I've been spending a lot of time lately taking the audio off of the CD-ROMs from my Danish pronunciation courses and running it into Audacity so I can edit it. As a result, I've blown off reviewing my 2,800 or so Danish Anki cards for over a week now. Yesterday I felt guilty and decided to get back to it and found over 700 cards waiting for me to review. I hammered my way through them all, but it made my head hurt. It's times like this that make me think about wordlists. A while back I read that Iversen uses them, so I tried his method myself and it seems to work. The only problem is that I'm not sure how to keep track of lists I've learned so I know when to review them later. I'm imagining an organisational time-suck of paper flashcard proportions. Maybe you're not even supposed to do long-term reviews with wordlists. I wonder. People say it's important. The way I understand it, according to SRS theory, there's a specific series of graduated time intervals between repeated instances of exposure to new information that results in optimal long-term retention of the information. It sounds scientific, but how did they arrive at those particular time intervals? Whose brain were they using as a test subject? Did they take the results from an enormous brain pool and then average it out? Did they take into account that some brains might be more interested in learning than others? Or does the formula work without exception, one brain fits all, and rule out a rogue exception brain ignoring all these parameters and effectively learning stuff some other way? It's not that I don't think Anki's helped me. I know it has. And I also know that I set myself up to be abused by it. Just because it says I have 700 reviews doesn't mean I have to do them all immediately. It's not going to get mad at me or laugh or call me a failure. It's just a thing and nobody else on earth knows what I'm doing with it. But whenever the reviews pile up due to my own inconsistency, I do them all at once, get a headache and blame the thing because I feel like it knew all along that's what I'd do and let me do it anyway. So, has anyone had success learning vocabulary with wordlists?
Hopefully Iversen will answer your questions, but he might still be traveling. In the meantime, have you read the part of his guide to learning languages devoted to the topic? Guide to Learning Languages, part 4 If you wish to search for other threads on HTLAL re his method, I recommend using a google advanced search (which I keep bookmarked): Google advanced search on HTLAL domain, with the search terms Iversen and word lists. Since you seem done with Anki, I won't add any recommendations about it, other than referencing my posts in the thread here: I am a teenage Anki whore. However, I would like to point out that if spending a lot of time at once on learning vocab is a large part of the problem, then you might still have that with word lists. From reading his posts over there in the past, I have seen Iversen mention spending an evening at a time on them. The difference between his word list method and Anki, is that he spends more/all the time with a given word (as part of the small 5-7 group) up front, which he regards as "doing a proper job." With Anki, you spend the time on a word spread out over time (which I and SRS theory regards as doing a proper job). Obviously the difference is that you can do it without the stress of thinking you have to do something each and every day (though Anki "forcing" you to do that is part of its effectiveness long term to me).
