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Distinguishing guessing from knowing? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ghawkins1969 Diglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 4214 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, German | Message 1 of 14 11 May 2013 at 4:21pm | IP Logged |
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Flashcards and distinguishing between guessing and knowing for "simple" facts...
First off you might say that flashcards, and related techniques, are generally about testing yourself and you at least should be clear about whether you guessed or knew an answer. But I'm not so sure this is always true. Certain facts are so simple, have so little substance as it were, that it's hard to tell if you guessed or not. E.g. Dutch nouns can be divided into two groups which we can call "de" and "het". At least 75% of nouns fall into the "de" group. So if asked if a given noun is a "de" or "het" noun I'll be right 75% of the time if I always say "de". So if I'm testing myself I think it's actually hard to know if I chose "de" because I really knew it or because my brain just chose the most likely option. If I said "de" and someone asked "are you really sure it's not a 'het' noun?" would I buckle? I think for a lot of facts you can really judge you're own recall, e.g. "In which year did the French revolution start?" I can examine my own thinking and say: 1. I knew it straight off - no problems. 2. I knew it but did a mental double check against nearby dates. 3. I made an informed guess based on nearby dates that I do know. 4. I made a wild guess based on roughly knowing the relevant time frame. But for the "de" and "het" situation I think it's not so easy to question your own thinking, it's just a binary choice with little you can go on to analyse your own recall. In German you have "der", "die" and "das" nouns, for many nouns there are dead give aways or little clues as to the group a given one belongs to. I might have gotten a given noun's group wrong, but on seeing the right answer subconsciously re-recognized the clue to its gender and so been primed to get subsequent similar nouns right. Maybe I wouldn't get those other nouns right again if not also re-primed in the same way (or maybe I would as this experience was enough to properly reinforce the particular clue for me). The only way I can think to confirm to myself that I've really remembered such a fact is to artificially make it harder but it seems counterintuitive to increase the difficulty of the learning task. E.g. I could split the number 1 to 9 between "de" and "het" nouns. So when writing a flashcard for a new "de" noun I would write "de" followed by a random number between 1 and 5, e.g. "de-3 auto", and for "het" nouns I would chose a random number between 6 and 9, e.g. "het-8 huis". So when testing myself I'd need to recall something more complex like "de-3" or "de-5" but I'd at least then know that I had almost certainly remembered the fact as it had been recorded on the card rather than just chosen randomly. That's one idea I've come up with off the top of my head - but as with almost all things I'm guessing others have thought longer, harder and from a more informed stand point, about this. So any suggestions or pointers on how to deal with this issue? Regards, /George PS if you think it's odd just to learn noun genders in isolation then a) I'm just choosing an example issue here, b) I suspect many English speakers ignore the importance of gender early on when learning a language such as French, German etc. and find themselves having to come back to it later for nouns for which they already know the other important information (meaning, how to form plurals etc.). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4520 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 14 11 May 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged |
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I see no issue in guessing. If you make a pure guess, you will probably fail the card at a later revision. If you make an (unconscious) informed guess, you almost know the answer already and you get reinforcement by seeing the right answer, so at the next revision, chances are high that you don't need to guess anymore.
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 14 11 May 2013 at 6:22pm | IP Logged |
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I totally agree with daegga. Those informed guesses are very important part of the process for me. Even
guessing a similar word or the first letter or how approximately the word sounds, these all are good signs that just afew reviews later, I'm likely to know for sure the right answer. However, there are a few moments when I do it harder for myself by hitting the failure button in anki (and annoying my future me with more reviews). Those are the articles/genders when I am trullyuncertain because I see the gender as an important part of the word. But I don't make any special form of exercises for that. I don't feel the need. 3 persons have 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 4 of 14 12 May 2013 at 4:39pm | IP Logged |
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i don't think those arbitrary numbers are a good idea. that's just tons of useless information to learn. you can colour-code the two genders, though, just to reinforce them further. This way you have a better chance of being consciously aware that you remember the gender because of the colour. (mnemonics can be useful too - just don't cling to them simply to prove to yourself that you're not guessing.
Also, for me the difference between guessing and knowing is largely the same as the difference between easy/normal and difficult in Anki. guessing is harder than remembering effortlessly. On a larger scale, native materials are the best way to move things from the 'i can guess it' to the 'i know it' category. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 5 of 14 13 May 2013 at 3:15pm | IP Logged |
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If as ghawkins1969 states: "75% of nouns fall into the "de" group", then it would be more effective only to mark those in the lesser group, i.e. those in the "het" group. It would take less time to write the cards, and the 'exceptional' words would stick out in a more conspicuous way.
I don't do flashcards or Anki, but I do do wordlists. And there I don't really care whether I can guess or I really knew the meaning or morphology of a certain word beforehand. I know I saw both things when I put the word on the list (and maybe added some minor annotation) and then the important thing is whether I can figure it out when I have to from now on. However there is one situation where I have felt the need to separate the two groups, namely in thoses cases where I have calculated an estimate of my vocabulary size in a certain language. Here there is a lot of difference between knowing and guessing! Several years ago I did a survey of more or less all my languages, but without taking this critical aspect into consideration. However last time, where I only checked a representative number of languages, I divided all the words I checked into three groups: knows, guessable/halfknown and unknown. And this was much more satisfying, even though the divisions still were somewhat fuzzy. It was surprisingly easy to say whether I really knew a certain word or just guessed or relied on a vague sense of the meaning. Every time I was in doubt the item in question simply went into the middle group. Maybe the users of SRS systems could use a similar tripartite system. Edited by Iversen on 03 July 2013 at 3:39pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 6 of 14 13 May 2013 at 3:42pm | IP Logged |
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As for de/het, in Dutch rules exist for assigning gender as well, based on endings (-
ing and -heid/teit words are always feminine and thus "de", for example). A common misconception about Dutch is that it has only two grammatical genders, namely common and neuter; this is technically not true, as all nouns are masculine/feminine/neuter, the distinction between masculine and feminine is simply not marked in the article. It is "in correct Dutch" marked in the possessive (the famous "de regering en haar leden"), although this distinction is rarely upheld in the Netherlands (purists and southerners may do it). In Belgium it is ALWAYS upheld, the reason being that many Belgian dialects do distinguish between masculine and feminine in the article (the same occurs in Brabantian Dutch). Thus to speak correct Dutch it is technically better to note masculine/feminine, although it is rarely ever relevant in speech and writing. However, the give-away rules you know for German also hold for Dutch, and if the word is cognate between German/Dutch (not necessarily the same meaning, though!), then you can almost be 100% sure the gender is the same. Diminutives in Dutch are always neuter (het meisje "the girl" is thus a neuter noun!!! Not using it as such is ungrammatical). For article use, mark het only (de as a default guess is good enough, and some Dutch people make mistakes with article use as well; it sounds fairly uneducated coming from them though, unless you are speaking in a dialect which upholds different grammatical gender distinctions). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 14 14 May 2013 at 2:31am | IP Logged |
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I actually fare better with Iversen style word lists when it comes to information like gender. When I quiz myself on flash cards, I might be 60% sure it's one certain gender, but I still feel kind of unsure about it, and then I check to be sure. When I have the other language cue in an Iversen style word list and have to write down the gender, I have to decide which gender I think it is or whether I truly don't know it. The act of fixating my decision in writing makes it more memorable for me, independent of whether I was right or wrong. And that means I need far fewer repetitions. Edited by Bao on 14 May 2013 at 6:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5332 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 14 02 June 2013 at 5:27pm | IP Logged |
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If you knew the correct answer, just leave it be, even if was guessing, you will probably guess it correctly everytime. Teach yourself only those that went wrong. Consolidation will eventually come with enough exposure.
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