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Maxim Sitnikov | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Fyodor Diglot Newbie Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6700 days ago 27 posts - 33 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Swedish, Mandarin, German | Message 1 of 11 02 March 2007 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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http://maximsitnikov.ru
- Personal page of a Russian invalid Maxim Sitnikov. He claims to know 25 languages. http://maximsitnikov.ru/lang.shtml There about languages. Pages only in Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 11 02 March 2007 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks a lot for the link!!!
I wonder why so many polyglots totally stop learning new languages at some point :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 3 of 11 04 March 2007 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fyodor, Thanks for the link. It's interesting that quite a few entries on that page deal with various aspects of memorization. There is one item I found interesting. It may well be obvious to others, but somehow never occurred to me: in answering the question of how many words per day one should learn, Sitnikov says that with languages he studied (as opposed to tried to acquire "on the fly"), he would start with 20 per day, raising that rate by 10 in a week's time, and so on, until reaching 80 words per day. He says his experinece with 100-120 words per day has not been that great - it was hard to maintain that rate, and the retention rate was not very high at that point. His advice is to figure out your daily limit and try to stick to it, possibly even gradually increasing it (say, by around 5 words per week).
I hope you are not talking about death here. :) Edited by frenkeld on 04 March 2007 at 11:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 11 05 March 2007 at 4:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately I'm not yet capable of reading the homepages of Sitnikov in Russian (maybe later this year), but the quote above is quite interesting. With my word lists I generally count on 'pre-learning' around 100 words in an hour (more precisely 80 words in 45-50 minutes, because that's what I can fit on a quarter of a sheet of paper). When I then return to the lists a couple of days later I generally find that something like 10-20% of the words still look vaguely familiar, but I can't recall the exact meaning. Okay, then I have to try to learn the lost words once again. With a somewhat larger group, say 20-50%, I can even recall the original word from the translation, so I count those as active. However this percentage is very much dependent on the level I'm at, - with a 'weak' language the percentage is lower, which is no surprise as I have noticed that the percentage of passive words that also 'feel' like active words generally is lower in a weak language then in a better known language. When a word first has entered this 'active' group I can return weeks later and it is still there like a trusty good ol' friend. The losses occur in the 'passive' group where I do know the meaning, but can't recall the words from the hint provided by the translation. I do not quite understand why the daily intake of words in Sitnikov's model should increase, - for me it is a conscious decision how long time I want to spend on vocabulary-training, and I spend more time on a language where I am seriously hampered by a limited vocabulary than on my best languages. Edited by Iversen on 05 March 2007 at 4:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 5 of 11 05 March 2007 at 8:16am | IP Logged | |||||
Iversen, I didn't quite catch how the query at the end of your post connected to the preceeding description of your own memorization techniques. Could you, please, provide some additional insight into why you find the idea of gradually ramping up the daily word intake surprising? If your source of words is not the dictionary, but the textbook and the reading materials, Sitnikov's would seem to be a rather natural approach - you start easy, by copying 20 words per day, and then ramp it up to the most productive level, which, of course, will also depend on the amount of time available for study, but may still have a "natural" daily limit. Furthermore, with more "distant" languages, the productive rate will increase for a while - as one gets more familiar with root words in the target language, they provide hooks that aid memorization of the derived words. My own very brief brush with intense (by my standards) memorization was as a teenager - I would read and copy new words on flashcards in the evenings, and work with the flashcards on the subway ride to school. I recall that I found 50 words a day reasonable, and that with 100 the retention rate dropped significantly. I don't remember how long I kept that up, but it must've been at least three or four months, since I do know that my English got a nice boost from that effort. Had I gone from 50 to 100 gradually, instead of trying to do it in one jump and then dropping right back, it could be that I would have found that, say, 70 a day were still productive. Wish I still had time for such experiments with other languages. Edited by frenkeld on 05 March 2007 at 9:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 11 05 March 2007 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by Serpent on 05 March 2007 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 7 of 11 05 March 2007 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Being fluent even "just" in English is quite an accomplishment at 16, especially since you don't live in a small country. A possible answer to your question is contained in your own words, "At least right now I think ...". People's goals and priorities do not always stay the same throughout life, and his does not appear to have been a very simple life, if you read some of the pages at his web site. Edited by frenkeld on 05 March 2007 at 3:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 11 05 March 2007 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for correcting my post. I thought one could use it this way :/ (btw, where can I ask for corrections to my posts? I asked for them in some thread, but no one seems to have noticed: yours is the only correction I've got so far, and I guess there should be some more)
The story of his life is certainly amazing. It just seems strange that he used to be SO fascinated with languages, but now he isn't fascinated at all. I can't find the quote, but I remember reading something like "Why should I put so much unnecessary stuff into my head when there are things more interesting than that." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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