Thank you for your mainly positive review of my system. Let me take this opportunity to react to the qualifications you expressed about the system.

1. You mentioned that the idea of having multiple books is “clunky”. There is obviously a way round that, and that is to have a bigger book (50-60 lines deep), to start the headlist with 25 at the top left hand side, do three distillations instead of two going down the right hand side, and then do another two or three instead of the one going back up the left hand at the end. An alternative is to use a smaller book (40-45 lines deep) and take blocks of 20 to the head list instead of 25. That way you can get more from a single book.

For the first couple of years I used a loose leaf system, and i found it was hard to keep that organised, and switching to hard-bound writing books made it a lot easier.

I am not in favour of using computers rather than the hand and natural writing to learn vocabulary as I believe that there is a memeory that functions better with the human hand holding a stylus than on a keyboard. This is the reason why we always sign our name the same way. Writing across a page is a more natural motion than taping a keyboard. Also it is quicker to deal with diacritics, other alphabets, etc. You can more easily actually do the learning and writing comfortably without worrying about misstyping, etc. That having been said, if someone is sure that they know themselves and will be definitely more motivated by using a computer version than a paper one, then I don’t discount the possibility that they as individuals might be better served by doing it that way, but as a rule I advise doing it manually. You can take the goldlist on a walk, sit on a parkbench and do a page and then walk a bit more for the break, then stop at another bench. You cannot really do that with a computer.

2. I would put a different head word with each meaning. Example sentences are the standard way of learning the basic, regular paradigms, as well as learning idioms and set expressions. With the irregular words you just need to learn the exceptional parts of speech. In the head list you might list out all the parts of a Spanish verb, in the second list you might omit the parts which are predictable from the third person and the first person singular, for instance. In later distillations put it all on the one line, and obviously gradually drop it out as you became sure that you remembered all the parts of the verb.

I think that most vocab books do have enough space to give practice sentences, at least short ones. “Wenn der Wecker laeutet, steht man auf” will easily fit in any one I’ve ever made. In the head list you might place the new words on separate lines to the sentence, whereas later on in the second and third distillations you would not need to do that, you would just keep the practice sentence and maybe put the English word you were not sure you remembered in brackets.

Thanks again for your review, and I hope that this response will have gone a little way to addressing the remaining reservations.

Best regards,

David