After reading this discussion thread and watching Steve's recent video, last night I had a flash if inspiration. As Lingq and Goldlist share common principles, I will combine both in my studies and use them in tandem.

I will continue to read new material through Lingq, tackling subjects that interest me. Lingq is unique, in my experience, in recording words that I already know and presenting suggested translations for the words I don't know. Then, when I come to a word for which I create a link in Lingq, I will also add the word and its translation to my Goldlist book. In doing so I will become intimately involved in this new word, writing it out in my best handwriting and noticing the spelling (especially for Russian, seeing where those dratted soft signs go).

This will keep the Goldlist relevant to my current interests, which is so much better than transferring pre-existing vocabulary lists or copying in from a frequency list. I will continue to read new material through Lingq, thus keeping up my enjoyment of the language. My review sessions will be through distillation of my Goldlist book, which I find more pleasant to do than using flash cards.

There! The best of both worlds.

I re-opened my Goldlist book today and found the last entries dated July 2010, with a lot of distillation ready to be done. Time passes so quickly! I must have been using Lingq ever since. But it is certainly true, as David James has said, that it is possible to go back to a Goldlist book after a long break. In fact the distillation that I have done this evening dropped more than 30% of words as remembered, so I must have been consolidating my knowledge of the language since July 2010.

I finally started my first goldlist today. My approach was to take random Serbian nouns from the Morton Benson dictionary. (Yeah, I know that if Moody's were Linguists they would NOT be giving this dictionary a triple A rating! But it’s literally the best one in existence for this language at the present time, alas…)

I have decided to see how many nouns I can stock up on to begin with, before I start learning verbs in the context of example-sentences (which I will cull from Linguaphone Serbocroat, and from the old edition of Teach Yourself Serbocroat.)

At the moment I am not interested in word-frequency or practical usefulness – rather I just flicked through the dictionary and picked out words which seemed to attract my attention. To add a little twist, I wrote the translations of the Serbian words in German rather than English in my notebook.

I’m not too sure what a psychoanalyst would make of my first 25 words!? Even I was a little bit spooked when I saw what I had selected! Here are the German translations:

Gegenangriff
Schlüsselloch
Trojanisches Pferd
Tagelöhner
Kriegshetzer
Hochverrat
Flammenwerfer
Knast
Soldat
Theater
Speer
Theologe
Bewaffneter
Alptraum
Blockhütte
Blutbad
Klerus
Einheit
Schusswaffe
Kater
Köder
Lockvogel
Salvation Army
Verleumdung
Schlachthof

On the face of it this is not terribly useful or practical. Yet I found that I could immediately translate almost all of the words into German without a dictionary, so it must be stuff that one would eventually learn by living in the country, I guess…

Anyway, let’s hope I can keep it up! :-D

@odiernod "I have known it to be popular for some language teachers to insist that their students take on new personas as that language version of themselves. A form of method acting perhaps?"

Lee Riethmiller?.. if that's not the case, could you provide some more info?

@ Rank: ein wahrer Albtraum! Salvation Army kenne ich noch als Heilsarmee. Ich wünsche Dir viele katerfreie Tage. Möge die GL sich nicht als Zeitverschwendung erweisen; mir hat sie damals Spass gemacht, vieles ist besser hängengeblieben.

Well, the time's up and I just checked my first experimental Goldlist of Serbian nouns.

Firstly, I covered up the Serbian side, and just asked myself whether I could go from the German translations (see my last post above) back into Serbian. Result: I knew 4 of them. I didn't even have to check them - I just knew them. But as regards the remaining 21 nouns, I had not the faintest idea what the Serbian was.

So secondly I looked at the list of Serbian nouns, this time covering up their translations. On seeing the actual Serbian words, I was able to remember the meaning of another 3 words (in addition to the 4 already actively remembered.)

So on the face of it, I guess the method seems to work as per the theory - I still had not far off 30% of the original list of words in my brain. But all the others were completely gone, as if I had never seen them!

I've been seeing just about a 30% retention of all of my words as well, after 15 days, which is the cycle I am doing. I am checking the "easy" way of course, checking for recognition rather than recall.

Which works just fine, Odiernod, because the method is for developing good passive abilities.

I'm in the middle of my second distillation, and I can sometimes recall a bit more than 30%.

Yeah, it's probably better to work with passive recognition rather than active recall (although it'd be kinda nice to have both...)

I'm going to continue working with this method (but maybe not with Serbian!)

Rank, build up your passive quickly, then the active is sure to follow! Works every time. :)

I have found that I enjoy the gold list immensely for physical media. I just went through picture dictionaries in 3 different languages (mainly filled with nouns of household and everyday items one will not normally encounter reading about politics, science, technology, health, etc. For example, after 3 years of Italian, I had never encountered "dog bowl" before, or even had reason to assume they would use a different word than for a human bowl.) I wrote down all the words I didn't recognize in my various headlists. Now I can just happily carry along with my distillations whenever I feel like without having to make another headlist until I have reason to, such as reading another physical book where I don't have an electronic version to LingQ.

When I was at college 20 years ago I learnt about 8 subjects by just using a repartition technique. Writing down phrases over and over again and speaking the phrases out aloud word for word. It worked and I scored distinctions in all the subjects. The information stayed in my brain for way longer than 2 weeks and i studied nonstop hours on end sometimes not sleeping that day. I had a deadline of 2 months .The knowledge stayed there for years, but I must say today I have almost forgotten everything so long term memory isn't for ever ? I agree that the hand, eyes and mouth definitely linked to long term memory... But the only effective way to learn a language fluently is to live there!!!! If you don't use the knowledge your long term memory filters out the unused and deletes it ! My English as become a lot worst because I live in Sweden and don't use it to the extent I did in England!!!!!

30 % sounds like a determined and absolute figure to me which sounds abit daft regardless of what scientists say.People are different and have different intelligence levels which probably contributes more to ability and of coarse some people have photographic memory ;))) or some degree of it maybe ???? Of course if you repeat something you get better at it! Its called practicing ?????? To me cramming is probably a more effective method because you are in effect practicing more.Of course you force things into your long term memory the more you learn the more you remember!!!! Two week idea just sounds stupid like going to the gym once a week and expecting big results !!!! The older you get the harder it gets the sponge drys out!!! And language as no real rules its just a lot of crap made up ideas thrown together full of exceptions !!! Like the bible haha! Writing reading listening and speaking = success nothing more the rest is practice and hardwork! Like everything else!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I wonder if this Goldlist method would be useful for learning the Chinese/Japanese characters? I mean, since it involves writing and all. And since those are so small (relative to words), you can probably fit more than 25 of them on a page.

Still, there's something not quite believable about this, in that it doesn't seem to have a limit. Let's say you were to spend all day doing this: eight hours a day, with breaks once in a while. In one day, you could write down all 2000 of the standard Kanji (the official set of them, the ones in Remembering the Kanji, or whatever). Let's say you had no familiarity with them beforehand.

So, in 14 days, if you do nothing, would you *really* recall about 30% of them (or about 700)? That just doesn't sound believable. I believe I could write down 2000 characters and their meanings in one day (if I spent all day at it), but I don't believe that doing so would cause me to recall 700 of them them 14 days later, if I didn't know any of them when I wrote them (i.e. if that was the first time I had seen them).

Still, it's easy to doubt it, and it'd be a fun experiment. I might try that out, but I heavily doubt I'd recall anywhere near 30% of them if I only saw each once and wrote each one down once. It feels intuitively like you'd need repeated exposure to etch something into long-term memory, and that 30% recall from a single exposure wouldn't work if the language is very different from one's own (e.g. no cognates).

My suspicion is that there are secret memory "hooks" inside words, so that what you are really remembering are those hooks. For instance, if you see nacht, and think "that sounds like night", and see it 14 days later, even if it was the first time you ever saw nacht, you'd probably remember that it meant night, since it's so similar in pronunciation. But if you saw 夜 once, and wrote it down, would you really remember that it means "night", 14 days later, if there's no "hook" in your memory? I'd be surprised if this 30% number is consistent, I'd expect it to be higher in languages with more cognates to one another, and lower in languages with fewer cognates. The 30% number may actually just represent the average cognate similarity rate between two Indo-European languages (and most of the languages studied on this site are Indo-European), rather than the % of everything that the brain sees that it stores in long-term memory.

Haha your funny imyirtseshem. You keep practising and one day maybe you'll become English !!! :)))))) sorry about the bible quote ......

Besides remembering words don't mean you can communicate. it certainly helps you but thats just one small part of learning a language.

I think this way of learning works better by filling your short term memory first. After that going back and repeating the process with the words you learned less frequently. This keeps the words in your memory and eventually your short term memory will naturally become long term memory but with faster results.

Goldlist doesn't impress me at all ! Long term memory still needs repetition to keep it active! If you don't use it you don't need it and you forget it eventually. Repetition repetition repetition is not a new concept it's a natural way of learning something!

I saw a Youtube video of a Scottish guy learning Danish using the gold list method. He'd been doing it for 3 years and admitted that he still had a long way to go before he could feel comfortable with the language. I suggest that he would have probably learnt more in a third of the time using cramming and repetition?

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I spend most of my language learning time in immersion. I let my Gold Lists build themselves naturally by jotting something down every time I run into a "how do I say that?" situation. When I get to 25, that's my next Gold List. I only "actively" make Gold Lists (sparingly) for special cases where I have to bolster a vocabulary in a specific topic and I can't find any good immersion materials for it, such as preparing to visit a client working in an industry I am unfamiliar with. I usually pull this vocabulary out of technical dictionaries. Most of my vocabulary absorption comes from reading and rereading what you call "immersion" materials and listening to podcasts and the radio (and the occasional tv show. Funny how "Reality TV" is the biggest waste of time and brain cells in your native language, but can be some of the most useful content out there for understanding colloquial speech in an L2).

"Also, why is everyone so eager to try anything BUT immersion?" I don't necessarily think they are. I think people are looking for the most convenient or enjoyable tools to fit into their daily schedule. My absolute preferred method to learn vocabulary is to read a good book, in Spanish I am currently reading "Cómo Ganar Amigos e Influir a Las Personas" (which is a great book if you are looking for something to read) and in Italian I am reading "Amore e Sesso nell'Antica Roma"; however carrying books around is not always ideal, and sometimes flashcards are the easiest way to "get some reps in" throughout the day when you only have a few seconds here and there. The idea behind the GoldList is that it is a low-tech SRS system that you can easily take with you anywhere. Having done them on airplanes I can agree. I also have my GoldList notepads sitting near me on my desk at work for when I need a quick brain break here and there, or to do when someone is blabbing about something on a conference call that doesn't pertain to me. It isn't my preferred method, but it fills in the gaps where appropriate.

One last note: GoldLists are great for passive vocabulary, but I have found that the only way to increase your active vocabulary is to struggle to recall words when you need to use them: i.e. chatting and speaking.

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I have to admit that "Caso Cerrado" is a guilty pleasure of mine.

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