So today is actually Wednesday the 7th of May, not Saturday the 10th of May. I am doing this challenge ahead of time, because I might not have a full day to do it later in the week.
What is the Tim Doner Challenge?
To memorise 100 brand new words in a single day.
Tim Doner claims that he can retain 'up to 100 new words a day', and I am going to put it to the test. I think the most new words I have added before is about 16, so this should be pretty interesting.
How?
What I did was to create a vocab set on the website Memrise of 100 Egyptian Arabic words that I have never learnt or maybe even heard before. These ranged from the word for 'personality', 'civil war', 'to fart' etc etc. It's a real huge mix.
The challenge begins.
10:11am - I started.
11:22am - First 3 levels completed for the first time. Having difficulty with some of the longer words.
12:10am - Taking a break for lunch after going over the first 50 words just once.
2:14pm - I have been through all 100 words at least once now. I probably only about 25 of them, but I am going to keep testing myself on them until they are all in my long-term memory. If you were wondering how many Memrise points 100 new words gets you, it's 36,865.
5:24pm - Oh my days. My brain hurts. I am going through the sets of words one by one. I just did a run through of all 100 words and I got 83 correct. That's really good going. I am going to find the words I got wrong and try to commit them to memory.
10:31pm - Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. I feel like I have a tentative hold on quite a lot of the words I have learnt, and that many will be gone by tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning I will be testing myself on the words I learnt, and this is how I will know whether I have learnt them or not.
08/05/2014 - The next day.
8:20am - I tested myself on every word and got a score of 91/100
So I haven't learnt them all, and in all honesty I think some of them were a fluke. The amount of vocab that will actually get recycled from this into my working memory and usable vocab is probably around 35-45.
This challenge has made me feel more confident about learning more words in a single day. Learning 20 or 30 words now seems like a much more simple task.
Many more even bigger and much more ambitious challenges on their way!
That's awesome! 91% is excellent retention, and long-term practice will certainly help. Do you think you'll keep aiming for that goal?
ReplyDeleteThanks :) Unfortunately, It took almost my entire day to memorise all of those words, which isn't something I can do often.
DeleteBut it has made me feel more confident about remembering 50-60 words in a day without straining myself.