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.