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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5123 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes  Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 17 of 44 21 February 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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You certainly know best how you learn effectively, but I have to admit I find your proposition a bit strange. If your goal is to be able to read, why don't you start reading? Start with easy stuff, move through the age ranges, and soon you will be reading literature. I believe the easiest way to become a fluent reader of literature is to read extensively as much as possible. Even at the expense of all other activities, in particular Anki reps. With Spanish being a major language, there's sure to be enough books for all ages and skill levels.
Anki is incredibly efficient to drill specific items, but I don't think it's the perfect tool to acquire general reading skills (it's good on the side, though, used in moderation).
You say yourself that research shows that a learner needs to see a word in context 6 to 22 times before the learner "knows" it. The issue is that you only see one (instance of) context on your Anki card, but this context many times. Extensive reading will present the same word in ever changing contexts, making it much easier to really acquire it on a deep level. Words exist in a complex web of relations, connotations, co-occurrences etc., and you just can't cram that into your head with a meagre 10'000 sentence cards. At least that's what I'm worried about regarding your approach. Another thing you're missing out on is the magic of flow. Once you reach a certain level (and, as said before, I think the easiest way to get there is to read extensively a lot), you will experience flow when reading good stories. Flow is a really cool experience and from what I understand it should be conducive to learning, too. Yet another thing, I'm not sure if Anki's pass or fail dichotomy has much to do with reading skills. My experience is I will sometimes understand and sometimes fail to understand the large number of words I haven't acquired solidly yet. It depends on many things, context, level of attention, whether I've seen the word recently etc. This doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Over time, comprehension will improve, will become less context-sensitive, you'll start noticing co-occurrences, connotations, register etc. It's a complex process which is not well represented with pass-fail. I think the skill set to acquire is rather: tolerate ambiguity; being able to make quick guesses and then move on; focus more on meaning than on words. After all you're being told a story, not specific words. To acquire those skills extensive reading for pleasure is the perfect base activity. Sorry for the wall of words, and I don't mean to question your undertaking. You will know best what works for you and what doesn't. Edited by Bakunin on 21 February 2014 at 8:42pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 18 of 44 21 February 2014 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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You have some good points for sure.
The way I'm doing this, an anki rep simply means that you read the sentence and just pass it if you can read it aloud fluently, and you know what every word means. So doing anki reps is reading. The review feature of anki is simply a way to be sure that you don't forget what you have learned. I tried this after some disappointment with L-R, it seemed to work great, but I kept feeling like what I was reading was slipping away within a few days of learning. Don't overestimate my Spanish. I am tantalizingly close to independent reading with material written for adults, but I don't really think I'm there yet. I can't get excited enough about material written for children to pursue it much; I'd rather play with anki. I guess what I'm trying to do is to skip the Peter Rabbit to Harry Potter stage. Oddly enough, one type of adult discourse that I've found pretty easy to read is the whole "erotic" catagory. High interest material with simple vocabulary and grammar. It does get a little repetitious. It seems to me that my main lack is vocabulary. I plan about an hour a day doing L-R, another crutch when you don't know enough vocabulary, and then read aloud material that I understand. I suspect this 10000 sentence method will pay off and lose its usefulness way before I get to 10000 sentences. I like anki, because it doesn't take any time, I can fill other wasted time. I imagine, however, that I will drop down the new cards and review numbers whenever I get where I can read independently. I doubt that I will stop anki, it's just too easy and useful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 44 28 February 2014 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I actually changed the heading for this log to try to show that reading is at least as big a part of what I'm doing as anki/srs.
I find that quantifying what I'm doing with these big numbers is a nice motivator for me, even if it's just another way of saying 30 new anki cards and 30 minutes of reading a day on average. On both my anki cards and my reading I'm a little behind schedule, but still well within reach of where I should be. As of today, I "should" have 1616 cards in the Young + Learn or Mature categories in my anki deck; I have 1321. I should have already read 161600 words; I'm still down at 94000. So far, my grades are: SRS: 81% Reading: 58% I've obviously got to kick myself into gear on reading. It's what I like to do best; an hour a day should get me back to a passing grade pretty quickly. I just need to do all my recreational reading in Spanish; L-Ring things if I need to. One thing I've noticed about anki that I didn't really realize before, is how your knowledge of a sentence changes as the intervals get longer and longer. It isn't like reviewing the sentence just restores your knowledge back to what it was when you first learned the card, reviewing the sentence successfully at longer intervals drives it deeper and deeper into your brain. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 44 28 February 2014 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I've actually put about 3000 cards into anki; I just deleted a lot of them for different reasons.
I thought when I started this log that making cards out of bilingual novels I prepared for L-R, since I already have them in a spreadsheet program would be a easy source of thousands of cards; I'm afraid many of these cards are inappropriate. Many sentences in novels are too long to make good anki cards, and many of these long sentences contain several unknown (to me) words. I've found a lot of the classic English novels that have been translated into Spanish make great reading in Spanish; I think sometimes the translation clarifies the meaning. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 44 01 March 2014 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thank you for writing about your experiment! I'm following with great interest, and I like your secondary goal of 1 million words. That's about half of the original Super Challenge, and it will surely give you a huge comprehension boost.
You have a ton of interesting stuff just on one page of your log, and so I'll respond in detail. :-)
Yes, I've always liked cards like that, too. They're easy to review, hard to fail, and they stick in my head.
You might want to try picking up three or four interesting books and seeing if one "clicks". Some books are weirdly easy for no obvious reason, but it generally takes a few attempts to find one. And once you find a really interesting book that's not too hard, you can always just dive in. You'll probably start out "kinda sorta" reading. After a couple hundred pages, things tend to get better as you acclimate to a given writer. This is one place, unfortunately, that a bit of money can really help. If I have only two French books on my shelf, I may not get excited about reading. If I go out and buy, say, four interesting things, at least one of them will "click" and I'll devour it.
One nice advantage of this is that you'll know all the potentially embarrassing words very well, which will make it easier to avoid using them by mistake. :-)
Yeah, this is a really interesting phenomenon. I can put a weird, difficult sentence on a card, a sentence that I don't entirely understand. And somewhere around the 1 month mark, it will come up for review, and I'll look at it, and it will seem perfectly natural and obvious. There's some sort of change that happens very reliably between 20 and 40 days. I suspect we're not the only people to notice this: Anki starts calling cards "mature" right around the 1 month mark, too.
I'm very happy to hear this. :-) When you started this log, I was a little bit afraid that you'd fall into the trap of "must review every card every time!" and wind up as the next "victim" of 10,000 sentences/SRS gone wrong. But you seem to have successfully avoided that danger, and discovered that a little deletion goes a long way. Besides, the nice thing about deleting cards is you can always make more. If you use an ereader, all you need to do is highlight interesting sentences and export your highlights file. Interesting cards are basically an inexhaustible natural resource, so there's no reason not to delete capriciously when a card annoys or bores you. I can easily make far more good cards than I will ever have time to review, so why not cull the herd, so to speak?
What I often do with these cards is boldface each unknown word, and add definitions for each to the back. When I review, I try to be merciful on the grading: If I know 2 of 3 words, and I understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole, then I'll pass the sentence anyway. Anyway, good luck with your experiment! I shall continue following with interest. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 44 10 March 2014 at 3:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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OK, another update:
All is well, and it is clear that my reading, and especially listening comprehension are improving. I have 1587 sentences in anki, and I have read about 121,000 words. I've been surprised at how slowly I read full fledged Spanish for adults, but I think I need to reread sentences so much that it slows me way down. I seem to be improving rapidly, however. I'm just trying to push ahead as fast as I can. I've been reading the Spanish version of Cornwell's _The Winter King_. I've always had an interest in the middle ages, and this book is set back in the dark ages. Cornwell generally writes good page turner that is historically accurate. He writes well of war. The last few nights I've been reading of the battles to keep the Saxons out of England, in Spanish, and going to sleep with Gregorian chant playing in my ears. Very anachronistic, but it fits together in my head somehow. Anyway, it's the kind of thing I would read for fun in English. My grades are a little better: sentences in SRS: 1587/1863 = 85% words read: 121000/186300 = 65% This is comparing what I have done to what I "should" have done to be on a path to get to 10000 sentences and 1000000 words by the end of the year. This is, of course, a completely arbitrary number. I've actually cut down on my new cards per day in anki; anki was starting to become a drag, and I had cards left over at the end of the day a few times. I also have deleted about half the cards I've added; it would be trivial to have a couple of thousand more cards in the learning and mature categories, if I wasn't throwing so many away. I'm trying to get ten thousand good cards. I am not doing complete immersion in Spanish, which AJATT recommends. In fact, I'm pretty close to being immersed in Tagalog when I'm at home. I certainly don't intend to give up my family, or my Filipino soap operas, to help my Spanish; I'm just going to learn what I can how I can. I think it is really important to read material that you really want to read. I kept trying to read Harry Potter, and just couldn't get into it, even though it is at about exactly the right level. I've read it to my children in English, and I'm just too familiar with it. Maybe later. I picked up a copy of the Latin version; perhaps someday I'll study some Latin. It certainly fits with an interest in the middle ages... I would be really psyched if I could actually read full fledged literature in Spanish by next year; my impression is that I will be able to... Maybe well before then. I just have to keep working. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 44 10 March 2014 at 3:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Another note on Latin: I know that Spanish is a Romance language, but it still sort of shocks me whenever I can understand some Latin, based on what I know of Spanish.
Beautiful, very alien, music from Leonin and Perotin at Nortre Dame in 1100, and suddenly I understand a whole phrase... Cool! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4758 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 44 10 March 2014 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Oh, if anybody is interested, I'd say that I'm still about a B1 speaking; with the limited time to devote to study and travel, I'm not sure this is going to get better very quickly. I think that I may be able to push my passive skills up a lot with the time I've got to devote. If I can make myself into a B1 active/C1 passive type person, I'll be able to be a decent tourist/customer in Spanish when I get the chance.
My Spanish learning environment is far from optimal, but who cares; I'm just having fun with a very cool language and set of cultures. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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