Hmm. I work in the field of second language education. I even read Hamilton’s pamphlet [1] ten years ago when writing a couple of papers on historical controver

Hmm. I work in the field of second language education. I even read Hamilton’s pamphlet [1] ten years ago when writing a couple of papers on historical controversies about language education [2, 3]. I’m sure the Hamiltonian system works for some learners, especially those who are highly motivated to learn to read the target language. In most language classrooms, though, the method would fail quickly, because most learners of modern languages are more interested in learning to speak. They would also find the Hamiltonion method tedious and intellectually taxing. However, I do agree with the author that the importance and difficulty of vocabulary acquisition are often overlooked in language education programs. I’m not sure, though, how many people would acquire vocabulary better through the Hamiltonian system than through other methods. There’s a lot of individual variation in learning styles. When learning Japanese, which I now read, write, and speak fluently, I did a lot of brute-force vocabulary memorization using flashcards while also reading extensively without a dictionary and, at first, without much comprehension. Although I later worked as a Japanese-English translator, when initially learning the language I didn’t use translation at all, and all of the language classes I took were taught only in Japanese. But I don’t know many other people who learned languages successfully in the same way I did, and I myself wouldn’t be able to learn another language that way again. In any case, if anyone wants to try the Hamiltonian method themselves, textbooks are available at the Internet Archive [4, 5]. Let me know if it works for you. [1] https://archive.org/details/historyprinciple00hamirich/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/historyprinciple00hamirich/page/... [2] http://gally.net/writings/2012_Disputes_about_Language_Teaching.pdf http://gally.net/writings/2012_Disputes_about_Language_Teach... [3] http://gally.net/writings/2012_Which_Languages_to_Teach.pdf http://gally.net/writings/2012_Which_Languages_to_Teach.pdf [4] https://archive.org/details/opera00sall/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/opera00sall/page/n3/mode/2up [5] https://archive.org/details/corneliusneposad00nepo/page/n9/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/corneliusneposad00nepo/page/n9/m...