Finished Pimsleur Volume 1

It was hard at times, but I finished with Pimsleur 1. Now I'm working on volume 2. The first Pimsleur lesson I did took 7 tries to advance. The next was 5, and it wasn't getting any better. So I did something the program recommended against - I made a word list, and drilled it when I wasn't doing lessons. That improved my performance to a maximum of 3 tries to pass a lesson.

This is perhaps my greatest weakness in learning languages. I learn words passively, meaning in context, without drilling, slower than anyone else I know. I'm a visual learner, meaning seeing the word written down helps a great deal, but it goes beyond that. Amongst a group of 50 Peace Corps volunteers in Tanzania, I was acquiring passive vocabulary slower than almost anyone else (3rd from the bottom). A week before the final test, I started using lists, and I finished 7th from the top. 

There is another reason why Japanese vocabulary is so hard for me. I need to learn using their simplified script, kana. The romanized script, romaji, has bee strictly forbidden to learners these days because it hard-wires in romanized text rather than Japanese, and obstructs the learning process. So I've been using only kana for my word lists. This is really hard. I've just barely learned the script, and I'm having to use it to learn a lot of new vocabulary. This all but wipes out the advantage of being able to see the written word.

So I got desperate, did some research, and decided to use a mnemonic method that I tried out while learning Swahili and Thai. The linkword method has been around a while (I'm not suggesting anyone buy the product in the link; it just details out the method really well). I thought I sort of invented that method, so was surprised that lots of other people use it, along with many other techniques. I've used a lot of other simple mnemonic techniques like this for vocabulary, but this one works the best for me.

At first, using the method was really slow. But after some practice, I think its about as fast as having the word in roman script. This is great news, since I learn about 80% of my vocabulary this way. It was about 30% with Thai, and 10% with Swahili. Using linkword to this degree is really new to me.