Self-Challenge!

[risgrynsgrot (Risgrynsgröt)]

I’m going to see how many words (entries) I can feasibly learn in a day (and month), you can join me if you want.

The rules:

— Always eat (a healthy meal) before first beginning to learn/review in the morning. This is so your brain works better.
— Review words as soon as they come up for reviewing. If you see a word is due, you can’t put it off!
— You always have to do a word’s first review on the same day as you first learned that word. That means no learning past a time at night where you’d be too tired to review 4 hours later.

My method for getting tons of words in:

1. Set your “words to learn per session” at 5.

2. Learn just 5 words each from 3-4 levels in a row (learn 5, go to next level, learn 5, next level). Repeat until finished. Your course will progress like this:

When you finish those 3-4 levels, start on 3-4 new ones. I can easily learn 100 words a day with this method, but doing things normally I usually end up learning 40 words a day at best.

After each pass through my levels, I check my dashboard to see if I have new words to water. The rest of the evening, and during my breaktimes when I need a longer break, is spent on stuff like adding in more vocabulary words to the course I’m memorizing from.

In order to keep this thread clean, if you’re planning on doing this self-challenge then just keep editing your same old post instead of posting a lot. If you hit a big milestone, then feel free to make a new post. Make a post below that tallies up the words you’ve learnt! I’ve put mine first, as a sample.

[risgrynsgrot (Risgrynsgröt)]

Normal average: 20-40 words a day, if I’m lucky.
Goal: To finish all the words in my Genki 2 textbook before autumn (that’s around 3.000 words)

Today’s words: around 140 learned
This week: 280
This month: xx

[cos]

Go into one course and learn 5 words from one level. Then skip to the next level and learn 5 from that level. Then do the same for the next 1-2 levels, so your course looks something like this:

While that works well for most courses, I want to point out that some of us create courses where order matters.

For example in my Hebrew course a later level may build up some phrases using words you learned on earlier levels, or maybe make use of a grammatic concept that an earlier level tried to teach you by showing you several examples of.

Also, sometimes there are informational (multimedia) levels that give important background for the levels that come after them. My Hebrew course has this as well - for example, there are several places where you learn some vocabulary words that are going to be used in a song, then the next level has a youtube video of that song, and then the next level has translations of new phrases that you heard in that song. If you didn’t learn all the vocab first, and then watch the video, the level after it may not make much sense, or may be much harder or more confusing than intended.

Most courses aren’t like this, but there are a fair number of courses that are like this: they build up concepts, and order matters. So before you jump about the levels out of order, read through the material on each level (including the multimedia levels!) and figure out if this is a course where that makes sense to do.

[risgrynsgrot (Risgrynsgröt)]

Ah well, it doesn’t matter what method you use for the self-challenge, that’s just the one that works well for me.

[roflcopterlol]

I have been doing a similar challenge for about 3 weeks in Chinese, and I have managed 50 words per day, and my recall rate stayed between 85-90%, but recently I started to dip to around 75-80% , so I don’t know if I can maintain such a method without burning out.

[risgrynsgrot (Risgrynsgröt)]

From what I’ve read about memory, if your memory techniques are good you should have about the same rate every time even if it’s day after day. But stuff like diet and how well you slept really does affect how well you do (it also affects your ability to concentrate, and motivation). That’s also why I have those rules for myself above — I’ve noticed myself that if I learn words when I’m tired, thirsty or hungry, or before I’ve eaten anything in the morning, my recall rate is lower later on when it comes time to review. If I eat any kind of processed food (such as white sugar), it affects all three things negatively, for some days afterwards.

Also, in my case, I realized that with Esperanto I have an average recall rate of about 90%, but if I try to memorize the same words using English (my native language!) it’s about 70%. I think this is because you’re recalling less and your brain is working less overall when you use Esperanto — left is “opposite-right”, south is “opposite-north”, summer is “opposite-winter”, cram school is “extra learn-place” etc (the normal meaning of cram is of course, “shove in”, stuff like having to sort all that out likely hinders your brain slightly even if you don’t realize it).

I’ve also definitely noticed that, usually, the longer the definition the harder the word is to remember. So instead of “at/on/in a seashore” it should be “ashore”, and then you can twist grammar a little, “in school” becomes “aschool”, “at the bank” is “abank”… And of course, stuff like if you have the two definitions “shoe” and “shoe, boot”, it’s easier on your memory if you change the order so the same word isn’t first — “shoe”, “boot, shoe”.

Not having direct translations of the words you’re learning also slows you down — instead of “company president” just say “company boss”, instead of “town mayor” just say “town boss”, as that’s what the hanzi/kanji is saying anyway…

So you might be able to change something about how you write definitions and see if that helps in any way… I’ll see if my retention rate starts dropping after 3 weeks, seems like a good thing to watch out for!

[roflcopterlol]

I completely agree with you, and I think that the length of the definition is important, but what also gets me is that I am now running into Chinese words without easy English translations. So, some of them will be a sentence. Such as one Chinese character I learned this week was translated to “hold or carry with both hands facing up”. Which is a long definition, one with a complication as you mention “hold or carry” instead of picking one, and also the “with both hands facing up” . Some definitions have weird grammar quirks as well that you just have to memorize which I think contributes to frustration and exhaustion. Because if I use memrise, it claims my recall is 60-70%, but I know a huge number of those are typos, or are definitions similar to the one I outlined above. So when I started recording by hand the ones I get wrong and reviewing those outside of Memrise, I started to see some benefits, and also I see that the number of words I actually forget is much much lower.

I agree though, I set out to learn 5,000 Chinese words in 6 months, and the most important thing is sleep, followed by regular running and optimal nutrition. The only reason I am experiencing burnout or rather… a slight reduction in the enjoyment of learning these new words, is because I am forgetting more due to lack of sleep. I wish there were easier ways to “tag” words I am learning so that I can enter notes next to the words. Like… create permanent tags on certain words I learn which would say “8+ hours of sleep, wrote the words down twice before going through memrise’s flashcard game, etc etc”. That way we could better quantify how different factors influence our recall rate on a longer time scale(assuming each day is as easy or hard as the last).