Wednesday 12 October 2016

Measuring progress 1

Of course it's about the journey, not the destination. So getting there quickly is less important than getting there comfortably, or enjoyably. Nevertheless, it's good to know that you are achieving something. We like to see some progress.

Now that's a little tricky, the way that I'm telling you to go about it. My way, we improve everything at once in tiny increments. Think in terms of growing grass (no not that sort, the ordinary kind). Or a field of grass, a bamboo forest, or a beard. Or imagine spray-painting a car or applying lacquer. 


The point is, you don't do it blade by blade, stalk by stalk, hair by hair, square centimeter . . . you get the picture.

So progress across the entire field is slow. But because every aspect of the language improves, not just the target vocabulary and grammar rule of the day, the progress is very fast.

Progress is best measured by depth, not number.

And so, you find that you gain familiarity of a whole chunk of text. You understand more of it. You are able to process it more quickly.

You could earmark a chapter of a book and return to it at regular intervals. Never use that section of text for anything else. Give yourself a grade according to how well you cope with it every few months.

And if you insist on numbers . . .

Imagine an area of 100 by 100 units. Language units. So in total that's 10,000 (consisting of vocabulary, grammatical, pronunciation etc). 

  1. Running around the whole field improves each of those items 1%. 
  2. Studying a subset of 100 items hard may 'learn' those 100 items by cramming them into your short-term memory. But you'll forget 90% of what you've learned quite quickly. 

Improvement in the first option is 10,000 times 1% 
= 100 units.
Improvement in the second option is 100 times 10% 
= 10 units.

The first method seems slower but is 10 times faster.


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