With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
> Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular?
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
I am referring to the standard metric used in SRS communities.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).