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Maxim Sitnikov

  Tags: Polyglot | Russian
 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
frenkeld
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6946 days ago

2042 posts - 2719 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: German

 
 Message 9 of 11
05 March 2007 at 4:49pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
Thanks for correcting my post.


I am glad you didn't get annoyed by it - not everyone likes to be corrected. In any case, your posts present few opportunities for corrections.

Serpent wrote:
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."


A relative of mine had a son who had muscular dystrophy, which he died of at the age of 22. I don't know how long people usually live with this disease, but it is progressive. He has business activities, and he is married now, so he may well feel those things are more important to him than languages at this point.


Edited by frenkeld on 05 March 2007 at 6:18pm

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
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 Message 10 of 11
06 March 2007 at 1:13am | IP Logged 
frenkeld wrote:

I do not quite understand why the daily intake of words in Sitnikov's model should increase ...

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?


I found it surprising because I personally start out trying to learn many new words in the beginning simply because I need them to understand original texts and oral material. Later when I have reached basic fluency and know most of the lexical items I'll ever need I don't feel quite the same urgent need to add even more words, but more to learn idiomatic expressions and the more subtle uses of already known words. One reason may be that I use word lists and things like that to prepare for reading and listening, - I don't expect these activities to contribute much to my vocabulary. I may be in a minority there.



Edited by Iversen on 06 March 2007 at 1:17am

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 11 of 11
06 March 2007 at 1:14pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
I found it surprising because I personally start out trying to learn many new words in the beginning simply because I need them to understand original texts and oral material. ... One reason may be that I use word lists and things like that to prepare for reading and listening, - I don't expect these activities to contribute much to my vocabulary. I may be in a minority there.


Most people start with a textbook or course of some sort, learning basic structures and vocabulary in parallel, so the idea may be that the first month or so you go a bit slower on vocabulary and a bit harder on structure, and ramp up the vocabulary as you progress in your feel for the language, including its morphology.

With this approach you can start reading and/or listening outside the foundational course whenever you feel like it, and whether one uses these new activities as another source of words to look up in a dictionary fairly systematically is really up to the learner. If one doesn't want to, one either has to pre-learn many words, which is what you do and which is probably not very common; or keep getting them from courses, vocabulary builders, and other formal learning materials; or set aside some activities where one does look up many words; or let context and/or erratic dictionary use slowly increase one's vocabulary.

Sitnikov's schedule calls for memorizing 20 x 7 = 140 words in the first week, 30 x 7 = 210 words in the second, 40 x 7 = 280 in the third, and 50 x 7 = 350 in the forth. Together, that's 980 words in the first month.

The next four weeks it would be 420 + 490 + 560 + 560 = 2030 words, where I assumed his limit of 80 words per day.

So, in 8 weeks that would be 980 + 2030 = 3010 words - many a language learner would be quite happy with that schedule, especially if by then one has also understood enough grammartical structure to read unabridged texts.

Continuing at 80 words per day for another 4 weeks will add further 2240 words, bringing the total to 5250 after 12 weeks of study.

I don't know if this is good enough for you, but I'll take it. :) My only question is how many hours of study per day are needed to accomplish this.



Edited by frenkeld on 07 March 2007 at 10:17pm



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