Color Coded Conceit

During my senior year at Ferrum College, I took classes in French and New Testament Greek. Played a little with Anglo Saxon. And dipped a timid toe in the ocean of Turkish.
Somewhere in my goods and chattels is a coffee bag from that conceited era, with crudely lettered vocabulary cards in four colors -- green ink for Turkish, red for Old English, black for French, and blue for NT Greek.

The technique is simple. Cut a 3 by 5 card into 3 or 4 pieces. Write the word or phrase in the target language on one side, in your native language on the other. Flip through the deck, and set the words you recognize aside. Concentrate on learning the unrecognized words. A neighbor, Chris Sanford, refined the technique for me recently. If you don't recognize a word, review it, then slide it back into the deck 10 spaces from the front, so you can soon review it again. If you ALMOST recognize a word, slide it in about halfway back in the deck. Known words go all the way to the back. In a kind of "bubble sort" process, the words you really need to work on work their way towards the top.

This morning, a dream I'd nursed for nearly 30 years reached a milestone. More than a year after starting, I made it through the New Testament in Turkish. With, perhaps, 30% comprehension. A lot of words defined in green ink in the margins, sometimes several times on the same page! Entropy remains an ongoing struggle -- can I push vocabulary words into long-term memory faster than they leak out? Can I increase my daily increment, my page count quota, so as to become a fluent reader within the foreseeable future? This "brute force" approach has worked for me in the past, inside the Indo-European family tree of languages. And the adventure is far from over.