Do you have an exit plan for isolated vocabulary study?

I'm not saying there's no such thing as the affective filter, but that it is too often and too easily allowed to become an excuse. Students disengaged? Affective filter! Suddenly, the teacher is absolved of the responsibility to critiqcally analyse their teaching techniques, because they can blame failure to learn on a "closed" student and they can try to "lower" the student's affective filter, and if they fail, it's not their fault.

In reality, there are three main sources of student disengagement:

1. material that is too hard
2. material that is too easy
3. material that is not relevant

Tinkering with the affective filter can only deal with the third category, and only in certain circumstances. You can alter the language slightly to make it seem relevant, and you can talk to the student and sometimes convince them that it is relevant (but more commonly they'll tell you they understand, but they're not convinced). But in the meantime, the problems of complexity and ordering go unresolved.

True. However, these identified similarities are the starting point for further studies. They suggest theories to be proved; they do not prove theories that have been posited previously - Krashen asked if case studies were scientific, and that's the only scientific way to use case studies.

Seems simple. But you're confusing two things: "conscious study" and "level of effort". Children go through a lot of tears and frustration due to not being understood - children's learning is not effortless. Carefully plan ned courses of study can require little or no effort. I feel the first few CDs of Michel Thomas's courses are both effective and effortless (my first experience was the Spanish course, where I spent almost two hours with the CDs before realising I was actually very hungry and went and made dinne). Others say the same about Pimsleur. Others still, Assimil (I had insomnia in a hotel once and did over half the Catalan course in one sitting).

Frustration is the opposite of learning, and effort normally implies frustration.

Many linguistic functions are abstract concepts that cannot be verified by sight. There are whole classes of hypotheticals and impossibles -- eg "If I had been there, I would have stopped him." These are things that children appear to be cognitively incapable of learning until a certain point in their mental development. The difference between language and maths and physics isn't huge.

Now as adults, we have the cognitive ability to understand this sort of theoretical language, but it still remains invisible to sight, and therefore extremely difficult to learn by exposure. But Michel Thomas got his students to build these constructions on the 2nd or 3rd day of class - it's actually pretty easy to do.

Comprehensible input might teach you a lot of words, but for grammar, it's deathly slow. And right at the beginning, you have to simplify the teacher's language to the point that it is a very poor approximation for natural language. Why start "i+1" language with a very low value of i? Why not blitz the grammar à la Thomas and start with a high i, which you can then expand rapidly, as you'll be able to engage with actual native materials?

My experience of truly comprehensible input is very different from what Krashen describes. It's very rare that I've intuited a new grammatical function from exposure (although it has happened - I learnt from Àguila Roja saying "hé vuelto a matar," for example). Instead, I've always felt that I only really understand language that I could produce. For me, the +1 is stuff that I "know", but that isn't automatic. There are many things I've learnt in class and forgotten, only to be reminded by hearing it in context.

That's a nice deck, and huge. Your plan sounds like a plan.

Anki, by the way, is well below 25% of my study time, excepting on those sequences of days when I've almost exactly no time for study and then the Anki treadmill cajoles me to at least do Anki before turning in for the night. If I found it boring I wouldn't likely use it at all.

Since this thread is now going further off track, I would like to summarize my views.

1) Isolation - Does not exist for most learners. Despite Big_Dog defining it for himself as not to include example phrases and sentences on cards, this is in fact context despite not being part of a longer text. The meaning of a word is influenced mainly by the other words in immediate proximity to it. Also as long as Anki/Iversen lists/GL are used to support course texts or even just free extensive reading, then such learning is not in isolation since one only gains an initial and partial meaning from those methods, and reinforces and expands it by reading and listening.

2) Lexical Threshold - Acquiring the amount of vocabulary necessary to reach the lexical threshold, i.e. 15,000-20,000 words, and in a timeframe less than 2 years, is my highest priority. Any other considerations of "balance" must bend to that priority. Rigidly limiting the time spent on learning new words plus reviews of those already learned or partially learned with Anki to some pet theoretical figure of 25% or whatever, would mean either spending more hours per day on study, which I don't have, or taking two to three times longer to learn that vocabulary which would equal years and years to acquire the vocabulary I need to hit the lexical threshold. That is unacceptable to me.

3) "Balance" - I in fact spend time every day on courses or grammar study and listening to German radio and watching German television. I don't really count that listening/watching as part of my study time, since I steal that time away from watching TV in English. If I am going to watch the boob-tube, it might as well be in German.

4) Production/active skills - I have not spent the least amount of time on these the past year and don't believe that I needed to, as the vast majority of my time using German in the future will be passively. I still see no evidence that I can't relatively quickly activate my skills, and I do believe it will be far easier with a much larger vocabulary and the large amount of passive input in reading and listening that I have had over that year. A lot of vocabulary and a little grammar can take one very far in passive skills.

Then to activate, since the fundamental meaning of most of the words encountered will then be known, concentration can be focused on grammatical accuracy, discourse markers and lexical chunks and usage in general, i.e. deeper layers of comprehensible input and output. And the gaps in same will now be easier to comprehend and fill for speaking and writing. I see no reason to fight against a severe lack of vocabulary and grammar understanding to artificially produce a limited and inflexible amount of output at an earlier stage, when it will be far easier later after a lot of input and learned vocabulary. However I have from the beginning read out loud, albeit without feedback, to get my mouth used to pronouncing German.

5) Exit plan - When I have acquired 20K+ words, partially or completely, then I will likely stop using Anki for German and add that time to more reading as well as thinking and writing and some speaking. And if I am going to do FSI type drills for automaticity, or active wave type of translations, then I would rather do them then, or even now, than from the beginning. I suspect that if more learners used FSI type of courses only after acquiring a significant vocabulary and input, that many more would both like it and stick with it. Or just make their own drills and exercises then.

6) Extensive reading vs. wordlists - I will be much more willing to just do a couple initial courses and then rely on extensive reading for some other languages like Romance ones. But maybe not. Anki has served me very well with German and should do so as well in other langs.

7) Finishing a language - Going from the experiences of others, it takes years and years and enormous amounts of input to learn usage to any high degree, let's say 10 years for the purposes of this illustration. But one first has to get to the point to start that process, which in my mind is after acquiring those 15-20K words. I would rather that initial process take a year or two instead of 5 or 10, after which I still had another 10 (or whatever).

Now there is an alternative. Which is to learn only about 3000 words, but learn all the idiomatic and grammatical uses of those words (except for co-uses that require other, lower frequency vocabulary), be able to speak and write to a shallow depth concentrated around transactional type of situations while still not being able to read a newspaper as well as a native high school graduate, and then call yourself fluent with no limiting adjectives describing the actual low level of proficiency associated with that low bar definition. That won't be me.

Yeah, of course you can improve, what I meant to say is that if you're studying a related language and getting lots of input, then adding anki to the mix with thousands of recognition sentences (a la AJATT) seems to me like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If you have to know, I do SRS for French and English, that are closely related to my native Spanish. In the case of English the massive boost in understanding didn't come thanks to SRS but through a combination of a 30 min./day listening (starting from 0% comprehension at BBC World News) + extensive reading with pop-up look-ups and the occasional wordlist (in digital format, without any consistent method). I did all that once I was done with Assimil + one of the Cambridge courses on English pronunciation. Finally, I started SRS when I could understand between 60-95% of the blog posts I used to read back then. I did use to write, but all in all, my approach was lopsided towards passive as I clearly neglected conversation and spelling.

With French is a completely different story, I use SRS to try and keep my passive knowledge of the written language, which until a point I manage, but nothing further than that. I just need to find the time and learn French pronunciation just as I did with English. Until that is just a half-learn language with tons of fossilised errors in pronunciation.

Unless it took you extremely long to activate your English, then Q.E.D. as to my quote and the balance issue.

(Naturally if you were in fact severely harmed by mainly passive learning for a long stretch which caused you severe problems in activating your English, I will say that one negative counter-example doesn't prove a thing .)