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Memorizing lists of "phrases" rather ... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5343 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 65 02 November 2011 at 11:45am | IP Logged | |||||
I've seriously thought about only learning new words passively through sentences only rather than as individual separate word-chunks. My thinking is more along the lines that when learning the words individually it feels that I'm "over-learning" SOME of the words in a sense. Sure, it's great if you have a context-less environment in which you can fully recognize and define the word regardless of any outside hints or sentence context ... but why go to all the trouble? Through the process of reading and listening we will eventually hear the more common words hundreds or thousands of times more anyway, so perhaps we would be better off just "cheating" and making it stupidly easy to recognize those words by surrounding them with context just so we can quickly jump to more advanced reading/listening materials in which those words will pop up again repeatedly... If we "barely" know it because it's learned in a sentence that we've essentially memorized .. so what? We're going to see all these words in a thousand contexts later on anyway as we get onto more advanced listening/reading stages. By putting a lot of time into "pre-learning" the word in a context-less environment, it may mean that some of the time used during the massively long reading/listening phases, which we'll all have to go through anyway, will be wasted in a sense. Or, to use an example ... if I'm going to hear the word "the" a trillion times while in the process of learning and assimilating a more difficult word such as "scaffold" in natural contexts anyway, then why waste my time reviewing the word "the" a trillion times in anki or on word lists? "Scaffold" is going to be the bottleneck, not "the" or "and", etc. (yes, I know "the" can in reality be fairly tricky in itself, but I'm just using it as an example of a common word ..) In the process of getting used to the harder words and learning how to use them, the easier words will already be known anyway ... even without studying them individually past an initial introduction phase. "Scaffold" might be something I'd need to review and have an Anki card for, but the second I can read even the most simplistic sentences, "the" is probably something I'd never need to review again. Therefore having a a few hundred vocabulary words with things like "the" or "and" somewhere in the rotation (along with what is sometimes very odd and hard to remember definitions for some of these supposedly "easy" non-noun words, thus causing many failures and repeats) it might be better to just stick it in an easily remembered sentence and then never worry about it again, trusting it's reviews in actual sentences to be far more than you'd ever need. That being said, I'm still using a 1 word, 1 flashcard, system right now (although I use sentences for grammar related issues) but I do suspect there may be some merit to doing vocabulary learning itself through sentences only. I just haven't bothered to try it. I'm also a bit past the point where there are many often-repeated words that I think might most likely benefit from it. Edited by Sandman on 02 November 2011 at 12:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4800 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 65 02 November 2011 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm going to disagree because I believe the human mind has an amazing capacity to pull sentences apart into components and to reassemble those components in novel ways. A young child might hear the sentence "This soup is disgusting." and the next day spout off to mom "This oatmeal is disgusting." When my three kids were growing up, and when my grand kids were acquiring language I saw this kind of thing time and time again. They would hear a sentence, and then almost immediately start using bits and pieces of that sentence in different contexts. I think that's an inborn function of the human brain, and that by learning whole sentences we are actually learning sentence components as well.
Perhaps the word "the" doesn't need to be learned, but observe anyone whose native language does not include a definite article struggle to learn when to use "the". By learning chunks one is not so much learning the word "the" as learning when and how to use the word "the". So I agree learning "the" in a list or an Anki deck is a waste of time, but being repeatedly exposed to "the" in context is vital to the process of learning English properly. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| WentworthsGal Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4823 days ago 191 posts - 246 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Spanish | Message 11 of 65 02 November 2011 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it's a great idea to learn sentences, especially when you're new to a language. If you can get a base sentence and then some extra verbs, adjectives and nouns to swap with the original ones in the base sentence then you can have several sentences at your fingertips. Double this if you learn how to turn it into the negative (e.g I like potatoes - I don't like potatoes). This can be a great boost to your motivation, especially if you can link two sentences together with "and" etc. It may not be exactly correct with the word order or grammar but I personally think it's a great place to start...
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 65 03 November 2011 at 7:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've just returned from a French language meetup where I participate as an informal helper with learners of French. What I noticed time and time again is that the number one problem of relatively advanced speakers is incorrect usage of French words. That is to say, the speaker is using a perfectly good word in the wrong context. For example, French uses chambre, salle and pièce for variations of the English word room. The problem is that there are important differences in usage according to the kind of room and the context of the sentence. These kinds of mistakes are nearly impossible for the speaker to detect. The only way to overcome this problem is to be corrected by a native or very advanced speaker. Now, the only way to possibly avoid this problem is to be exposed to or learn enough examples of the differentiated usage of these terms to understand the subtleties of usage. And this is exactly why it is important to learn entire sentences or phrases. This does not mean that learning a language consists of solely learning a list of sentences.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 65 03 November 2011 at 11:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been thinking through the posts above, and not least the one by s_allard above, and in many respects I tend to agree with s_allard (just to mention one contributor). But there are a few things that aren't that simple.
First, "The only way to overcome this problem is to be corrected by a native or very advanced speaker. Now, the only way to possibly avoid this problem is to be exposed to or learn enough examples.." described two very different ways of solving the problem with the incomplete knowledge/feeling for the ideomatic side of language - because even though the word wasn't used, this is what it all is about. I stick to the opinion that you are in a much better position to learn long complex expressions AND their correct use if you know their elements. This has more with memorization to do than with idiomatics. You could of course learn all possible combinations of salle/chambre/pièce and their different purposes by heart as indivisible blocks, including combinations where they don't refer to rooms, i.e. you could treat these combinations as single words - but each of these words would be more difficult to remember than their elements. OK, learning single words before their combinations entails a risk that you make incorrect combinations. But you get a better sense for the possible uses of 'salle' if you can see beyond each single use. When I advocate learning single words (or even single word elements) I always stress that the idea is that this should ease the subsequent learning of idiomatic constructions through the contact with genuine sources, written as well as spoken, and it is is simple fact that it can take years to build up a repertoire of combinations that are correct while eliminating combinations which aren't found in native materials. Dictionaries and other specialized sources can give some help, but ultimately only a lot of language practice can give you the necessary feeling for the frequencies of different combinations. So when an inexperienced language user produces incorrect or at least unintentional combinations then corrections from a native speaker or more experienced learner are in a sense a way of shortcutting this slow and laborious absorbtion of frequency patterns by eliminating certain combinations and adding extra weight to others. Now, corrections are a part of language learning, but I have once formulated my own reactions to corrections by saying that I prefer corrections that solve more than one single problem at a time. Saying that "pièce à dormir" isn't correct in a very specific context is less relevant than a rule for which rooms where you can sleep qualify as "pièce", and which ones should rather be called "salle" or "chambre". And one example is simply not enough - you need a general rule and not just one certified sentence. Even if you can't make a watertight frequency distribution it is worth noting that very big bedrooms for many persons would be "salle à dormir" rather than "chambre à dormir". On the other hand the room in the next ad can't be that big: "Appartement, 45 m2 approx, une salle à dormir, salon-salle à manger, cuisine et salle de bain." I learn much more from some simple rules of thumb which don't refer to a certain sentence, but can be applied more generally - but unfortunately most of the corrections I have received refer just to one concrete sentence where I have made an error ("don't say OYZ, say XYZ"). We have a dire need to get rules of thumb rather than isolated corrections, and without those rules I would learn just as much from leaving the errors uncorrected and instead continue my slow, but persistent gathering of new information. This becomes even more true when we move to even larger word combinations. As long as you don't master the idiomatics at the intermediary level it isn't worth bothering with stylistic subtleties, and that's one more reason for concentrating on learning the correct use of smaller word combinations than on whole sentences. Edited by Iversen on 03 November 2011 at 3:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 65 03 November 2011 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
(your handle freaked me out dude) Many people here use sentences as part on their language plan. How big a part they play, and how they are used varies greatly. If you tell us the rest of your plan, we can give you better feedback on whether what you're proposing makes sense, or what the advantages and pitfalls are. Without that, we can only make general statements about using sentences as a learning strategy. You have given some details, so I'll try to comment. And I realize you aren't necessarily asking for advice here, but may just want to discuss this. So please don't cut out my kidney and replace it with my liver or something like that. I like to use sentences a lot when I'm starting out. This is partly because I like to use Pimsleur, and putting entire sentences into an SRS (flashcard program) really compliments it. I learn both directions: L1 to L2 and vice versa. I focus a lot on pronunciation and automaticity, which chunking serves well. In addition, I learn the isolated words in both directions. But after I get to a certain level, I don't use sentences as much. I rarely do more L1 to L2 sentences, because it's hard to get an L2 sentence to perfectly match L1, and I hate to have to decide whether I captured the intent of why I had the sentence in there for or not. I rarely have this problem with words. I find long SRS sessions of L1 to L2 sentences to be tedious. Another difference between them and words is that they have grammar. It's good to drill grammar, but at this stage I'd rather do it by reading or conversing. On the other hand, I do a lot of L2 to L1 sentences, or L2 to pronunciation sentences, if the language is hard to read. This is essentially the whole point of the 10,000 sentence method, which was designed for Japanese. I don't do this for French, because reading is much easier, and I'd rather just read native material. Finally to your question - to learn a sentence containing every new word, rather than the isolated word itself. I definitely don't do this. I learn the isolated word, both directions, in the SRS. It's less time consuming and more effective than learning an entire sentence for me. In summary, I use sentences quite a bit, but I would never use them to replace isolated vocabulary study as you outlined. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 65 03 November 2011 at 1:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't like "memorising" phrases -- I prefer to be able to build them up from components.
This means there has to be variation, and things have to be slightly unpredictable, and for me that means using flashcard software rather than fixed lists. As well as being in a fixed order, lists of phrases tend to be designed to provide only a bare minimum of examples. What I prefer to do is use a wider set of prompts so that I don't just memorise the cards, but instead learn to produce the language spontaneously at the prompt. I did this for Welsh -- I'd been neglecting my course (because I had more important stuff to do for French) so I took lots of examples from the exercises on the course and SRSed them. I passed the exam. (Although I'll have to admit I never really learned Welsh. In my defence, it was a very basic course anyway...) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 16 of 65 03 November 2011 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm with Iversen on this. S_allard's suggestion that you can only learn it by example seems very shaky. The process of learning (as I understand it) is about learning to generalise. If you can generalise, there is a rule. Maybe it's subtle, maybe it's convoluted, but there's always a rule. If a rule exists, and we can generalise to it by example, then surely we can be explicitly taught the rule? OK, so the rules are sometimes too convoluted and subtle to be taught explicitly (and correctly), but if we have to generalise, isn't it easier to generalise from an approximate rule than no rule at all? After all, the first few stages of generalisation will only form an approximate rule anyway. So we get as close as we can, and then we learn the subtleties by example. And why not? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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