Results Of Fluent Forever Words List Blitz

 I made a claim that I would learn the 625 words in the Fluent Forever list in Irish over the weekend.

And I did it. Learn means lots of things. 1. able to generate and understand quickly 2. able to understand in context 3. able to work out the word but it takes a while. I have 90+% at 1 now. Maybe 5% that a sentence would really help. And probably 2% that I had to make mnemonics for. For example leaf is a boring child stuck in a hedge (Dull Og).

Without refreshing these words I will forget over time. But in a test learning this wordlist seems to help. I read a few ages of the kids book Diary of a Wimpy kid. About one word per page was in this list but I did not know previously. smell, ring and neighbour (boladh, glaoigh and comharsa) which left about 4 words I had to look up per page. Still a 20% improvement in, kids level, literacy in a weekend is good. Even if its only actually 10% less looking up time for common words for the next while it still feels like reading Irish is easier now.

 I would guess I spent somewhere between 2 and 3 hours concentrating on this. And some more slack time on my phone. Which makes me think about all the time I waste on my phone. As well as Anki I also made some notes for the words I was getting really stuck on.

The Anki deck is here now there are better pictures and some errors fixed. But if you see anymore please let me know. 

No Chemical Element has ever been discovered in the Southern Hemisphere

 

The furthest south a chemical element has been discovered is Bikini Atoll at 11.6° N where after a 1952 nuclear test Einsteinium and Fermium were discovered. 

The next furthest north is Technetium in Sicily in 1937 at 38.1° N

More info on where and when discoveries were made on this wikipedia page

Map from here

Learning 625 Irish Words in a Weekend

 

I watched this video I learned 1000 foreign words in one day 

Could I do the same with the 625 words deck I made and described in my last post

Can I learn 625 words in a weekend? 

1. Probably not. But no guts, no black pudding.

2. I probably know about half already. Even though I got a pass c3 25 years ago some must still be rattling around in the ceann. 

3. I made the deck which means I have vaguely seen the words before recently. I was trying to get the deck made fast, not trying to learn them at the time.

4. I am saying this publicly mainly so the embarrassment of not learning these makes me work harder.

I am going to put aside an hour Friday, Saturday, Sunday evening. No twitter, reddit or chess on the phone only Anki.

I am going to fix up the deck as I go, some words now are wrong, some pictures confusing etc.

When I get stuck on a word I will create a context sentence for it and add that to the Anki card.

The deck is here. I have added more and synced since then but the page has not updated. If you download the deck could you let me know if gift looks like this?

Anki Deck for Irish

 

I really enjoyed the book fluent forever and decided to use the method to learn a language. One of the ideas in the is to learn 625 common words quickly. They are listed here. 

And then I realized I do know a language. Well kind of Irish to a C3 in ordinary level several decades ago. But learning these 625 words will at least get me past the 'I do not remember a word' level. 

Anki is an app that uses spaced repetition to help you memorise words. The deck is there here.  The deck is based on a smaller one in Spanish here. Some of the pictures might be changed to make them less Spanish. And some of the 625 are missing, the themes of  Numbers, Months and  Days of the week.

It would be a great help if you could point out any mistakes you find in the deck. Or are willing to help with coming up with sentences to add to the deck. The idea is that reading 'the big black dog is an actor' will get 4 words in the deck into your head. Which means over the course of session far more repetitions of words in context would happen.