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Do you do flashcards in both directions?

  Tags: Flash cards
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
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BaronBill
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 Message 17 of 30
15 October 2013 at 2:25am | IP Logged 
Durazno wrote:
Thank you for your reply.

If someone wants to be proficient at speaking, writing, listening, and reading, should that person just make double the flashcards and have every one of them in both directions?


That is normally the suggestion around here, to have each word in ANKI twice (L2>L1 and L1>L2). That's what I do and it seems to work quite well.
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Durazno
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 Message 18 of 30
15 October 2013 at 3:50am | IP Logged 
Gracias por sus respuestas rapidas!

I've got a few lists with about 500 words. Its time to get cracking!
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Serpent
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 Message 19 of 30
15 October 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged 
Erm, I wouldn't say there's a default rec here on HTLAL. it depends on your goals and your strong points. if you are very talkative and never miss a chance to practise, it may well be enough to learn the word passively and then activate it as you speak with the natives. If you are an introvert who loves reading, it might make more sense to create cards with gaps using authentic examples from books. It's also easy to incorporate audio or pictures into your cards nowadays.



awww nostalgy:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:
I haven't yet decided which flashcard program to use, and who knows - some may even have the function of changing directions with a mouse-click.

my own post in the beginning also refers to paper flashcards. Although I still think that if you do both directions, you should switch between them, ie don't filter your cards based on that.

Edited by Serpent on 15 October 2013 at 4:53pm

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Crush
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 Message 20 of 30
15 October 2013 at 5:04pm | IP Logged 
The problem i've always found when going native->target is that a lot of times one (for me) English word can have several (let's say) Spanish translations. If i see "happy", how do i know if the response is "feliz", "alegre", or even "contento"? Translating from target->native tends to avoid that problem, especially when placed in context.

I'd be interested in hearing what others have to say on that.

When doing word lists or things where i'm working with a small group of words (50-100) it's not such a big issue, but normally that's not the case...
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Serpent
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 Message 21 of 30
15 October 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged 
Well, just because a dictionary translates all three words as happy doesn't mean there are no differences between them. And actually I would say that roughly feliz=happy, alegre=joyful (gay as it was previously used), contento=content, satisfied. But yeah, you can't really learn these differences by using single word flashcards.
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jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 22 of 30
15 October 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
awww nostalgy:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:
I haven't yet decided which flashcard program to use, and who knows - some may even have the function of changing directions with a mouse-click.

my own post in the beginning also refers to paper flashcards. Although I still think that if you do both directions, you should switch between them, ie don't filter your cards based on that.


Those were the days... :)

My usual recipe is to start with recognition (L2->L1) and add production (L1->L2)when I feel I have a decent knowledge of the vocabulary I'm exposed to. Both directions are important. Nobody can deny that.
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emk
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 Message 23 of 30
15 October 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged 
For my first deck, I ended up making about 1,000 L1->L2 and 1,000 L2->L1 cards using Mnemnosyne. This actually worked quite well at first, but by the time I reached a thousand words, it had gotten really grim: 70+ cards to review per day, with lots of words that had subtly overlapping meanings, and tons of really awful cards that I failed constantly. So I spent my life cycling through the most painful cards over and over again.

Still, I did learn something, but I crashed and burned hard at the 3 month mark, when reviews were up to 40 grueling minutes per day.

When I tried flash cards again, a few years later, I went with Anki, I synced it between my laptop and my phone, and I used two card formats:

Quote:
FRONT:
Sentences with unknown vocabulary words boldfaced.

BACK (definition):
boldface = letters that are printed in thick, dark lines

And also cloze cards, for key vocabulary that I'd like to master:

Quote:
FRONT:
Sentences where I have to fill in a [...].

BACK (blank filled in):
Sentences where I have to fill in a blank.

I enter all sentences by cutting and pasting from digital sources.

I find both these formats to be far more enjoyable than L1<->L2 cards. They're also pretty efficient: I gain good passive recognition of 80% of the words, and many of the useful words end up lurking just below my "active" threshold. Since I get lots of speaking opportunities, I say, "What was that word again? Oh, yeah." And so any genuinely useful words tend to activate.

Of course, if you have fewer speaking opportunities that I do, then you would probably have to use more cloze cards. And some people do seem to enjoy L1<->L2 cards, and benefit from them, so this advice isn't for everybody, and it may not be appropriate at all levels.
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sans-serif
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 Message 24 of 30
15 October 2013 at 6:08pm | IP Logged 
Crush wrote:
The problem i've always found when going native->target is that a lot of times one (for me) English word can have several (let's say) Spanish translations. If i see "happy", how do i know if the response is "feliz", "alegre", or even "contento"? Translating from target->native tends to avoid that problem, especially when placed in context.

I'd be interested in hearing what others have to say on that.

When doing word lists or things where i'm working with a small group of words (50-100) it's not such a big issue, but normally that's not the case...

I'm not the biggest fan of flashcards, but I do use them and usually for single words in the direction L1->L2.

I first of all make the L1 prompt as long and clunky as necessary to dispel all ambiguity about which word is being meant. Sometimes I even resort to such inelegant methods as giving myself the first letter of the word or a "not <synonym>" as a clue. Earlier I used to think that the harder my cards, the more I'm learning, but as experience has shown, it's obviously the other way around.

I've also come to realize that, at least for me, single word flashcards mainly address one subtask of learning vocabulary: that of ingraining the "label" in my memory, in other words the spelling and the sounds representing the meaning, not so much the meaning itself. Of course, seeing a translation or two for a word gives you a general idea of the meaning it carries, but it says little about how it relates to other words or what kinds of phrases it usually appears in. Seeing the word used in different contexts and using it is what takes care of this latter part.

Edited by sans-serif on 15 October 2013 at 9:21pm



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