[james_s_tayler]

Although I agree with plenty of things you say, and we probably have similar experiences learning language, the strength of your assertions to always use i+1 (95%) and to always go from native to target when doing flashcards are unwarranted.

That's A method. Or A way to do it. There are many paths up the mountain. Granted I appreciate it when people explicitly lay out "here's the path I walked up" as that's good information. But there exist other paths equally as fast and maybe some even faster, many slower of course but there really is a surprising multitude of techniques that wind up at similar results.

I remember sitting and engaging with content that I had fuck all idea what was being said but I was so damn delighted every time a word came up that I knew that it just lit the fire and kept it burning. I did plenty of i+1 flashcards which were sentences (both reading and listening) purely from target to native. I quickly established a foundation on which I could parse any sentence, I just needed the vocab. Then I did nothing but engaging with content I was interested in regardless of difficulty and hung out with friends getting in 10+ hours conversation (one on one plus group situations) per week. End of my second year of doing that I could hold my own in a lengthy one on one for hours on end and end of year 3 I could hold my own indefinitely in groups.

Was a blast. So long ago now.

[mikekchar]

Sorry. You are correct. I keep getting obsessed with efficiency :-) I also did what you did. However, I have discovered that you can learn faster than that if you maintain 95% comprehension rate (it's the amount that's required to infer language from context). I used to have a list of references on this topic, but sadly I lost it somehow (along with a book on teaching English I wrote -- astonishingly I did not have backups). Since I returned to IT, I haven't had the time to go back to this :-(

But anyway, I've tried the 95% comprehension technique on my students and the results were pretty fantastic. I highly recommend it.

[james_s_tayler]

I don't disagree with 95% it's definitely a magic formula. What I did was do my focused study where I would sit down and do flashcards etc in the 95% format and then for hours a day after the focused study side of things was taken care of I'd dive into completely unstructured learning. That's been my go to ever since.

Also, I suppose I should clarify a little around target to native. I tried that a couple of times. Maybe even 3 times seriously. Intellectually I always came to the conclusion that if you can pull off doing pure output in native to target over a wide enough range of sentences then the whole structure of the language will crystalize really fast. I could never make the emotional side of it work. It always felt too grindy for me and I had to overextend on spending effort against that one task and couldn't sustain it. So I'd just slide back to my tried and true method because tough as they were I could always make the emotional side of that sustainable.

I think it's actually a critically important point. I love it the idea of it as a method and if the emotions of it are workable then it's probably an epic path.