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Modified Iversen wordlist method | ||
Tags: Word List | Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6751 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 17 of 28 04 June 2008 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||
My impression from Iversen's original thread is that after reviewing the 5-7 words you want to memorize: 1. Write them in order from memory on a new flashcard or piece of paper. 2. Write their meanings (keywords) from memory. 3. Fold, and re-write the original word from the keyword. It's possible I've misunderstood step 1, and that doing it without memorization is okay. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6760 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 28 05 June 2008 at 2:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I've looked at the descriptions again, and I don't find any procedure before writing in the first column. So from your list above I would remove 'from memory' on number 1. And you only do number 2 when you can do all of it from memory. Between 1 and 2 there is time to memorize the meanings. Before number 3, you review columns 1 and 2 and when you feel you can do number 3, then you attempt it.
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| Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6760 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 28 05 June 2008 at 2:46am | IP Logged | ||
I think I would skip that 4th step. Just write the kanji words from looking at the English meanings. And that way it will fit nicely into a page divided into 4 columns. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6751 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 20 of 28 05 June 2008 at 5:38am | IP Logged | ||
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I just write the readings as furigana in the 1st column if I don't already know how to read the kanji. And I re-write the kanji with furigana from memory in the third column.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6686 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 21 of 28 05 June 2008 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Keith is right: it is not necessary to do any memorizing before writing coloumn one. In fact I normally pluck the words directly from a dictionary or from one of the lists I get from jotting down the unknown words I look up while reading a text.* Of course you can learn a group of words by heart before writing them in the left column as suggested by Captain Haddock - however this makes the whole exercise a bit more difficult, and the risk is that you get tired and flee the battlefield too early.
The important part is the memorizing between the columns, and memorizing groups of words is important because the thing you really need to train isn't memorizing, but recall. Captain Haddock's last remarks are interesting because they suggest that you could test target -> native and native -> target with different writing systems. However this probably isn't is relevant for other languages with a one and just one writing system. * a word about jotting down words: I have recently started to omit the translations when I jot down words that I have looked up. Then I do three-column word lists with these words soon after, and here I of course write the translations in column 2 (if I still remember them, - otherwise I look them up again). This probably wouldn't function with totally new languages because new words are more difficult to remember in such languages, but right now I don't have any language at that stage on my list. With intermediate or basic fluency languages it functions quite well - I normally remember the translations. Edited by Iversen on 05 June 2008 at 3:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7230 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes | Message 22 of 28 05 June 2008 at 9:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Iverson, some questions about how you handle various scenarios in your wordlists:
1) Word meanings -- For example, act could be a noun meaning a legal act, an act of a play, or just a generic act of some kind. It can also be a verb with various meanings. How do you keep all that straight? 2) Irregular verb tenses -- An example would be the German verb befehlen which is all over the place in the various forms. 3) Gender -- If you review from foreign-native first, then when you test from native-foreign the genders would be easier to remember as you've just reviewed them. Do you find that causes any problems remembering genders long-term? Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6686 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 23 of 28 05 June 2008 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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1) the important thing is not to cover all meanings, - if you already know one 'core' meaning of a word it is easy to add one more, while trying to learn all the possible shades of meaning of a complicated word just will confuse you. However in case of true homonymes I make two lines, or I give two 'core' meanings, - an example with German 'in the middle':
bear 1) Bär 2) tragen bear 2) in languages where you really need to learn for instance the preterite by heart I might add a hint at some words, though only from the 'minority' group. For instance all Germanic languages have a small group of very common 'strong' verbs and a large, but generally uncomplicated group of 'weak' verbs. The strong verbs typically change their stem vowel, so I might add one letter between parentheses to remind me of that: befehlen (a) command befehlen (the (a) indicates that the preterite - or simple past - form of "befehlen" is "befahl", - now I know that this is a strong verb and that's enough. I will learn the form "befohlen" in due time) With Russian there is a different problem: to each 'imperfective' verb you will normally find one or more 'perfective' verbs, and there is not a simple rule to predict the formation of these forms. Here I try to learn the whole set at the same time, so I write them under each other with a line to the left to indicate that they belong together (and always with the imperfective form on top). It is normally only necessary to write one translation in the middle because the aspect difference explains the rest - and yes, for mnemonic purposes I write the accents even though they are omitted in normal Russian ortography: | писáть . . .... . писáть | написáть write написáть (the points should not be written, - they are only there because of a quirk in the forum software) 3) It's the same thing with gender as with the preterite of the verbs. If you take a language like German where there are masculine, feminine and neutral words, then you will find that the majority are masculine... OK, then you only need to indicate the gender of feminine and neutral words. I don't use the articles, but the signs ♂ ♀ ¤ . If the gender of a certain word is known from some simple rule it shouldn't be indicated (for instance words on -chen in German always are neuter) Anything that is too complicated to be notated in the space available in a normal word list should be learnt by some other method, - such as the forms of very irregular verbs and complicated idiomatic expressions. Word lists are a rough method to make words stick in your mind, but they cannot learn you all the weird and complicated features of a living language. Edited by Iversen on 05 June 2008 at 3:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6760 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 28 07 June 2008 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I am working on the modified Iversen method for Japanese. As a trial run, here is what I have done.
First of all, the paper. I used printed paper with squares neatly arranged like graphing paper. The squares are 5 millimeters. It's really small and I did not think I would be able to write in the complex characters in them, but somehow I managed. The paper has 44 rows and 30 columns. Without getting too detailed, I put one entry per line which ended up in the following order: Kanji, Kana, English, Kanji. The first day, I did 6 at a time. I felt I had to do some memorizing before writing them on the paper because when I do write them down the first time, that is when I need to make my mental notes about the characters so that later, I can recall those notes and reproduce the Kanji in the final column. Without doing some work to memorize the reading and meaning before writing the words in the initial column, I would have nothing to attach it to in my brain. So I went through the list before writing them down until I knew the readings and the meanings. Then when I wrote the Kanji words by first carefully looking at them and then trying to write them from memory. If I could not do it, then I knew which part to give more attention to and I made mental notes. I also repeated the reading and meaning once when finished with each word. By the time I finished writing the 6 words, I could still remember all the readings. I did a quick run through in my mind to make sure and then I proceeded to write down the readings in hiragana for each word. After that, I would check my recall of the English translations. Usually, no problem. So then I wrote down all of the English translations. After that, I double checked to make sure I hadn't left anything out. Finally, the fourth and last column. This was the challenging part because I had written down the readings and the English since having written the actual Kanji words. Just glancing at Kanji is not enough of a review to be able to write them. So it felt like some time had passed since I had written them. I covered up the first two columns and went through the English column. I traced the Kanji with my pen but no ink as I reconstructed them from my memory. Many times I closed my eyes to get a better look at them. This helps to remove any visual distractions from sight so that I can concentrate on the characters from memory. I recalled my mental notes that I had made about which characters were used and what those characters consisted of. If I got stuck, I tried my hardest to remember it. Only when I had felt that that wasn't working would I finally resort to looking at the answer. If I failed any one word, I would repeat the run through again. Once I could go through the list with no problem, then I would actually write them down in that fourth column. Like I said, the first day I had done 6 at a time (42 total). I felt that this was too easy and that the exercise was over too quickly. So the second day I did 11 at a time. Naturally, this was more challenging but still easily attainable. The less familiar I was with a particular Kanji the more difficult it was. On the final two sets, I noted the time it took. Each set of 11 took about 32 minutes. Both times, the first 6 minutes were spent learning the words before I wrote that initial column. So to fill up a page with 44 words took me 2 hours plus rest time in between sets. I'm thinking if I use a dictionary or vocabulary book, I can leave out the 2nd column which has the readings. I could look them up easily later if I reviewed them a month down the road and forgot some. This would allow me to get twice as many words on a page. Plus, it would be easier to review since the readings wouldn't be on the page. I would know for sure that I had learned the readings if I can still read them with out having to worry about covering up the readings before I accidently see them. Each night was a lot of work. I'm not sure I could keep this up. I was exhausted when I finished. I would have liked to have done more. But it was tiring so I could not. I suppose I will try with the 3-column version instead of four columns. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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