsh
    Thanks @emk. (I've also now seen your related recent post on HTLAL).

    I should say that after I posted my previous comment about Professor Arguelles, I later remembered that he qualified what he was doing when at the 98% comprehension level by referring to it as unassisted extensive reading, and of course he does do extensive reading before that stage, just as you do, using aids like parallel texts and translations. The main difference is probably that (as he has mentioned a few times in videos and articles/postings), he doesn't do any explicit vocabulary learning (whether computer-aided or manual).

    Thank you for the very lucid explanation of the processes you go through.

Share This Page