@odiernod: David James plays this Viktor Huliganov role just if he speaks English. I can’t imagine how this could possibly help his Russian pronunciation. I guess he speaks Russian so good, because he has been learning it for more than 20 years, lived in Russia and has a wife from Belarus.You can read more about his language learning journey in "The Polyglot Project ".
I may have missed something already mentioned in this thread, but are you meant to write the meaning of the words as well, or just the words themselves? What will you gain if you just “learn” the words without knowing what they mean (at least in the beginning)?
Hey Peter,
You write the meanings of the words on the right hand side of the page, at least that’s what I’ve seen from people showing their implementations of the method on Youtube.
I wouldn’t mind trying this for French or Spanish, if anyone has any more advanced or topic-specific vocabulary lists, please let me know 
Come to think of it, I might as well just take lists of words from my vocabulary section on LingQ…
Peter, you can google frequency lists for each specific language, and start with those. In my case, I got a 10,000 word list for French and one for German, and started going backwards from least frequent to most frequent, skipping words I already knew. I suppose when I get to the two or three thousand top words I’ll just stop working with it because they’re the most common words in the language, and I already know them.
Thanks, odiernod. I had already done the sums. Assuming this method works, to learn 25 words a day (or so), one would spend an hour spread over at least an hour and 40 minutes each day.
Study, wait until short-term memory has faded, see what is left in long-term memory, and go on from there. It’s very elegant.
And writing out definitions longhand is the way to learn them, in my experience. At least for me flashcards and electronic flashcards have only been good for checking progress, rather than making it. Took me years to figure that out. Fortunately for me, writing out longhand was the way I started out. Unfortunately for me, I tried using flashcards, instead, for a long time in the middle.
This method sounds good. It would be nice to see how paradigms are written down, how words are combined in a distillation, etc.
I suppose it would take a bit of time to do. Let’s say you’ve gone through your frequency list and you’ve now got fifty words. You would still have to look up all of those words and choose the meaning you want to assign it (or translation). Then you would be able to actually start writing them, assuming I’ve understood it correctly.
Just to add a different perspective, here are my views.
I listened to a bit of David’s video. I agree that a lot of deliberate learning only goes into short term memory and does not stick. This applies to words, to declension tables and even grammar rules. I still do these things, because in my experience they help me notice things. However, the vast majority of my learning time is spent on reading and listening. Since I only have an hour or two a day to spend, I really don’t have another hour for a list or SRS work.
However, reading at LingQ achieves much of the same. As I read, and LingQ new words, and ignore words I know, and check the odd yellow word which I have forgotten, and move these LingQs up in status on my page, making my pages lighter and lighter in colour, I am actually reading and reviewing mostly high frequency words, and words that have appeared often in my reading. At the same time I am increasing my familiarity with the language through reading and listening to the same material.
How many words per day can we learn in this way? I don’t know for sure, but it is a lot, certainly over 100 I think, in Czech. If I import newspaper articles today there are only 10-15% new words, including names. There used to be a lot more.
I agree with David that writing things out long hand helps us learn. I certainly did that in Chinese. However, computers are so convenient today, and perhaps I have become lazier, I just do not find the time to write things out. I could never maintain a gold list. On the other hand I am very motivated to bring in new content in Czech, read, LingQ and listen, and my vocabulary just grows.
It may be a good technique, but I know that it’s something I’m unlikely to do. I use my SRS when I have short, 5 or 10 minutes periods of time during my day. I actually set my session time limit to 5 minutes. I have Anki on my computer and on my iPhone. I mostly use premade decks featuring sentences. I never study just word alone. For the sentences that aren’t premade, I took them out of textbooks. I use Anki mostly for Japanese, and just continue it because I’ve been doing it a while. I have something like 15,000 or more sentences in the system - many of which I haven’t seen yet. It’s also good reading practice as the sentences are in Kanji, and the hiragana is in the answer field.
Mostly I do Anki because I can’t think of anything else that I could do during these short little 5 minute spurts of free time I sometimes have during the day. Often it adds up to 20 or 30 minutes by the end of the day.
If I were to sit down for 20 minutes or 30 minutes, I’d probably prefer to do a lesson in LingQ, or read a chapter of a book or something, rather than maintain this wordlist. And I know, just based on my personality, that maintaining this system on a daily basis is something that just wouldn’t happen.
Steve, I think that LingQ would be more effective. However, the goldlist method is certainly a good method and it might suit some people better.
For me, I am going to try it for two of my languages because I can’t do them here at LingQ. Without being able to use LingQ, we need to be able to use other effective methods and I think that this one could be effective.
Agreed Imy…everyone has their own favourite way of learning, and LingQ reflects how I learned languages even before LingQ with a major effort on listening and reading and learning words from that content. I am sure the goldlist method works, David is living proof. I think I would use it for a language for which resources were not readily available.
Of course, just doing this method alone would seem pointless to me, so it can be easily combined with extensive listening and reading. Underlining words, adding them to goldlists and working through them. You’d have a dictionary lookup session every day, making as many lists as you felt like doing, and the rest of the time doing input activities mixed with a little grammar here and there. Sounds like a solid system to me.
Peter,
What I do is open my frequency list file on the computer and have an online dictionary ready in another window. I go through the frequency list and as soon as I find a word I don’t know, I look it up in the dictionary and write it down on my notebook along with the meaning. Repeat until you’ve got 25 words or your 25 min run out. I can usually get 20 words down this way.
You’re supposed to do it in a relaxed fashion, enjoying yourself and the whole process.
This method is supposed to be used in conjunction with other methods, of course, and I personally think it’s best suited for the more advanced vocabulary that you don’t see all the time, though it works with any vocabulary.
When I read David James’s contribution to The Polyglot Project last year it appealed to my nerdy side. I promptly rushed out, bought beautiful notebooks, filled my fountain pens and started a 6-months long regime (French advanced vocab).
I was able to get ink in four colours and it all was great fun for a while. I loved writing the ever-decreasing lists and the vocab seemed to stick much better than usual. I was able to speak with much greater confidence/fluency, but just couldn’t keep up the lists after a while. So I returned to simply reading and listening which seems the easiest thing for me to maintain.
I may return to the Goldlist method for a while for another language - after all we have enough vocab and definitions within LingQ - if ever I return to serious language learning.
@SanneT
I didn’t know about Mr James’ contribution to the polyglot book before Sebastian pointed it out in his post yesterday. I spent several hours last night reading most it, and I agree it makes pretty interesting (and unusual) reading.
I liked the way he describes learning Italian in classes at school, while teaching himself Russian at home using Linguaphone and the older version of “Teach Yourself”. The result: he got a top mark in the ‘O Level’ Russian Exam, and a lower mark in the ‘O Level’ Italian exam - leaving his Italian teacher entirely perplexed! :-0
His recollections of having a little run-in with the KGB while on a student exchange in the old USSR during the 1980s is also quite funny in the telling (although the actual experience of a KGB-third-degree was doubtless anything other than ‘funny’ for a student 19 or 20 years of age!)
Compared to LingQ, the GoldList method has one big advantage: you have to WRITE the stuff you want to learn, and you have to write the stuff that doesn’t stick AGAIN. Within LingQ you only click, click, click the words, if you are lazy, you use Google Translate and do a “QuickLingQ”. This may be fast and easy going, but will it stick in your mind? Mostly not.
During the last months I did a modified GoldList method. I read a book that is not available on the net and wrote sentences with unknown words in a notebook. I only used my electronic dictionary app on my iPod touch to look up unknown words. Every day I read for about 45 minutes, and I wrote one page with sentences with unknown words in context. Later I transfered these to my SRS and repeated them as usual. My observation: this stuff seems to stick much better than the stuff I did on the computer ALONE, e.g. within LingQ.
The writing seems to have a major impact on the learning. And I like to review my written sentences in my notebook WITHOUT computer. Sometimes I try to avoid sitting in front of a computer to learn: too many distractions, and typing words or clicking seems inefficient to me.
I tried the Goldlist method some years ago. I filled two notebooks with Russian words and made four and five “destillations”. In my very personal case it didn’t help me too much. There are words, specially in Russian, which you can’t learn only by reading 5 or even ten times. Not even when you write them down you will remember them easily. Personally I prefer to work with ANKI. This program has become part of my daily routine. Every morning at six o’ clock I sit in front of my sreen with a cup of tea and check my Russian flashcards. That works. …I’m sorry Huliganov.
Anki is a great idea in theory, but I find the work of making the decks cumbersome and actually reviewing them ungodly boring. I’ve been doing this goldlist now for two days, and even though its too early for me to tell it already feels more comfortable for me than Anki. Only time will tell…
I forgot to mention, I am getting my “vocabulary” from my list of not yet known lingqs, sorted by oldest created date. I am then taking care to only pick words that do not require too much context to understand, i.e. words that describe concrete concepts such as physical objects.