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Best ways of memorizing stuff? | ||
Tags: Flash cards | Memory | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3902 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: French | Message 9 of 19 01 January 2015 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting thanks. While I know a lot of words, and phrases, some do not come to mind easily, and I don't know if I'm just slow or not, or if it's just going to take time, and repeated exposure.
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| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 10 of 19 01 January 2015 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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The thing is, the more often you come across a word the more likely you are to remember it. No different from new vocabulary in English. So really you want to watch a lot of TV series, Films, listen the the radio or podcasts, read, read, read, then read some more, and use flashcards.
After you've seen a word 10-15 times and looked it up, it will sink in. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5334 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 11 of 19 01 January 2015 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Absolutely yes: don't use flashcards. I don't know about "stuff" in general, but the best way to memorize vocabulary is in context. When you encounter an unknown word in a sentence within a semantic context that you then look up, the chances of remembering it later on in another semantic context are much greater than if you only see it in isolation. Not only this, you'll be working on the remaining vocabulary, grammar and syntax at the same time. Unless you have no suitable materials to work with (i.e., reading materials appropriate for your current level) or are working on Kanji or Egyptian or Sumerian ideograms, in my opinion flashcards are the most time wasteful form of studying a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5945 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 12 of 19 02 January 2015 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I have used flash cards, both electronic (ANKI) and paper, although increasingly I am questioning their effectiveness for me. Equally though I am super-interested in the apparently super-productive subs2srs + ANKI approach of emk, eyðimörk and others.
In the past, I have tended to throw everything I have learned into ANKI. I have concluded that this approach slowed down my learning more than it benefitted it. I also would make perhaps 5 or 10 paper cards per study day for anything that struck me that day as either particularly challenging or important, and flip through those paper cards a bunch of times at random moments - this still strikes me as effective, for me.
This sounds like it may be somewhat similar to my experience: I find a word either clicks for me right away, or I am going to be struggling with it for quite a while. My approach lately for any word that does not click right away (rather than just throwing it into ANKI and hoping naively for the best down the spaced road), is to make sure to work the non-clicking word hard right at the very first instance, not by brute force but instead seeking out example sentences using the word and seeing it in context. For example, for some reason "forchetta" clicked right away. Ask me in a hundred years what the Italian for "fork" is and forchetta will be readily at hand. The vowel-heavy "Cucchiaio" on the other hand would likely still puzzle me for a hundred flips of an ANKI card. So instead more recently I read the word in context as much as possible from wordreference.com, where for cucchiaio there around twenty phrases and example sentences (from "silver-spoon" to "Non ho molta fame, prenderò solo un cucchiaio o due di gelato. I don't try to memorize all the examples, but working through them pounds a spoon into my noggin really effectively. In other words, don't bother reading the above portion of my boring post. Just agreeing with what others have said about the benefits of context. Also, big shout out for Duolingo - it relies heavily on context, though the context always seems to involve animals eating apples for some reason. Edited by Spanky on 02 January 2015 at 2:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6586 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 13 of 19 02 January 2015 at 3:07am | IP Logged | ||
SRS is what you make of it. I use(d) it basically as a way to save the most special tweets, sentences from books, quotes and whatnot, and relive the wonderful moments regularly. I kind of agree about single words, but this doesn't apply to sentences or subs2srs cards at all, imo. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5309 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 14 of 19 02 January 2015 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
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@Tyrion101: It would be helpful to know what language(s) you're interested in, because there are some language-specific techniques, for example, RTK for Japanese and Chinese. There are also lots of mnemonic verses for remembering Latin grammar.
I use a method similar to Iversen's word list method and link words for Indo-European languages. (I've also experimented with Anki, but it didn't work for me.) IMHO, there's no one-size-fits-all method. You'll have to experiment with the different methods suggested in this thread and pick one that works for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4522 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 19 02 January 2015 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree that SRS words in isolation aren't so useful, but I am currently finding learning words embedded in sentences really helpful for improving my low frequency vocabulary. Anki is only an additional thing I do on top of lots of reading, but I do find it helpful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tyrion101 Senior Member United States Joined 3902 days ago 153 posts - 174 votes Speaks: French | Message 16 of 19 02 January 2015 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
French is the main one at the moment, though there are others, Russian (eventually) and Mandarin, want to learn Korean someday as well, but I'm mostly putting these aside until I can firm up my French to the nearly automatic point. I think I stated somewhere on the site my primary language interest is Asian (Russian isn't really Asian, but I've always wanted to learn it.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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