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Flashcards - good or bad? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Enrico Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 3735 days ago 162 posts - 207 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Italian, Spanish, French | Message 41 of 45 31 August 2014 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | ||
For me flashcards is boring and not to helpful I prefer extensive reading and listening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5027 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 42 of 45 03 September 2014 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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For most of my learning I have absorbed new words in a naturalistic way and generally
doing a good job of retaining new words so wouldn't use anki. Now however I am using anki but no more than 30 minutes a day, usually less, during the time I spend on public transport. The thing I would convey is that my use of anki is rooted in promoting communicative proficiency, not just cramming hundreds of words. To illustrate this, two of the problems I faced (in German) were to be able to use gender and relevant plural (German plurals are quite irregular). To not know a plural or a gender exacts a cost in communicative competency. Not a great one to be sure, a slight hesitation while one makes one's best guess, nevertheless on words that are common and that I have learned but tend to forget it is a real drag to keep forgetting things. Of course in fluency terms it might be better to just get it wrong (i.e. not be too aware or care too much) because then your flow of speech isn't perturbed and the only downside is people will work out you're not a native speaker which, of course, they'll know already! Anyhow anki is my solution to this problem, simply by some repeated exposure, which if I forget I can repeat more frequently. The idea being to strengthen the memory by spaced repetition in order to aid fluency. An other area I find it helpful is in remembering names of international organisations that I might talk about where I want to do so fluently and not have to reconstruct the word from first principles (for example when talking about the European Convention on Human Rights and so on). Overall I think exposure to comprehensible input is the way to learn a language, so I wouldn't make flashcards the mainstay, or even do it all the time but it can play a role. Finally I should mention that I would use anki for any words I want to use more frequently in every day speech, idioms, loan words (especially from English) and numbers in newer languages. I guess it has infinite uses really, just so long as anki is working for you not the other way around. You shouldn't be using anki because it's a good thing to do but because it's solving a problem you have. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doodoofan Tetraglot Newbie Vietnam japanesetest4you.com Joined 4705 days ago 19 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English, Mandarin, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 43 of 45 13 September 2014 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Flashcards are good in someway. I wouldn't recommend using flashcards to learn English vocabulary,
because there are better ways to do it, like reading novels. However, flashcards work like magic when you try to remember Japanese Kanji. I created flashcards by myself with Heisig's Remembering the Kanji book and learned them every day. The Kanjis sticked into my brain for a very long time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6572 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 44 of 45 16 September 2014 at 7:42am | IP Logged | ||
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My breakthrough moments in Cantonese and Spanish have both been flashcard related. For
Cantonese it was a deck of 5,000 characters in both directions. Working through this deck really elevated my reading to a whole new level. I still expand the deck by adding every new character I encounter. Before, I'd do reading, but I'd be hampered by those characters where I thought I probably knew the pronunciation but wasn't sure. Should I look them up or move on? Add to this that there are no audiobooks in Cantonese. In Spanish the breakthrough was smaller, but working through a deck with all irregular verbs and their conjugations made my speaking a lot better. Other than that, I do have decks where I add interesting new words I encounter. I often find myself wanting to learn words whether or not they're commonly used, just because I really like the words in question. Doubly so for characters where I've memorized Cantonese characters for common words that nobody knows how to write (except me!). I do single word flashcards, usually L2 to L1, but sometimes L1 to L2 when I find myself wanting to say something and can't find the word. I love flashcards, I find them fun, and I enjoy watching the progress stats. I don't see them as a replacement for massive input, but they're a great tool to, above all, speed up the way there. I don't enjoy doing extensive reading or listening when I can't understand most of what's being said. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5049 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 45 of 45 16 September 2014 at 9:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't use flashcards at all in languages that are related to ones I know. In those languages, reading and listening
are enough for the words to stick because cognates serve as a memory aid. For languages unrelated to ones I know, I drill words I've recently encountered in Anki, because otherwise my retention rate is too low to grow my vocabulary quickly. This is never a replacement for input and output- the idea is just to improve retention, not learn a lot of new things. Basically, I wouldn't use flashcards unless your vocabulary is failing to grow (i.e. you aren't retaining many new words from input). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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