The last couple months of RTK1 have been really hard. Adding 20 cards per day isn't too bad, but reviewing all the other cards has been really time consuming. I estimated that, by the end, I was spending 3 hrs per day on Heisig alone. That's the reason I stopped everything else, except for Pimsleur.
Now I need to go back to my old program, but add something to fill in the huge void left by RTK1. I'm going to add a tutor. I only have about 1000 words of vocabulary, and I haven't tried to talk to anyone since I left Boeing in March. But this was the way I finally made my "breakthrough" in Thai. I had a tutor, with the instructions not to correct me unless she couldn't understand me. Every time she used a word I didn't know, I'd write it down, and memorize it before the next lesson. I was taking 5 one hour lessons per week.
The theory behind this was sound IMO. No corrections would ensure that there would be as few interruptions as possible, and I could get comfortable in the language quickly. Research has shown learners, as long as they are learning, and getting lots of correct comprehensible input, will correct themselves just as effectively as being beat up by a strict teacher. So no-corrections is a no-lose situation. With Thai, this seemed to be true for me.
The other issue, vocabulary learning, didn't work as well. There are so many new words at first. I have no idea how to deal with so many, or if it's even possible to learn so many so fast. So I ended up taking down only some of them, learning a portion of those, and being several days late on the remainders.
But the Thai tutor experience was very successful overall. I went from being a total mess of a beginner to being a solid intermediate in conversation in our 2 months together. I think it worked better than any other beginner program would work, short of living in Thailand.
So my new program will be
1) Tutor
2) Pimsleur
3) Vocabulary
4) JFBP
No comments:
Post a Comment