Thanks for the support.
I might have gotten up above 1 hour per day, everyday, at the worst of the 5000 words. It was mostly about an hour per day for 6-8 weeks
Early on I was releasing about 200 news words per day (can’t remember excactly) and I knew about 1000 non-cognates starting out.
(About 1 year of fairly recent but poor high school French worth becase we are false beginners. I took 4 years of French 55 years ago and I’m would be mad about how poor it was – if there was any point – knowing what I know now. They taught us so much that was just wrong and taught us so little through doing it badly.)
If you know SRS (Anki) systems you’ll realize that releasing 200 cards per day can easily create days with many times that number of reviews due: At the worst, for about 10 days or so it was up around 800 cards per day which I did throughout the day, mostly in dead time.
It was about a month to get through the whole deck 5000 / 200 = 25 days but the first week or so the release rate was down around 100 before I increased it to get the words loaded into my head quickly.
Once the first pass was through I could pretty much read with dictionary support, first my own arrangement of dictionaries (Primarily Linguee, GoogleTranslate, Wiktionaraire, and a list of almost 3000 non-obvious cognates I bought that included weak mnemonics but primarily a lot of etymology which helped with memorization.)
It took about 2 months to get the majority of it to “mature” – which means the cards are only reviewed something like once per month or longer. It’s been on maintenance now for while at 99% plus and it runs bout 60-80 cards per day.
You can read some of the others posts to see what dates (from late Dec start) my Anki deck reached various levels of maturity.) Some of it might be over in the original post that is here on LingQ somewhere. After a bit I realized this “Personal Accountability” was expected in this Challenges section of the forum.
My theory that is different from most of the experts seem to recommend is to “Load the first 5000” word into my brain as rapidly as possible/practical so that free reading of “comprensible input” becomes possible with a variety of intersting material.
It seems obvous to me this is a recommendation that is sorely underrated.
The sooner you can read most of the material you enjoy the sooner the massive comprehensible input can “take over” the main learning load.
The goal is not to primarily “learn” the words - thus why I think of this as brain “Loading”, but rather to get them recognizable so that reading them in context becomes clear enough to be self-sustaining.
Send me a private email and I can probably help you find the old Glossika stuff. HerbMartin at that Google mail place.
To me, the “new” Glossika isn’t even the same program even if it uses (some of?) the same sentences. The old audio program from 2016 is rapid fire, there is no stopping unless you stop the playback manually.
You get hit with new prompts in English/native language almost faster than you can say and listen to the correct answer for about 25 minutes straight per “lesson” which is called a “Day”.
I was really excited at the prospect of using the web version and prepared to buy at year at about $100+ until I tried it.
It was far more than just not being easy to put on the phone and do in the car or while biking. It didn’t even feel like the same program but rather like “just another language site”.
I do 2 per day, occasionally sneaking in an extra one, with a regrettable lapse of 10 days once, and there are 312 “days” (lessons) in the full 3 levels.
Last night I finished Lesson 20 of Level 2, or 124 of 312 with 188 to go…
Doing 1 per day will take more than 10 months even if there are no lapses. That’s too long for me to commit – doing 2 is harder but once I am on the bike with the audio running it’s easier to keep going than to do “another day” 6 months from now.
It’s not a sure bet I’ll finish, but it seems more likely than not at this point.
I seriously doubt that even 1% of the people that bought this program would ever finish all 312 – my guess would put it at more likely 1 in a 1000 or less.
This is probably the reason the program had to be changed so radically when it went to the web and a subscription basis. You can’t expect people to keep paying if they stop doing the program after a month or 2 and in the current environment you can’t sell a year’s membership to everyone due to competition from 100’s of other language programs.
The program on the web is fundamentally different. As to recording your wife that is pretty good as a substitute, but very time consuming 1000 x 3 items, and you really need SOME form of pseudo-random prompts and responses.
If you decide to do this look in “JoyTan” (I am a member of his Slack group) and he knows how to produce long audio visual language programs with some automation support. We’ve been talking.
My guess is you would never get it done as a “hobby” level activity and it would eat up a lot of time to produce.
If I didn’t have Glossika I would probably be using Pimsleur, Michel Thomas or similar. I like “Learn in Your Car” best but there isn’t enough of it available. Only about 100 or so short lessons (5 minutes?)
To be very clear, getting started and staying going with the Glossika audio program is very difficult for me – but it works.
LingQ is easy by comparison even at the “insane level”.
Anki is easy by comparison, even at 400+ reviews per day.
Doing the 5000 words vocabulairy is essential in my opinion and doing the reading (whether you use LingQ or not) is also essential.
Doing some form of audio program is also essential to develop speaking and fluidity…
I don’t do “grammar” as such – at all – and no consider that “grammar is evil” and actually harms our progress if you “learn” any grammar beyond you ability to immediately use it.
Grammar is for me a “clean-up” progress – which is true in our school systems also. No child learns grammar before being able to speak, read, and even write fairly fluently.
When you “know” grammar it just slows your speaking to a stop and interferes actively with any attempts to write simply.
I now treat “grammar” as a review occasionally or as “vocabulary” and currently I am review all of the major tenses with BrainScape decks (another flashcard system) but it takes me only an hour or 2 to “load” an entire tense/mood conjugation set into my head for most of the common regular and irregular verbs because I mostly know them or have familiarity alread.
I also worked out a “patten” for French verbs which gives me quick mnemonics for most French verbs. This only works for about 90% of 90% of all verb conjugations but like “5000 words” is covers 99% of what I’ll use in real production and lets me read easily.
BTW, Unlike a lot of common advice, I consider making the majority of your own review decks or audio programs to be a poor use of time – I do add to and edit my lists or build special purpose versions.
It is far more efficient to make use of existing decks – at least for 80-90% of your work) than to try to build the perfect deck.
I buy some word lists and grab all sorts of free lists – though as a programmer it is common for me to take an existing “list” that isn’t set up for flashcards and convert it, or to take the words from (sets of) books by dumping them to text and just “uniquing and sorting” them.
Even then my project to load “all the locutions” from Wiktionaire hasn’t completed. I keep putting it aside because I’m too busy learning to make more decks.
BrainScape is not a “great” system – Anki is far better. But as many free decks as Anki has, BrainScape probably has 100 TIMES more and they are pretty high quaility though no multimedia as far as I know.
Last, if you look elsewhere in these threads you’ll see that I use mnemonics and etymology extensively to make it quicker and more efficient to do brain loading of the vocabulary.
