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Best approach to Spaced Rep software | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| David_Schmavid Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5847 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes | Message 1 of 30 27 November 2008 at 9:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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So i'm trying to learn Spanish but progress is slow.
i've a terrible memory. i have downloaded anki to use to jog it now and again. the thing is, i don't know what approach to take when it comes to organising the flash cards and would very much appreciate some advice or words of experience. for instance: at the moment i am organising thus: 'Spanish grammar facts' - some in English with examples taken from schaum's outline of Spanish grammar 'geography / directions' which has countries in it and things like 'first, second' , left right etc...but thinking of broadening that into measurements... one fact is that some cards i ask to be repeated in 3 months time, and there's not nearly enough cards to justify three month repetition. also, is there a way to merge my decks into one large do you know?? thanks a ton for all help in advance! best, David 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7014 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 2 of 30 27 November 2008 at 9:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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The best page on making language-based flash cards is surely Antimoon's sample English flash cards page.
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| David_Schmavid Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5847 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes | Message 3 of 30 27 November 2008 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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thanks although that doesn't really go into how best to categorise the cards i am creating. should they all go in the one big file or am i correct in giving them sub categories according to bits of the language? eg.g. geography, parts of body, etc. etc.
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| Othar Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6212 days ago 185 posts - 205 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Norwegian, Turkish | Message 4 of 30 27 November 2008 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would put them all in the same file. You can write the category in the tag field in case you want to search or disable the category later.
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| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5984 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 5 of 30 27 November 2008 at 4:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I prefer a searchable database rather than one split into categories that will be a pain most of the time. I guess all SRS programs allow textual searching, but the ideal thing would be to be able to do headwords searching. For that you should mark this words in some way, for example I use the html bold marks, and you should also stick to a coherent system for writing these headwords, like for example the conventions of the dictionary you use the most. Edited by Javi on 27 November 2008 at 6:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6475 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 6 of 30 05 December 2008 at 2:33am | IP Logged | |||||
To be honest, after some experimentation some months ago I quickly found that page's advice not to be very good advice. Consider this English sentence: "I went to the store to ______ groceries." The context is so helpful that you know there's a very high probability the word is "buy". Your brain fills in the blank without even knowing what the word in the blank is. Now consider this Spanish sentence: "Fui a la tienda para _____ comestibles." In case you don't know Spanish, this is the same sentence. Assuming you know the rest of the words, your brain will still know the blank must mean "buy". Now consider this one, this one being the one that actually appears in your flash cards: "Fui a la tienda para comprar comestibles." You have the same situation, just with the blank filled in. If you don't know the word "comprar" and know all the other ones, however, your brain will still fill in the blank. And you will still read to yourself, "I went to the store to buy some groceries". The upshot is: you fail to use your memory to answer the question of what "comprar" means. This is extremely bad. You fail to associate "buy" with "comprar", and so you continue to not really know what "comprar" means even though you don't have much of a choice but to give the card a perfect score. After all, it's hard to tell if you knew the meaning of "comprar" from the context or if you really did know the word, because, in my experience, the meaning of "buy" usually leaps at you before you have time to think about what "comprar" means. A much better way to do it is to emphasize production instead of recognition. That is, in this case, you would go from English to Spanish (assuming you're studying Spanish): Q: I went to the store to buy some groceries. A: Fui a la tienda para comprar comestibles. Now you're forced to know the word "comprar" and the association in your mind is properly strengthened. It's OK to use both production and recognition, going both ways, but I only do it when the sentence is structured so that the answer is never going to be self-evident. I find that to be a small minority of the time, though... the vast majority of my items are production only. - Kef Edited by furrykef on 05 December 2008 at 2:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5984 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 7 of 30 05 December 2008 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
That's interesting. Personally I don't like production sentences, first of all because they have to be bilingual, and also because, since there are several ways to say something, it's not that easy to evaluate your answers. That said, and although I heard about SRS in that website for the first time, I don't really use any of the card styles they recommend. I do use a mix of Definition-word and Gap-filling, I feel comfortable with it and think it works for me. Anyway, I'm not sure if I got what's the problem with filling in the gap. You said it is too easy?? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6678 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 8 of 30 06 December 2008 at 4:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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I usually work with recognition and sentences. You will go faster and it's more encouraging. My idea is to be good at recognition as quickly as possible because this help to work with native materials as soon as possible. I remember one of our members wrote this and I agree: People can learn to recognize and understand far more than they can learn to recall in the same amount of time. If you learn to recall 300 words, you can't do much except move on to learning to recall the next 300 words. If you have learned to recognize and understand 2000 words in the same amount of time as it would take to learn to recall 300 words, you can then start reading, and so encounter those 2000 words enough times to acquire them actively, and at the same time be encountering and learning to recognize hundreds of new words. All in the time it would take to learn to recall the next 300 words. This is powerful language learning. Edited by slucido on 06 December 2008 at 4:34am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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