…But Does It Work In The Real World?
I’m pretty biased when it comes to evaluating how well this website works in the real world, to study real things that people really are interesting in learning. Nevertheless, now that this website has been up for a number of months, and most of the kinks have been unkined, let me share with you just how much this site has done for me
The chart above shows my progress studying Mandarin Chinese since July 12, 2007, until now. I punched some of the numbers into the calculator and figured that if indeed all the words that I’m calling ‘easiest’ I have indeed ‘learned’, I’m learning more than 30 words per day over an extended period of time.
That’s pretty good. If I keep it up for a year, that’s about 10,000 words. It’s difficult to figure out how many words are in the average adults vocabulary, but one number I’ve read is 60,000. That puts me within striking distance of an adult vocabulary.
Of course there are numerous mitigating factors to temper my excitement. Words can be learned. Words can be forgotten. The law of diminishing returns comes into play, too. Even now, I’m finding it’s more and more difficult to find good new words to learn, even though I know they’re out there.
Also, out of those 30 new words I’m learning a day, some of the words have already been ‘learned’ (in other words they already exist somewhere buried in the deck of over 5,000 flashcards).
So maybe numbers aren’t the only way to assess progress. After all, I’m not studying Chinese so that I can tell people I recognize 10,000 Chinese characters. I’m studying Chinese characters so I can understand Chinese and be understood in Chinese.
I don’t have any more numbers to prove that my Chinese comprehension is improving as much as my handy chart above suggests, but I can tell you that I certainly feel like I’m understanding much more of what I hear and read in Chinese than I did six months ago.
Finally, there is one thing I can say for sure. There aren’t shortcuts to learning a foreign language. Don’t trust anyone who makes outrageous claims (e.g. “Learn a foreign language in an hour!”).