For those of you who are interested in the tests and thinking that we’ve been doing around intense sessions, I’ve got an introductory booklet up on Kindle:
and apparently it will be here for the US when they’ve finished checking the publishing rights:
I’ll be particularly interested to hear what you think of it if you read it - and doubly hugely so if you’d be kind enough to leave a review on Amazon, which makes an enormous difference to driving extra sales
Just bought this to read this evening, I have had a few weeks just coasting with my learning and feeling a lack of motivation so am hoping this will re-kindle (pun intended) my enthusiasm! Diolch yn fawr team!
I’ll look forward very much to hearing what you think of it, Tina - and if you’d like any extra details about how to implement an intensive test yourself, just sing out on here and we’ll help you give it a shot…
I’ve downloaded it and skimmed through and I’ll leave a brief positive review later. (I presume that’s what you need for the ratings, or would you prefer the below?)
It’s a good read and some incredibly interesting premises. (Can’t belive nobody has properly got on to this before really!) I’ll be very interested to see the long-term results of the guinea pigs of the intensive training / rest periods method when you have tested it on enough genuine beginners. What worries me at the back of my mind is that you may end up with people with a rough grasp of the language, but lacking a firm enough grounding to be able to “route” what they want to say to the appropriate constuction enough of the time. I hope this is unfounded, but has been bothering me ever since you moved away from the more “formal” approach of the original 3 courses. As I say, I’ll be following the results with great interest, and almost sorry I arrived a bit too late to try it out properly!
Either is fab with me - I don’t want to nudge people into any specific direction, apart from the shameless nudge (aka pushing as hard as I can in the small of your back!) into the actual review…
Yup, I recognise that concern - it was the siren song at the back of my mind that made Course 3 so much more drill-like than 1 & 2 - ‘ooh, I’ve got to fill in all these gaps’.
But the real query there is about the new Level 1 etc material, which is much less traditional than the original 3 courses - and based very firmly on what I’ve been seeing with people extrapolating - and we’ll start to see some worthwhile initial evidence, I think, by the end of Level 2 (currently recording).
The intensive approach is more about how memory works - how much gets retained after an intense session, and how often/when you should revisit - and on that front, I’m very confident indeed - haven’t found any exceptions yet, even though we’re still on a tiny sample size.
I’m looking forward to tucking the old material away and checking more pro-actively with a set of beginners who’ve gone straight to Level 1 - but I think we need to have Level 2 available before we do that…
Thanks for the emails Aran. I should have asked my question on the Forum so that everyone could share it, but it is good to know that I can read Kindle editions on my iPad by using the link you sent me to download the free App. I’m going to get myself sorted now and will give feedback in due course.
And at the moment it’s looking as though we’re going to be past 100 downloads before the end of today, which is a first for our Kindle tests and a Good Thing
To give you an idea of what a HUGE difference reviews make, we’ve just jumped from #24 (not on the first page) to #2 under Education & Reference -> Foreign Languages…
As a result of getting just our second review.
A few more reviews will keep HILT up at the top for a few more days, which all makes it more likely that Amazon’s own algorithms will start sending some traffic at it.
So here’s my subtle hint: please PLEASE go and leave a review!
Looking forward to when this is ready, both for Welsh and for Spanish. Haven’t finished Level 1 yet, but I intend to be one of those guinea pigs for you.
