Extensive Reading Hours vs. TV Hours
Posted: April 4, 2011 Filed under: Extensive Reading, Free Voluntary Reading, Second Language Acquisition, Time Management | Tags: time management 12 Comments »
My TV Set
There is an interesting article “MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours” at The Daedalus Project that says:
MMORPG gamers spend on average 21.0 hours per week playing the game (N = 1996), and spend on average 7.7 hours per week watching TV (N = 1996). The national average for TV watching per week is around 28, which is what the above averages add up to. In other words, this lends support to the claim that time that was spent watching TV has been displaced by MMORPG playing.
What if we as language enthusiasts do the same as the MMORPG gamers i.e. to displace the time that was spent watching TV by Free Voluntary Reading?
Let’s see:
21 hours per week = 945 active minutes + 315 minutes for breaks (45+15);
945 minutes = 141.750 words per week (150 words per minute);
7 weeks x 141.750 words = 1.000.000 words read in your target language;
1.000.000 words in just 7 weeks.
Nagy and his colleagues claim that the million per annum figure is a reasonable estimate of the number of words school children typically encounter in a year.
That means that we can emulate the first 8 years of their education in just 56 weeks!
Building a start-up vocabulary
Posted: April 3, 2011 Filed under: Second Language Acquisition, Time Management, Uncategorized | Tags: second language acquisition, time management 3 Comments »A start up vocabulary is a basic set of words that you need in order to start acquiring vocabulary and grammar from the books by Free Voluntary Reading, without dictionaries.
Its size depends of the first few books that you want to read and can vary from the most common 2000 to 3000 words.
People spend different amounts of time to build this vocabulary size but after years of trial and error I’ve developed a system for me that allow me to learn these words in three weeks studying for 1 to 2 hours a day.
Here it is:
Day 1 - Learning the alphabet of the new language, basic phonics;
Day 2 – 100 new words (43* minutes or about 1 hour including breaks);
Day 3 - 100 new words (43* minutes or about 1 hour including breaks);
Day 4 – 100 new words (43* minutes or about 1 hour including breaks);
Day 5 – 100 new words (43* minutes or about 1 hour including breaks);
Day 6 – 100 new words + repeat day 2 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 7 – 100 new words + repeat day 3 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 8 - 100 new words + repeat day 4 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 9 – 100 new words + repeat day 5 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 10 – 100 new words + repeat day 6 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 11 – 100 new words + repeat day 7 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 12 – 100 new words + repeat day 8 (70* minutes or about 1.5 hours including breaks);
Day 13 – 100 new words + repeat day 9 and day 2 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 14 – 100 new words + repeat day 10 and day 3 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 15 – 100 new words + repeat day 11 and day 4 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 16 – 100 new words + repeat day 12 and day 5 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 17 - 100 new words + repeat day 13 and day 6 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 18 - 100 new words + repeat day 14 and day 7 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 19 – 100 new words + repeat day 15 and day 8 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 20 – 100 new words + repeat day 16 and day 9 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Day 21 – 100 new words + repeat day 17 and day 10 (91* minutes or about 2 hours including breaks);
Total: 2000 words.
* the learning time is for a language completely different from your native but with a relatively easy script, see this interesting thesis (page 26, table 3) for more info about that.
Why is this complex plan necessary?
Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material. That means that if you learn a hundred new words today well you need to repeat them 4 days later in order to retain them. After you repeat them in 4 days they will stick in your memory for another 7 days. If you repeat them again in 7 days you’ll remember them for another 12 days etc.
Look at Figure 2. Table of repetition intervals.
I used it to determine the date of the repetitions, this way you can be sure that you’ll remember the words you study but you won’t spend too much time on unnecessary and too frequent repetition.
What’s next?
Just grab a book and start reading but try to begin the very 22nd day otherwise you’ll start to forget words. I just started my first one – “1984“ by George Orwell “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury, bilingual, in Czech and English. 
