Creating A Word List For Language Study

So I'm trying to come up with a “master list” of English vocabulary words that I can use as a base to translate into other languages. My thought is that if I come up with a list of words that covers a good deal of the gamut of concepts that English speakers express, then translating those words into the target language should provide a good basis for plundering towards fluency in that language, either in flash cards, the creation of oral materials that reinforce those words, or other language learning materials.

Don't ask WHY I'm doing this. There is no good answer for that. It's just a function of the set of things that I do.

I came up with the seed of this idea a few years ago, when I made a Spanish deck of flash cards for a friend of mine. I simply took the 1000 most frequent English words, put them in a single column in a spreadsheet, copied that column and pasted it in Google Docs, translated the whole column into Spanish, and then pasted the Spanish version in the next column over from the English version in the spreadsheet. I proofread a little and did some tweaking to correct some errors (since I'm fluent in Spanish), and then imported the whole thing into Anki. Then I created some instructions in the programming language that created a new set of flash cards that reversed the order of the first set (the first set was all English-Spanish, so I created a set that was Spanish-English). There, an easy-peasy way to make 2000 flash cards (actually, it was less than 2000 because some of the words were duplicative).

So, I wanted to put a little more thought and effort into making a list that would take one to a pretty sophisticated knowledge of the language. I wanted to have an even mix of frequency and utility, and have the list have several levels that progressed from basic to advanced. In doing so, I encountered some interesting problems (well, interesting to me anyway), which I'll talk about later.

I started with the Dolch Word List. This is a list of 315 words created by Charles Dolch in 1936, and published in 1948. It is subdivided into pre-primer through third grade utility words, and a separate list of nouns. The list has a few words that, while I wouldn't call them “archaic” due to the age of the list, probably have shifted somewhat in their frequency and their utility. But it's a good start for my first layer.

Next I went to the 1000 most frequent words in English, and broke it into two halves, the first 500, and the next 500. I picked out all the words in each half that had not already been covered by the Dolch List (by creating a formula in Open Office Calc that weeded out the words already present), and these two lists became my next two layers. Now I've got 1031 words, which is interesting in that it means there are 31 words in the Dolch List that are not in the 1000 most frequent. One slight problem I see in dealing with frequency is that the frequency of words in another language might not be the same as the frequency of English words, but I figure that most languages used by modern industrial societies will speak to a similar enough range of human experiences that it will be close enough. If I get to analyzing a language like Yanomamo, all bets may be off on that.

Then I turned to the list of words in Basic English (turning away from the focus on frequency back to utility). This is a simplified subset of the English language that is designed for teaching English as a Second Language. There are about 850 words in Basic English. I used all the words in the list of Basic English that were not previously duplicated in the previous layers, and those became my fourth layer. There is a superset of Basic English called Special English, that consists of about 1500 words, and is the vocabulary used for broadcasting by the Voice of America (the theory being that a simplified vocabulary will be must more understandable by foreign listeners). I decided not to draw from Special English, because I figured it would mostly duplicate my next lists.

Then I turned to the General Service Headwords List, a list of about 2000 words created in 1953 taken from a compendium of common English written sources for the purpose of language learning. The General Service List (GSL) is the first list I ran across to substantially segment out lemmatisations. A lemma is a different inflection of a core word, for example, the formation of “running,” “runner, ” and “ran” from the word “run.” Not only can there be different forms, but the word can also be transformed into a different part of speech, such as a noun made from a verb. And some of the lemmas can be substantially different, as in the formation of “better” from “good.” So there are two GSL lists, one of just core words (headwords), and one with inflected forms of those words. I took the headwords, and eliminated duplicates, and this was my fifth layer.

At this point, I'm starting to note some fairly significant problems. The biggest one is that categories of words that should be kept together are not kept together, and it is hard for me to tell if the sets of those words are missing important members. For instance, some colors are in the Dolch list, some are in Basic English, and some are in the GSL. I haven't even gotten to colors like “mauve” or “turquoise”, just the basic palette. And numbers are all over the place, too. Geographical directions, articles of clothing, kitchen utensils...the most basic functional groupings, are scattered and incomplete.

Another problem is that I have eliminated homophones. Yes, my list is homophobic (discriminatory, though, only in a homophonic fashion). Because there are words like “march”, “may”, and “august” (actually, “august” comes later), those months have been wiped out from my list, and I have to add them back in.

Then, I turned to the General Service List, which has about 800 more words than the GSL, but has coverage of more concepts in fewer words, and eliminates some words that have fallen more out of favor in the 60 years since the first list was created. Once again, I'm still just adding in the headwords.

My next stop is the Academic Word List (AWL), a supplement to the GSL, with words that are a little more erudite or hoity-toity. So now I've got a little over 3000 words, mostly just headwords.

My next two layers are from lists of lemmas of the GSL and the AWL. There are a LOT of words here, though not a lot of new concepts. But this is going to help with structure, morphology, lexicology, syntax and grammar. Now my complete list is a little over 9000 words.

So that's where I am at with this right now. It still needs a lot of shaping. I need to get more defined on functional grouping, fill in any holes in the structure, and redistribute the levels of learning. I know folks like Charles Berlitz and Paul Pimsleur have probably dealt with matters like this in their own way but I just want to take a fresh look at it in a methodical fashion, albeit one that does not arise from any disciplined training whatsoever. What's the worst that can happen?

High-Impact Aerobic Vocabulary Interval Training

Well, I didn't plan on this when I got to the gym today.  But when I stepped on the elliptical machine and started studying my Polish flash cards, I got an idea that I wanted to try out.

I worked out to a moderate pace, which for me is getting to a heart beat of about 130.  I kept that up for a few minutes, and then concentrated on one word on my flash cards.  After looking at the word for about thirty seconds, I started sprinting furiously on the machine until my heartbeat got up to 145, all the time concentrating on memorizing the word and its meaning.  When my heartbeat hit 145, I would then move back to lower-impact activity, slowing down on the machine.  Of course, my heartbeat would continue rising for a short time after I slowed down the activity, usually to about 160-165 (once it rose to 173), and I would keep up the slower activity, relaxing my body and ramping it down more and more, and watch my heart rate go lower from the peak.

When my heart rate would reach 115, I would pick out another word, and start the process again.  Thirty seconds at the "resting" rate of 115, then furiously sprint-pedaling up to 145, lowering the intensity and watching the heart rate go up and then down again, and then starting over with another word at 115.

Here are the cards I took with me to the gym today:

In case you're wondering, where there is a star, it signifies all-new material.  Not that you are wondering.

I got through the first card and about halfway through the second card, and worked out for about an hour.  My average heart rate for the workout was 128.  Then I did review in the sauna afterwards (not so great because the light was burned out, but there was some light coming in from the glass in the door).

I have no idea if this is a successful study strategy per se.  I would actually tend to guess that compared to a control group, it's not terribly great.  Usually studying while exercising is harder, because you're concentrating on doing many other things, and because your body's oxygen and processes are busy with other stuff.  I've found that the more I ramp up the intensity of my exercise, the harder it is to concentrate on the material I am trying to study while I am exercising.  The fact that I only got through one and a half cards in an hour is a little slow for my usual card study too.  Still, both exercise and study are made better by mixing up the routine, so there is surely some benefit to be gained from a new and fresh approach.

But being the freak that I am, I wish that I had more data about this experience.  Like how long it takes from 115 to 145, and then to peak, and then back down again.  Or whether there is variance in time in the intervals as more intervals are completed.  I'm sure there is more stuff I will think of that I wish I had captured data on.  Maybe later.  Now it's time to pay a visit to the chipotle sun-dried tomato hummus that I made a few days ago.

Verbs Are Hard, And Learning Words In General

I don't know about you, but I find learning verbs harder than learning just about every other part of speech.  I'd say that for me they are about ten times harder than learning every other type of word.  And Polish verbs just seem particularly difficult.  Polish is a fairly alien language for a native English speaker, and it's probably not much easier for anyone else who doesn't already speak a Slavic language.

I find myself reading the average sentence and doing pretty well with most words in the sentence except for the big gaping hole of meaning where the verb sits.  Actually, it's not as bad for me as it used to be because I've learned a decent number of verbs at this point.  But verbs are still the weakest part of my Polish vocabulary.   Maybe the first fifty verbs were relatively easy, but after that, learning verbs turns into a slog from hell.  There's a reason that you see books devoted solely to verbs in a given language.  And there's a reason you might not see, say, a book entitled "500 Italian Adjectives" (Now I'll probably get a comment from someone who has a book on 500 Italian Adjectives.  Still, if such a book exists, I don't think it disproves my point).

Often I study verbs by themselves, in isolation from other vocabulary, because I have to put in so much more study to get them down.  If I rotate them in with other words on the flash cards I am studying, I'll get a high percentage of all the other words, and then nothing when it comes to the new verbs I am looking at.  I can look at them over and over again, and still get no glimmer of recognition.  I read somewhere online that somebody suggested that you picture verbs as being on a sports field, like a football field, and picture somebody moving with the action the verb embodies.  Yeah, that didn't really help me at all; I tried that and then abandoned it when it wasn't giving me any better results.  What does seem to work for me is just to grind out the learning of the verb slowly and steadily, and not add too many new ones to my flash cards at the same time.  And I also try each time I see the word, to try to picture how to use it in different ways, to look at the conjugation of it and try to use different conjugations and tenses, and basically just work the word as much as I can.

The strange thing is, with verbs as well as with other words, I think they get stored in my brain fairly easily.  It's the retrieval that's a bitch. I can tell it's the retrieval end that is hard rather than the storage end because there's so many times when it just pops out of nowhere when it didn't seem like it was going to come forward at all.  And then there are what I call "savant days," when the retrieval is just simpler than usual for some reason.  But in general, it seems like it takes a while to build that neural pathway that allows for a consistent retrieval of the word.  It's like having a really cluttered closet and knowing the widget thingy you want is in there somewhere, but you have to do a ton of cleaning abd organizing to find it.

I do eventually get there with verbs as well as with other words.  It just takes a lot longer.  That's one reason I make so many blog posts that are centered around the different verbs (and other derivative words) one can make from a given root.  They are basically my study guides for when I find a verb or group of verbs I am finding to be difficult to learn, and I just look at the whole universe centered around the root for a unique look at the subject.

More On Language Fluency: Słowotwórstwo

I did a post on language fluency a while back, but I wanted to talk about fluency a little more.  You might wonder what it takes to achieve fluency.  You might also wonder "how many words it takes before you can consider yourself fluent."

I used to think in those sorts of quantitative terms.  I thought that if I got to a certain number, and it had to be somehow measurable, I would be at the point where I was fluent.

That's not really the way to think about it.  You can have a vocabulary with very few words, but be at the point where you have practiced them very well and can fill gaps of words you don't know through intuition and contextual clues, and then respond without hesitation with the words that you know.

Or, at the other extreme, you could know a very large number of words, but still not have them embedded verbally to the point where you recognize them well and can easily create different forms of words out of them.  This is closer to where I am.  I probably have about 6000 Polish words that I have learned to the point where I can produce them fairly easily (that's a conservative estimate as I have about 10000 in rotation on Anki plus about another 4000 phrases and sentences), but have a difficult time recognizing them in conversation, and have some difficulty consistently producing them in the correct grammatical context.  I've probably gotten more fluent in some other languages with less words learned.

But that is OK for me.  I really enjoy learning new words, and so I have focused my learning on vocabulary more than most would.  You can tell that my posts mostly focus on vocabulary and the interrelationships between words and parts of words.  I'm more interested in "słowotwórstwo."  And I'm confident that at some point the fluency will arrive; maybe at a point that is later than it would be for a person who concentrates more on speaking and grammar.  But when it does arrive, I think I'll have a high breadth of expression.

Today's Study Card--May 8, 2013

Most days I make myself a "study card."  Sometimes I make more than one.  Sometimes I do a separate one for verbs because verbs seem to be about ten times harder than other words for me to learn.  I'll write the study words for the day on the card, fold the card in half, and use it as a flash card, trying to guess the English translations of the Polish words first, then trying to guess the Polish translations of the English words, while covering up the words below with my fingers (or the words above if I am going up).  I might go randomly instead of in order, but my goal is to learn the words the best I can.

So this is today's study card, or at least the first one of the day.  Usually these are the words I am having the hardest time with from my Anki study deck.  For some reason, these all seem to be adjectives and adverbs today.  That's not always the case; they can be any part of speech.  Nouns seem to be the easiest to learn, as a general rule.  Maybe that's because an object can be pictured.  But even abstract nouns are easier than verbs.  Verbs seem to be the hardest.  Usually I will make separate cards for just verbs.

I always "learn" the words and then find that a month later I will have forgotten some of them.  So that's where spaced repetition comes in, to put them at the proper spacing.  All of these words are words that I supposedly "learned" previously.  But I suspect the problem is not one of memory storage, it is one of memory retrieval, because often the stuff I am searching for will just suddenly pop into my head.

Then at some point I try to collect the cards from the past week or two, go over them again, and pick out the hardest words that I am still having trouble with and put them on new cards.

Polish Noun Declension

Earlier I did a post about Polish Verb Conjugation and where to find resources to assist with conjugating Polish verbs.  Now I'd like to talk a little about where to find resources to decline Polish nouns, and also touch on adjectives and pronouns as well, since they must be declined as well.

Wikibooks has a series that shows some tables with example nouns and their declensions.  There are three different pages, one for each gender:

• Masculine Noun Declension
• Feminine Noun Declension
• Neuter Noun Declension

There is also a page on Wikibooks that talks about the general rules for Polish noun cases. 

Wiktionary has a more comprehensive list of Polish nouns, many of which have declension tables (you must click on the "show" link under "declension" to show the table; not all of them have this feature).  Each noun is listed alphabetically but you can jump to different letters using the alphabetical links near the top of the page.  There is also a brief and so far incomplete discussion of declension rules on Wiktionary at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Polish_nouns.

You can also find links to a couple of excellent grammar books in .pdf form on the Web.  The first is Oscar Swan's excellent "Polish Grammar In A Nutshell."  The general rules for nouns are in Chapter 3 and there are some tables of sample noun declensions on pages 24-28.  The next one is "A Consise Polish Grammar" by Ronald F. Feldstein and it talks about nouns in Chapter 3.  General rules for declension are on pages 41-56.  Both of these books also have information on declining adjectives and pronouns as well. Of course, page numbers and/or chapters that I have mentioned here may changed if the books are revised at some point.

There is a .pdf file of a much more comprehensive grammar, also by Oscar Swan, "A Contemporary Polish Grammar."  This deals with most topics in much more detail than the other two grammar books previously mentioned.  Chapters 3, 4 and 5 have extensive discussions of noun declension for feminine, masculine and neuter nouns respectively and also have some fairly inclusive tables of declension.  Chapters 6 and 7 talk about declining adjectives and pronouns.

There is also a good survey of noun declension on Grzegorz Jagodziński's excellent grammar site (the main link in English is here). There are links that show patterns and tables for various types of nouns, as well as adjectives and pronouns.

A brief table of the rules of declension (with no example nouns declined) can also be found (in Polish) at http://www.hamlet.edu.pl/uczen/?id=koncowki.  There is another brief but somewhat confusing declension table at http://www.polish-translators.com/deklinacja.html which is in both Polish and English.

There is some talk (also in Polish) about the rules for different noun cases on the Polish Wikipedia site at http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deklinacja_(j%C4%99zykoznawstwo). 

Finally, I also have made a set of flash cards called "Polish Nouns Declined" that I have developed for Anki (wow, they have recently really revamped their main page!).  You have to download the software, which is free and open-source, and then go to the list of shared decks within the software program.  (I also have created a deck for "Polish Verbs Conjugated" and have made contributions to Per Eriksson's "Polish-English" deck as well [though the Polish-English deck I am currently using has about 50% more material than the one on the site].  All of these shared flash card decks are completely free.)

Doubtless other resources are out there as well but this list should assist you in finding a good deal of information on declining nouns, adjectives and pronouns.

Where You Be At?

The title, of course, will be relevant to this blog post in two ways.  The first thing I want to do is talk about how there is a preconception out there that children learn languages easier than adults.  There doesn't necessarily seem to be a lot of evidence for this, and studies seem to show that adults can learn languages more rapidly and in a more comprehensive fashion than children.  But the myth persists.  Maybe because as an adult, you really have to rewire your brain and think in a different way, and that seems really hard.  I can relate to that.  Learning a new language is not an easy task, and it takes persistence.  It is easy to become discouraged if you are not focused.  But if you just plug away at it, as an adult you will definitely see better results the more you use your new language.  And I've heard adults complain that they constantly make grammatical mistakes.  Well, ain't no native-speaking adult ever be making no grammatical mistakes, right? (There's where I sneak in the spirit of the blog post title for the first time)

But now, I want to turn to actual places you be at.  Say, the four corners of the earth:

północ - north (also means midnight)
południe - south (also means noon, midday, or afternoon)
wschód - east (also means sunrise)
zachód - west (also means sunset)

But there's more places you might be at:

północny wschód - northeast
północny zachód - northwest
południowy wschód - southeast
południowy zachód - southwest

Here are the adjective forms:

północny - northern
południowy - southern
wschodni - eastern
zachodni - western

północno-wschodni - northeastern
północno-zachodni - northwestern
południowo-wschodni - southeastern
południowo-zachodni - southwestern

And some adverbial clauses:

na północy - in the north
na południu - in the south
na wschodzie - in the east
na zachodzie - in the west

na północnym wschodzie, w północno-wschodniej - in the northeast
na północnym zachodzie, w północno-zachodniej - in the northwest
na południowym wschodzie, w południowo-wschodniej - in the southeast
na południowym zachodzie, w południowo-zachodniej - in the southwest

na północ (od) - to the north (of)
na południe (od) - to the south (of)
na wschód (od) - to the east (of)
na zachód (od) - to the west (of)

na północny wschód (od) - to the northeast (of)
na północny zachód (od) - to the northwest (of)
na południowy zachód (od) - to the southwest (of)
na południowy wschód (od) - to the southeast (of)

z północy - from the north
z południa - from the south
ze wschodu - from the east
z zachodu - from the west

z północnego wschodu - from the northeast
z północnego zachodu - from the northwest
z południowego wschodu - from the southeast
z południowego zachodu - from the southwest

A couple of verbs:

wschodzić, wzejść - to rise (about the sun or the moon)
zachodzić, zajść - to set

Here are some places using some of these forms:

półkula północna - northern hemisphere
półkula południowa - southern hemisphere
Biegun północny - the North Pole
Biegun południowy - the South Pole
koło podbiegunowe północne - the Arctic Circle
koło podbiegunowe południowe - the Antarctic Circle
owoce południowe - tropical fruit

Remember that "północ" can mean "midnight" and "południe" can mean "noon" or "midday" also:

o północy - at midnight
przed północą - before midnight
po północy - after midnight
w południe - at midday
przedpołudnie - morning (literally "forenoon"; not the usual word for morning which is "rano" or "ranek")
przed południem - before noon
po południu - in the afternoon, after noon

Language Meditation

I've been trying to do at least once a day what I call language meditation.  That is, I will take a simple concept that has been a particularly difficult thing to retain through conventional study, and try to relax and focus my concentration on it instead of, say, on my breathing.  I'll try to work the word (if it is a word) through different scenarios and forms of the word (slowly and organically, only as it bubbles to the surface, and not through effort, but through visualization), and try to make it the core, unadulterated focus of my descent into relaxation--the mantra, so to speak.  I'll work on forgetting everything about the outside world except the concept I am studying (though I'd hardly call it studying, it's more like appreciation of a conceptual aesthetic).  My goal is to get my brain waves as far away from what would be necessary for associative or agglomerative study and put them more in the area that would be conducive to astral projection.  Looking at the colors of the concepts and hearing their synesthetic music, rather than creating logical and analytical pathways.

Attitude Is Everything (Or At Least Very Important)

One of my guiding principles is that there is no such thing as a waste of time.  Time passes no matter what you do; all you can do is waste your attitude.

Another of my guiding principles is that if you are feeling crappy, just wait.  Three days is usually the maximum required for a settled funk to pass, at least in my experience.

Last night when I was studying Polish vocabulary, I was having a real low point.  I wasn't getting any of my flash cards right at all, and I couldn't absorb any of the audio that I was listening to.  Sometimes you are just having a crappy time.  I don't care what kind of cheerful optimist you are, it doesn't help to be in denial about the fact that sometimes you feel bad.  We all sometimes feel yucky.  You can't paint over it with optimistic aphorisms.  But that doesn't mean you have to drown in doom and gloom, either.

There's a technique sometimes used in meditation where one does one's best to empty the mind of any thoughts.  Sometimes one can't empty the mind.  There is a Buddhist term called "monkey-mind", referring to a state that is so agitated and unsettled that thoughts are just jumping all about like a frenzied caged monkey.  One strategy for dealing with this is to acknowledge and embrace each thought as it bubbles forth, and then release it.

The reality of the human condition is that it is not always one level steadfast line.  There are ups and downs; there are peaks and valleys.  Things might move in a circular fashion or in zigzags rather than in a linear fashion.  The optimal way to handle this is to realize it and to deal with it.  Know yourself and how you react to what happens.

The simple truth is that there are times when we will shine, and there are times when we will stumble.  Last night, for me, was an emotional low point.  Maybe my neurons had just fired enough and they needed a rest; who knows.  Instead of continuing with pushing myself uselessly, I just watched a Polish comedy with English subtitles on YouTube (who knows, maybe in a month this link won't even be there).  Actually, I didn't even watch the whole thing; I fell asleep about halfway in.  And I wasn't concentrating on trying to understand the Polish, but rather, just relaxing and absorbing the entertainment value of the movie.

I find that there are times when I'll absorb a high percentage of material that I am studying, and there are other times when I'll absorb a low percentage of similar material.  Sometimes there are things I can do to improve my receptivity to study, and sometimes not.  So if I'm in a place where I'm not gaining any value from what I'm doing, and I'm not able to improve conditions to the point where I am gaining value, then at that point, if I continue, I am truly wasting my attitude.

One thing I like about Anki (a spaced-repetition program that I have raved about in prior postings) is that it gives you statistics about what time of day the success rate of your study is the highest.  For me, the statistical information is really striking--around 11 am, 3 pm, and to a lesser degree at 10 pm, my percentage of right answers is dramatically higher than at other times of the day.  I've used that information to try and make sure that I get at least a little bit of study in at or around these apparent most optimal study times if I have the opportunity and the inclination.

And waiting it out works.  Though I was close to zero percent last night, this morning when I studied the same material, I was at around eighty percent, and this evening, my percentages have been about just as high.

Confusing Languages?

I've been asked if I ever confuse languages, with all the study I'm doing in different languages.  The short answer is, for the most part, no, not at all (with a few caveats).  I can keep different languages all compartmentalized in the right places, for the most part.  And I think most people who have knowledge of different languages don't have that trouble in general.  Let me ask you this...do you try to play guitar chords on the piano but then get confused because there are no strings readily available (although I have tried to find techniques of piano playing that involve plucking the harp, but that's a totally different thing)?  Do you ever accidentally cook using a sponge instead of a spatula? Can you tell your parents apart?

OK, those are extreme examples.  But I think you get the point.  You get used to using a tool in a certain context, and you associate it with that context.  Vocabulary, grammar and speech are tools of communication, and they happen in boxes that are confined to a certain linguistic context.

But there are caveats to that general rule.  Sometimes I find that I can't think of the word in the right language, and the only word that will pop into the forefront of my mind is the word in a different language.  And I want to use that word, or sometimes even will in frustration, but I'm pretty aware that my target audience may not understand it.

Or sometimes there are similar words in languages from the same linguistic families.  Like "ancora" in Italian and "encore" in French (again, yet, still).  Or "donde" in Spanish and "dove" in Italian (where).  "Hablar" in Spanish and "falar" in Portuguese; "parler" in French and "parlar" in Catalan (to speak).  I could possibly wrongly throw in a Spanish cognate when I'm speaking (or, really, butchering) Italian.  But I'm not going to confuse French with Mandarin.

When I was first learning Polish, for some reason, I kept wanting to say, "wo ist" instead of "gdzie jest" (where is...).  But I knew that tossing German into the mix was not the right thing to do.  My brain just kept wanting to pick that as the first choice, even though I knew it was not right.

Learning Walks, And Extreme Thicketing

Often I go on "learning walks." That is, I'll take a long walk with either my Polish flash cards, or my little Android tablet on which I have installed Anki (actually, the program on the tablet is AnkiDroid, the Android version...I'm using the latest beta apk version from here).  Tonight I walked around for about two hours and knocked out about 400 flash cards in that time on Anki.  I pretty much just use the tablet for language study and that's the only reason I got it.

The other night I tried something different.  I took a list of the hardest words that have been plaguing me lately, and went for an arduous slog through waist-high brush and thick grass for about half an hour.  I was fighting my way through a thicket of both words and flora.  I figured that this would be a somewhat homeopathic approach.  Maybe it was effective.  But it was highly unpleasant.  I ended up back at home with all kinds of sticks and burrs embedded in my shoes, socks and pants.   Then I spent the next half hour picking them all out. Maybe I'd really learn a lot if I dragged myself through a huge patch of nettle and poison ivy.  Guess I'm just all in for education...who knows--maybe I'll go thicketing again at some point.

Trifecta!

Here are the three fects of my current linguistic odyssey:

Fect #1:

I've started studying Romanian in Polish.  Not only is it a good sideswipe from the unhappy accident that is studying-Polish-burnout, but it also helps with "running interference,", or, as I put it in a previous post, "practicing for diversion."  Why Romanian? It seems vaguely exotic, maybe even ethereal and otherwordly.  It's a Romance language, but it's been fellated by Slavic influence for centuries.  And it belongs to the Eastern Romance language family that ends its plurals in -i instead of -s.  Now that's just hot. If only I could find a good beginning Romanian text in Polish at a used bookstore (dream on...not in THIS country).

Fect #2:

Also, I'm enveloping myself in reading "Romeo I Julia, Tragedya w 5 aktach--Wiliam Szekspir."  First I had to get the right version off of the Gutenberg Project site.  It took me a couple of tries, but finally I found one that my e-reader would open.  When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way...

Fect #3:

Chinese, anyone?  Nin friggin' hao!  These videos are AWESOME for learning Mandarin.  Sometimes I get the feeling I'm spreading myself too thin.  But what the hell.  You only live once, and you gotta be ready for that moment when these one billion Chinese walk into a bar...  But seriously, it would be cool to speak the language spoken by more people in the world than any other--the language that over 14% of humanity utters natively.

And really, every trifecta should have a...

Bonus Fect:

This one doesn't count because it's only stupid English.  I've started a vocabulary list at Vocabulary.com called "Haphazard Devilous Munch" that consists of some of the most radically gnarly words that I could find that are "quiz-ready" on the site.  Granted, there are some much more severely sebacious words out there in the English language. For example, check out some of the words in this "Greek Words" list that someone else made.  But a lot of the serious munch in the Greek Words list can't be quizzed on the site because the powers-that-be haven't set up quizzes for them yet, whereas my munch is deliciously munchable.

The Wikipedia Method

Here is how I do the bulk of my reading and translation as part of my process to learn a foreign language:  I use the Wikipedia method.

My Wikipedia method works this way:  First, I will go to the Wikipedia page of the language that I want to study.  For the Polish language, I go to Wikipedia Polski, and pick an article in a subject that interests me.  Of course, I open it in Google Chrome.  Then I open another tab with the same article, and Chrome will ask me if I want to translate it from Polish to English, and I will translate it.  Then I open another tab with Google Translate, set to translate from Polish to English, so I can translate individual words if needed.  Note also that I have added a link to a random article on Polish Wikipedia at the bottom of my blog.

I'll read through the article, and if I come to word(s) that I don't know, then I'll look at the version translated from the target language into English (this is better than looking at the same article in English Wikipedia, because usually that article is completely different, and the translated version is somewhat word-for-word).  Since the translation is sometimes a little off-kilter, if what I see doesn't make sense to me, then I'll go to Google Translate and enter the words one by one.  I have yet to encounter something that is so idiomatic and peculiar that I can't figure out what it means.

It's not as useful to translate from the source language to the target language (for example, if your native language is English, don't use the Chrome browser to translate from English to Polish [or whatever the target language is]). The reason is that the translation will be weird and your native language skills will be better at understanding a strange translation in your native language than in the language you are trying to learn.  Also, you want to look at grammatical and syntactical constructions (as well as translations) that are correct, and even though humans make mistakes, the version written by the person will be more correct than the version that is translated.

But, really, my Wikipedia method could be used with any source material that is in the Polish language.  I use it with Wikipedia the most because then I can learn about cool and interesting stuff too.  News sites and blogs in Polish on subjects that interest you might be particularly suited to this type of endeavor.  The only things that are really important are: 1) that the source code on the page of the site you are translating is not so whacked-out that it won't allow for a translation, or 2) that the site is not heavily dependent on images that deliver text.

Vocabulary Whore

I fully realize that I could probably become conversant faster if I would devote more study to things other than Polish vocabulary.  But the problem is, I'm a vocabulary whore.

There is a lot of time that I should be studying grammar, or listening to audio, or reading. And I realize that.  I do devote some time to those resources, but not nearly enough.  The problem is that I just like learning new words.  After I've studied a bunch, I always find a hundred more words that I would like to know.  So I add them to my flash cards.

Actually, they are usually there in the flash card deck already, so I just unsuspend them.  Sometimes they aren't, and I will add them to the deck.  And then I go back to studying vocabulary compulsively.

Today, I studied about 90% Polish, and 10% other languages (Dutch, German, Catalan, Italian, Czech and advanced Spanish--was there anything else? I forget).

I do devote some time to reading and translation.  I'll talk about the bulk of the reading I do in the next post.

Claims Of Extremely Quick Language Learning, And Studies Of Extraordinary Polyglots

Sometimes I hear claims that one can learn a language and be fluent in it in a matter of weeks or just a few months.  Learning a language is an extremely difficult and complex task, even for those who have mastered several languages.  That having been said, there are probably some individuals who are able to create neural pathways that are optimal for learning and are able to pick up a language in a very short period of time.

There is the well-documented case of Daniel Tammet, who apparently learned Icelandic in a week well enough to speak it on a talk show in Iceland (sidebar: Tammet's case was researched by Simon Baron-Cohen, a cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the actor who played "Borat" and "Bruno").  Tammet had apparently learned several languages in a short period of time.  There is also Christopher, who displayed linguistic savant properties as well and could speak numerous languages.  Many such individuals are otherwise afflicted with developmental differences (autism, or some form of brain damage), and have their linguistic prowess as a "splinter skill,"

There are also some polyglots whose talent does not arise as a function of a developmental difference and are considered relatively normal in other ways.  There is a culture of talented polyglots who have been profiled; many of them started learning languages at an early age, but it is not unknown for people to begin learning languages as adults.  There have been some studies of what it takes to become a distinguished polyglot, and it appears that part of it is dedication and work, and part of it may be attributable to brains that are wired a certain way.  But there don't appear to be a lot of answers to whether such brain wiring is inherently innate, or can be achieved through learning.  Here is an interesting series of interviews with polyglots in which they talk about language learning.

There is also the matter of what constitutes a polyglot.  Some who call themselves polyglots may be somewhat faking it by knowing "just enough to be dangerous."  One would probably have to go through a testing regimen to determine exactly how proficient they are in a given language.  There are probably a lot of people who have various levels of proficiency in several languages that might fall short of fluency.

Now, let's get back to learning strategies that claim high levels of proficiency in short periods of time.  There is a book that I had studied from called "Polish in 4 Weeks: An Intensive Course in Basic Polish" (one of several texts that I have studied from, there is also a "Part 2" book for more advanced learners that I am currently going through), but I personally took a lot longer than four weeks to go through it.

The theory is that there are 28 lessons, and if you do one a day, you will have it down in a month.  There may be learners out there that can do that, but I certainly am not one of them.  I would venture a guess that the average learner would not be able to meet that one-month time standard.  You have to consider that the average student who takes two years of a language in high school or college can ordinarily barely speak the language, even if they made very high grades, unless they were extraordinarily motivated to actually learn the language rather than learn for the tests, which is possibly a different skill.  This isn't to say that the subject matter of the book is not good; actually of the numerous textbooks I have on Polish, I have to say that this is one of the better ones.

Enough for now, but I'd like to revisit this topic again at a later time.

Drop-Outs And Leeches In Spaced Repetition Learning

Drop-outs are words that suddenly seem to disappear from your memory.  This often happens when you are regularly adding many words to your lexicon on a daily basis.  You will have words that you are certain that you learned, but suddenly when you review them, you have no memory of having ever seen them.  It's like they got squeezed out of your memory by other words, or by other elements of your memory.

Sometimes a word will not be a total drop-out.  You will have some memory of some facet of it, but not retain an important relational structure that you had learned.  For instance, I talked about the situation earlier whereby sometimes I will have a word just suddenly pop clearly into my head, but completely disassociated with any meaning.  Maybe you will remember a word in this fashion, isolated from its meaning, when you had learned it pretty solidly and retrieved it multiple independent times in the past  Or maybe you can only make a connection to a meaning in one direction; for example, from the target language to the source language but not in the other direction (after you thought you had solidly learned it).  In this case, it will only be a partial drop-out.

Leeches are a different matter.  They are the black holes of learning, the words you just can't seem to get embedded in your mind no matter what.  There are several reasons a word may be a leech.  One of the most widely discussed theories is that the material you are studying is poorly designed for that word.  It may ask for too many associations.  For example, sometimes a word has more than one meaning.  Sometimes it has multiple discrete meanings, and those meanings are not grouped in ways that are common associations in your native language.  It may be difficult for you to grasp the meaning.  On occasion when this has been the case, I will make separate flash cards for the primary meaning(s) of the word and the secondary meaning(s) of the word, and then possibly consolidate them after I have learned both cards fairly well (of course, they can always become drop-outs at some point, and then become difficult again).

There is an excellent discussion of how to handle leeches on the Supermemo site, along with strategies for dealing with them.  For those of you who are not familiar with Supermemo, it is one of the first spaced repetition flash card programs, created by Piotr Wozniak, and there is a lot of discussion about how memory works on there.  You can really get lost there looking over the incredible repository of material on memory.

I subscribe to a sort of zen model.  For every component of learning that you need to do something for, there is something that you need to just as strongly NOT do to accomplish the task.  For every period that you spend learning, you need to have periods of rest and/or sleep, and these periods are just as important as the study.  In my model, leeches are words that absorb the negative energy from the other words so that those words can be learned.

There is also more discussion of what to do with leeches on the Anki site.  My thoughts on leeches are that when you are first learning, it is best to suspend leeches, as your learning will become more efficient without them.  Since a small amount of material will occupy a large portion of your time, it is best to move on to learning that will be easier.  Also, once you have moved away from whatever neural pattern you were experiencing due to the passage of time (another example of how NOT doing can enhance your learning), new patterns can arise that allow for easier learning.

However, once you get to the point where you have learned a lot of material and you are getting to more esoteric words, and there is more interference from other material after you have learned a large body of material, it is more difficult to drop leeches/  This is because almost EVERYTHING you will be learning can fall somewhat into the "leech" category, due to the fact that all the easier material selects itself out (because you have solidly learned it), and the fact that you will be working with more difficult concepts at this point.  This phase usually arises after having learned several thousand words.  At this point, you just have to accept that your learning will be harder.  But in some respects, it can also be easier in some ways too, because you will have a greater understanding of roots and syntax in the target language.

Both drop-outs and leeches are probably a function of retrieval, not of storage.  The material is in there somewhere, but the retrieval path has either not yet been completely constructed, or has been disrupted.

What Is Fluency?

The best definition of fluency that I have seen is, "the ability to read, speak or write easily, smoothly, and expressively." So you have become fluent when you can pretty much understand what people are saying and offer cogent and quick responses to what they have said to you, and do this back and forth without unnatural pauses.

That isn't to say that it is presumed that you can follow along with, say, a graduate level seminar in quantum physics.  The simplest threshhold of fluency could involve speaking at about a second-grade level.  You could still have large holes in your vocabulary that you are adept at working around; it's just that you can understand and respond without it seeming like you are struggling.

As an aside, though, I think of a grade level as more of an allegory than a precise measuring tool.  An adult will usually not speak on a second-grade level, strictly speaking.  Second-graders, can, for example, describe a lot of household items and know verbs that an adult might hardly ever use, like "to cluck" (gdakać).  How many times as an adult are you going to be called upon to say, "The cow moos?"  But a second-grader could tell you that easily.  Still, since it's not all that useful for you to know how to say that, learning to say things like this should be low on your list of priorities.  And, as an adult, you might know the word for "sociology" (sociologia) or "empathy" (empatia) relatively early on in your studies, especially if the related word is a cognate to the more complex concept that a second-grader might not necessarily know.

So there exists what I call basic fluency on the low end, and then native fluency on the other end.  Native fluency is what you would expect your average person who grew up in the country that speaks the target language to have.  And it can be uneducated native fluency at the low end and highly educated native fluency at the high end.  Most foreign speakers don't get to highly educated native fluency, ever. There are individuals who do, either because they are particularly gifted in language acquisition, or because they work like crazy to eliminate all the little errors in grammar and syntax, and deficiencies in their accents.  Many people who learn another language often have little grammatical errors or stilted modes of speaking in which sentences are constructed like they might be in a different language.  But note that grammatical (or spelling) errors occur even with native fluency.  Some are a part of colloqualism, and some run with a dialect.  And some are just common mistakes that native users of a language make.  Ain't a lotta English natives cain't figger out whut this sentence mean.  You see spelling errors in English all the time whereby some people use the wrong form of [it's or its], or [they're, their or there].  Other languages have little traps like that too.

Fluency doesn't just take one path; native fluency is just the most ingrained path.  Here is where it branches out.  You can have contextual (usually occupational) fluency.  This, at the low end, is where you might be able to communicate with a co-worker or an owner might be able to communicate with a hired hand using terms that are commonly used associated with the work (usually this type of communication is more faux-fluent that "real" fluent).  At the high end, it could be the specialized vocabulary that is used in, say, the medical or legal fields, or that a geologist or orchestra member might use.

I am fluent in Spanish.  I can communicate easily and freely in that language.  I would come somewhat short of saying, though, that I have native fluency.  I have a lot more than basic fluency.  I can communicate easily in speech or on the phone (speaking on the telephone is often a step up for language learners because they don't have the visual cues any more), with hardly any linguistic work-arounds.  I can understand almost everything I hear on TV, though sometimes I have to concentrate.  I can understand most words in the newspaper, though I would probably have to look up words much more often that I would have to in English.  So I still have room for improvement (but then again, I do even in English).  Have any of us really completely learned any language, even our own native language(s)?

I wrote a follow-up post on fluency here.

Phases Of Learning Words, And The Three Steps In The Illness Model

The last post talked about the skills involved in learning words and ways to develop those skills.  Now I want to address the phases of learning words.  All these terms are my own and I have no idea whether there are any similar concepts in the field of linguistics.

The first step is what I call simple recognition.  This is where you could pick out the word on a multiple-choice test among a few other choices.

The next step is isolated recognition.  This is where you can pick out the word on its own and associate it with the meaning.

Then you have reciprocal recognition, whereby you can pick out the word on its own and associate it with the meaning in both directions.

Up to this point, you probably still can't use the word on its own because you have only committed it to memory and not really worked up the retrieval paths in your memory.  Retrieval is one of the most difficult tasks.  You may find that words you think you absolutely knew just can't be called up when you need them.

I use an illness model of learning.  This point is what I call the "stroke victim" level.  You are trying to talk to people, and you know you have used the words, but you struggle to produce them.  Maybe nothing at all comes out.  Communication is frustrating.  The words are in there, somewhere, locked away in your brain, and you don't know how to get to them.  You may resort to pantomime rather than try to use words.  You might be able to muddle through at a basic level using every tool you can think of--writing it down, coming up for a word you know for it in another language, slowing down your speech or getting the person you are communicating with to speak more slowly, etc.  The one people try a lot (but is probably completely useless) is speaking louder and closer in their own language.  This is where you get the slightly annoyed blank stare in response, which is probably universal in meaning, but not where you wanted to go.

To break out of this level, you are going to have to get beyond the recognition phases and get to the recall phases.  And try not to drool.

Simple recall is where you can come up with the word when you need to most of the time.  This is a good thing.  You are getting to the basics of verbal communication.  It will become more fruitful to try to make yourself understood.

So your goal at this point is to graduate from "stroke victim" to "developmentally disabled".  This is where you can communicate, but you sound slow and stupid.  Your speech is halting and tentative, but a little more complete, and you can communicate basic needs and simple commands.  Me need bathroom.  Something smell bad.  Congratulations, you're now an idiot.

The next phase I call complex recall.  You can start placing the word in different contexts.  If it is a verb, you know many of the tenses and their forms.  If it is a noun or adjective, you know how to decline it.  You know how to use prepositions, but you are not perfect.  You are starting to grasp grammatical rules.

The next level in my illness model is what I call "backwards Alzheimer's".  This stage is long and drawn out.  This is where you have good days and bad days.  On the good days, you can understand and speak fairly well.  On the bad days, it's just not happening, and it gets frustrating.  And it's backwards, because your cognitive abilities in the language don't deteriorate more and more, but get better and better with more practice, until you have good days more and more often. Rather than experiencing "the long goodbye", you are in the midst of "the excruciatingly long hello".  Unless you really have a degenerative brain disorder, in which case you probably should get a medical opinion.  Sometimes I wonder.

When you are having mostly good days, you will probably find that for individual words, you have what I call "approaching word fluency".  Before, you were basically learning to count cards at the blackjack table.  Sure, you know how it's done, and you get all the concepts, but it takes practice, practice, and more practice to get it down so you can do it smoothly without any tells so you don't get your legs broken by the pit boss.  You need to just keep working it, and use your mind like a wrench on that recalcitrant bolt that constitutes the word you are grappling with.  Keep doing this until the rusty equipment is dismantled and put back together over and over again.  This is where the elbow grease effect kicks in.

Then you have what I call "word fluency."  This is where you can really work it easily for this particular word.  When you have this with about four thousand words, and you can interconnect them without pauses, you start approaching language fluency, which I want to address later.

Skills Involved in Learning Words

There are a lot of different skills that come into play in learning words.  First, there is learning the word itself.  That is, just placing the sounds of the word in your head.  I can't tell you how many times a random word in a foreign language has just popped into my head suddenly, without any associated meaning.  The word itself is just simple mellifluous cacophony superimposed on my conscious processes, floating without an anchor to any frame of reference.

Then there is the association with a meaning.  Sometimes the memes associated with the words in each language don't mesh up on a one-to-one basis, and sometimes the meaning is slightly off from one language to the other, or there is really no exact correlate in another language.  For example, the word "chciwy" means, literally translated, "want-y" (chęć is "to want").  But the closest translation is "greedy."  Or the word "gwałtowny" means "rape-y" (gwałt means "rape").  But it is translated as violent, torrential and sudden as in a sudden storm.

So you have to work up the association with a meaning between the target language and the source language, and then do it also in the other direction.  You just need to keep working it and working it in your head, and find as many tricks as you can to implant the associations in both directions.

One thing that is often recommended is to try to think of some sort of mnemonic or a word picture that helps you learn it, and the more silly, ridiculous or vulgar the mnemonic can be, the easier you will remember.  For example, I learned the notes of the lines on the bass clef line many years ago with the mnemonic, "Good boys don't fuck animals."  I dare you to get that out of your head.  I read an interview with a memory champion once where he said that some of the images he used to remember items were just really, seriously wrong.  He mentioned things like deviant acts that his grandmother was involved in.

OK, maybe that doesn't work for you.  One trick I use a lot is to look at the patterns of vowels in each word and compare them in as many ways as I can.  Look at the ones they have in common, look at how many vowels are in each word, think about their order, etc.  If that doesn't stick, I'll do the same with the consonants, though that is usually harder.  Sometimes I'll take a walk while I memorize words and try to recall what I was looking at when I thought about that word (sort of a soft version of the "method of loci", which I never really have much taken to in its pure form.

Verbal repetition works for me in some cases.  Often if I take ten minutes to just repeat the English word and the Polish meaning over and over again, working it around in my head, I will know it pretty well.

Sometimes I will be thinking about a Polish word and all of a sudden a root part of the word that is similar to another word that has that root pops into my head as an epiphany.  That almost always helps with learning the word.

It helps to approach the word as a thing of beauty or a piece of art to be appreciated, rather than an obstacle that needs to be overtaken.  Polish is beautiful and intricate in the manner in which its structure is put together.  Polish grammar is like high performance art mixed with some really fucked-up and arbitrary (pseudo) science.  It works better for me to admire rather than memorize.  The memorization will come, but it is better if it comes as an organic, natural process, instead of the pounding of pegs into holes.

Sometimes I encounter difficult words that have lots of lexemes (lots of disparate meanings).  If this is the case, sometimes I will study them in a separate group, because they require a lot of mind-massaging to be remembered fully.  And it is this class of words that reminds me the most that the most difficult part is creating the retrieval paths in the brain.  That stuff all goes IN easily.  It's in there somewhere, rattling around in the brain.  It's finding it and being able to spit it out that requires the most effort.  One proof of that is that when one is learning flashcards, one will learn the meanings of the word pretty easily at first, and be able to retrieve them for the first few days.  But after that flash card has been retired for a while, and one comes back to it, one finds considerable difficulty, and has to recreate some of the pathway of retrieval.  It's usually easy, then hard (but not as hard as originally), then easy, then hard (but less difficult)...it evens itself out, becoming less difficult in each iteration, until the word is learned, that is, until the retrieval occurs in a consistent fashion.

One visualization technique I use when I'm consistently not able to remember some of the lexemes of a word, is picture the neural connections between where the word is stored and the output of the lexeme that I am trying to retrieve from it.  I picture the place in the brain where the word lies, the nerves with their dentrites and axons as conduit from the place of origination to the destination, and trying to get that lexeme from the dusty, dank place in the brain where is is stored, to the proper output vehicle (I picture the mouth, because one would be speaking the result), utilizing the fanciful neural path that I am imagining.

Maybe I'll revisit this topic later.  I also want to talk later about "leeches" (words that are particularly difficult to memorize) and "push-outs" (words you really thought you had learned but have suddenly disappeared or become difficult). I want to talk about "practicing for diversion", which is a technique I use whereby I will work on learning some new words not necessarily to learn them, but as a diversionary tactic for my brain so I can go back to my original list after wiping my memory to see how well I really learned the words I was trying to learn.

A Primer On My Polish Studies

I've decided to start a blog about my Polish Language studies.  I've seen some other blogs out there of this sort and they have been helpful to me, so maybe this will be helpful to others as well.  I've made a few comments about the Polish language on David Morrison's most excellent blog about moving to Poland, No Home But The World, and maybe I'll incorporate and expand on the thoughts I've put there eventually.

I've been studying Polish for a little over two years now.  It's an incredibly difficult and complex language, and I would liken learning it to maybe doing a hundred-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.  I do have some experience with jigsaw puzzles, because a while back, a large group of people including myself completed a jigsaw puzzle with over ten thousand pieces, and it took us all over a year.  Of course, that was just attacking it sporadically, a few minutes a day.

I've been trying to study about two hours a day on average, which is a pretty large amount when you average out the fact that sometimes I will really bear down and study six hours a day, and sometimes I will burn out and not study for a couple of weeks.  The best and most productive thing I have found to do is to study for about four or five half-hour increments a day that are spaced out from each other.  On flash cards alone, I have averaged 735 cards a day over the life of my flash card deck, but only 470 a day over the last year (I know the exact number because my flash card program spits out all kinds of statistics).  And that's just on Polish...I'm also studying Dutch, German, Italian and Danish, but not with near the ferocity that I am applying to my Polish studies.  I probably spend about ten hours of Polish study for each hour of all the other languages combined.  Still, I had read on another Polish learner's blog that he studies about six hours of Polish for each hour of German and still knows German better because Polish is so complex and arcane.  I can relate.

And I strongly recommend Anki as a flash card program.  It's free and open-source (though donations are strongly encouraged and certainly deserved due to the excellent quality of the program), and there are a huge number of shared decks created by others.  But beware, the decks can vary in quality (since anybody can make them, they might not follow the best principles for learning; e.g., they might include too many facts on a card or just have cards for one direction of translation).  The Polish deck that I am using is excellent.  It was created by Per Ericksson, who really created one of the best language learning decks I have seen.  And I have added my own material to it so my deck is about 150% of the size of his (I have nearly 15000 facts and 30000 cards in mine; there are two cards for each fact because there is one for Polish-English, and one for English-Polish).  I emailed him many changes and corrections I had for a while and he incorporated them, but I guess he has not been maintaining it as diligently lately.  I don't want to put mine in the shared area because I don't want to supercede his, but if you want a copy of mine, let me know in a comment and I can send it to you (actually, I can send you a link to it so you can download it because it is so large it won't send in an email under most circumstances).  Another great thing about this deck is that I use it as a dictionary of first resort as well, by using the search function.

So after two years of study, I am probably at a low B1 level in reading and a mid-A2 level in speaking, and maybe a low A2 in understanding spoken speech (using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).  My speech skills (especially in understanding rapidly spoken speech) lag far behind my reading skills as I haven't been exposed to a lot of spoken language, and as my study methods are probably emphasizing vocabulary at the expense of grammar and verbal skills a lot more than a language course would make me do, mostly because I'm obsessed with knowing words and two- and three-word combinations of words in short phrases or idiomatic constructs.  So I'll probably learn about ten thousand words and idioms pretty well, then slowly start moving to more correctly using them and understanding them in speech.  That is probably not the way most people would learn...most would probably become "fluent" in a hundred words, then move up to a thousand, etc., but learning in a more balanced fashion and emphasizing verbal usage more.  Everybody finds their own path.

Anyway, that is probably enough for now.  I hope to maintain this blog at least sporadically; knowing my history of blogging there may be times when I am idle for a while.  But if somebody bugs me to put up a blog post, or suggests a topic for one, I might be spurred to action.