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Learning Vocab without Studying Vocab | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 25 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:21am | IP Logged | |||||
(d) use only truly fun sentences in Anki. like, FUN. don't exclude easy sentences if they are fun, that's one more way to get additional exposure. have you read Khatzumoto's posts? Maybe you need that silverspoon thing? Unless the problem is that sentences that are fun in texts are no longer fun when you add them to Anki... But heeey I remember you going gjçargerãhgwehgôwh about this list of mine on twitter. Yet you're still not following any of the accounts? Have a look again? Edited by Serpent on 18 July 2013 at 5:23am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 26 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged | |||||
Excellent suggestions, mike245. Actually, from yesterday I've done sort of an option (c). I realized that I do way too much with Anki, so I've scaled back. This is probably going to be far off topic, but anyway... The Real CZ posted a link earlier in the thread to the All Japanese, All The Time website, and I went browsing through that site, and that guy talks about something where you "lower your standards". If something is too much for you, cut it back 50%, and keep cutting it 50% until you feel like your workload is "nothing". I had my Anki decks set at 100 reviews a day. I've cut that back to 50, and I'm ready to cut that more to 25 if necessary. I was also doing 20 new cards a day, and I've cut that back to 10. I've also started deleting cards that have a review interval over six months. I figure that, if I know a card well enough that I don't need to see it again until six months later, then I can probably do without it. I'm also going to be more picky about what I put into Anki. I used to put all new words I came across into Anki, but that is probably too much work. I'm not sure yet how I can go about choosing the "AWESOME bits", as Serpent put it, and more than that, I also want to work on words that will be useful to me. But I will definitely be more aware of what I put into Anki. All of this should reduce the time I spend with Anki, which I should try doing before giving up on it completely. Anki has gotten me this far with Japanese. If it's time for a change, so be it, but I want to see if I can alter what I do for the better. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 27 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, the awesome bits are obviously bits of what I'm already reading. It seems like you're using a scorched earth tactic for now. Like, "this is boring but I don't mind it if I don't have to see it again". In this case, you may as well discard it and focus on stuff that you want to read and reread.
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 28 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Hmmm, let's take it from the top. When I come across a word in my reading, conversation or listening, that I don't know, I'll attack it from a number of different fronts. My first option is trying to figure it out from context if I can. If I'm sitting in front of the computer, it's quick and easy to search the word or phrase in Google Images or even the Google "web" search, open another tab for linguee, another one for the formal Priberam dictionary and yet another one for the Diconário Informal site if I need to do so. You know I'm a big believer in synergy. Seeing the word with a bunch of bilingual example sentences in linguee, the formal and/or informal definition helps me to achieve that synergy more quickly than waiting around for it to pop up again randomly. I might also search in youtube for a quick video or even a wikipedia article article or reference in the TL. This particular article has to do with locomoção. If you'll scroll down you'll see an image of a statue and a gif animation. By using "ctrl" + "f" and entering "caminhar" in the search box, you can search the article for appearances of the word. It's a time saver. Of course, my strategy depends on extensive reading and daily interaction with the language via many different sources: books, articles, podcasts, a novela, speaking with natives, twitter, etc. When you're at the beginning stages it isn't as easy to get the synergy going but it will never even have a chance to start if you don't give it a go. Will you remember what caminhar means a month from now? I certainly hope so! It's a fairly common word in Portuguese and will come up again and again as you interact with the language. I'm sure it will come up in your DLI course at some point, and if you are using a multi-track approach it will come up in your reading, speaking or listening. Just in case, check out what I found by searching for "caminhar" on youtube. Sometimes, you may have to go a little bit out of your way to make synergy happen. While searching caminhar I came across the verb "emagrecer". I know this word, but you may not. After seeing the images, I'll bet you can figure it out. Here it is on linguee. I'll also bet you won't have to look it up in your dictionary now. Now if you see it or hear it again in a week or two, I'd say that word will be yours. Yeah, you're right, you might forget it in a month or a year and have to redo this very painful process (tongue firmly in cheek), but it will start to click and, for me, that's better than doing daily anki reviews. I'm not saying this is a replacement for anki. I'm just saying that you could be using the method also. Again, if anki is working for you and you like it, keep using it. I've nothing against anyone using it (just the obsession with it and, srs is not right for me and my learning style). You don't seem to be so happy with it, kuji. Maybe you could cut it in half or by a third, perhaps just use it for a little while and delete, and see how it goes instead of going cold turkey. I'm just saying that anki isn't as necessary as some people believe. You can learn a language without it. Will it be slower? I don't know. If you're not interacting with the language as you study, yes! If you are interacting with the language along with your studies, I'd say you've got just as good a chance of seeing/hearing it again and retaining it. For a language like Japanese, I just honestly don't know if my methods are applicable, but yet, somehow, foreigners managed to learn the language before anki. Just don't depend on srs so much that you are out of balance and excluding other methods. My other pet saying is that too much study tends to make you good at- study. Don't let the process become more important than the desired result. Anki is just one tool out of many. It should be an arrow in your quiver of several arrows. If I were spending an hour or even half an hour a day going through srs reviews and making cards, I'd go round the bend and I probably wouldn't have managed to learn Spanish or Portuguese, but that's just me. I wouldn't like using the system. Maybe my learning technique is more inefficient as a result. I would posit that the amount of time it takes to enter loads of words into the system and go through the reviews could be spent just as effectively interacting with the language. Not using srs seems to work quite well for me. For Japanese, here's what I found while doing a google.co.vi search for つりにいく. I assume this word or phrase has something to do with fishing. I got it from a Global Voices (another good learning source) article referencing a tweet. Now if I could only decipher the writing and pronounce it! I can't, but I bet you can. As to your last question- "should I stay or should I go". It doesn't have to be an either/or, does it? Could you find a balance with srs/anki that you'll be happy with? Or, will even minimal srs cause you stress because you won't be able to control yourself and you'll want more? Only you can answer that question. Whatever you do, listen to your mind and body, that much stress isn't worth it in the long or short run. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 29 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:52am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm still following some of the accounts, although I should probably look again and add some other ones. I think that, yes, I do add some sentences and words to Anki, not because they are fun, but because I think that they might be useful to me. I want to be able to understand everything that I hear and see around me here in Japan. I've put some words into Anki that I've heard people say, or that I've heard on TV, and the sentences haven't necessarily been fun, but because I put them into Anki (or perhaps just because I took the time to make the cards), I now know the word and I can understand it when people I meet say it. Probably because the card is boring and no fun, I want to get rid of it. In fact, very few of my cards can be considered "fun cards" or "awesome cards", and that makes Anki boring. But... I do often remember the words that I was trying to remember. I'm afraid of losing that if I just focus on "fun" stuff. Am I only going to remember the "fun" stuff about a language, instead of the stuff that I need to know to function everyday in the language? I mean, where to find fun sentences for a word like 了解 (ryoukai - comprehension; understanding)? That is a word I put into Anki a few weeks ago, and I find that I see it and hear it often nowadays. But the sentence I had put into my Anki card was extremely boring, and I couldn't find anything more interesting. Also, when I do put sentences into Anki that I consider to be fun and interesting, they do quickly become "un-fun". There is an expiration date on a card's "fun-ness." And that is probably because of the sheer repetition that I have to do. That is why I am interested in doing what The Real CZ, iguanamon, Bakunin and others have said here in this thread. I like the idea of seeing the same word, repeatedly, but in different sentences, in order to internalize the meaning and put it into my long-term memory. (edit:) With Anki, I see the same sentences over and over. I want to practice the word more, but I don't want to go over the same sentences over and over. Edited by kujichagulia on 18 July 2013 at 6:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 30 of 67 18 July 2013 at 7:29am | IP Logged | |||||
Hehe, つりにいく(釣りに行く） means "to go fishing". I knew those words, although I didn't know them at first glance because they didn't have the kanji, so I had to search just to confirm. Nice work! Anyway, thanks to your posts, iguanamon, and Serpent, and The Real CZ, and mike245, and Retinend, and everybody else that has been posting in this thread, I've been able to do a lot of thinking about my situation. I think I might have pinpointed my problems with Anki. As I mentioned before, I was using it too much, so cutting back on Anki use might be the way to go. But I found another problem: I don't like seeing the same sentences over and over, unless they are just plain awesome. I like seeing the same word many times in different sentences. Hey, that sounds like just reading a lot, exactly what iguanamon, The Real CZ, Bakunin, and others are doing. Interesting. I don't think I'm ready to go cold turkey on Anki yet. In fact, no matter what, I will surely keep it for one part of my Japanese studies, and that is for practicing writing Kanji. I started a deck last year where a card shows me a Japanese word, with one kanji missing and kana in its place, and I look at it and write on a piece of paper the missing kanji. That format has served me well. My Japanese writing has never been better, I can easily write more characters from memory, and the best part is that I have never, ever made a change to the format of my kanji deck since creating it. So I'm keeping that. But I do think a change to how I use Anki to learn vocabulary and grammar is in order. I'm going to do some experimenting, and I'll talk more about this in my log. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Oleg Stepanov Newbie Russian Federation rusmagic.blogspot.ruRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4160 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: Russian* Studies: English | Message 31 of 67 18 July 2013 at 8:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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If somebody still interesting main question I never used Anki, Flashcards and so and so on... Just because I am Russian and never heard about them. :-) But now, after visiting this forum, I find a lot of such things what I will checking. Most of them possible get on Russian Torrent Tracker, what gives me possibility to became relate with all of them very much soon.
My studying of languages based on translating interesting books. I find some of subjects what absolutely unknown here (in Russia) and interesting to me. Now I will publishing my translatings. Apologize, if I wrote something wrong. And apologize for my bad English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 32 of 67 18 July 2013 at 10:10am | IP Logged | |||||
For French, I'm not using an SRS or wordlists. I've been studying it part time for about a year. My approach is to have a growing corpus of gradually more and more understood audio and texts that I review frequently. What does that mean? 1) Assimil - listen, understand, eventually repeat. 2) Use more than one Assimil (or Assimil like course). I have 4 for French. With the pauses removed (easy with Audacity), there are about 10 hours of dialogs. 3) Frequent reviews. Some of these are reading the lesson and notes. Many are listening and sometimes repeating in the car or elsewhere. 4) Gradually add more comprehensible input. This is generally accomplished with bilingual texts (like Assimil),or audiobooks. Some is Listen/Reading. 5) For non-course material, I start out with familiar or interesting books. So rather than stockpiling vocabulary per se - words with Anki, for instance, I stockpile audio with texts. As I add more hours of audio/texts in French that I understand, I notice carryover when I listen or read something new. This has been a fairly painless approach. It's easier with a language like French that has a ton of audio/texts available. I've used SRS and flashcards, etc for Spanish. It doesn't fit my lifestyle as well. Edited by luke on 18 July 2013 at 10:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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