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Vocabulary without flashcards! | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5737 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes  Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 1 of 18 13 January 2013 at 4:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know about everyone else, but two things have
frequently slowed down my language learning: 1. Making flashcards is a time-consuming, tedious exercise, and for some reason no matter how well I know the flashcard (even English-TL) I still can't easily use the word actively. 2. Listening comprehension is difficult, especially when people speak fast, largely due to missing the word boundaries (so good luck understanding anything when your vocabulary is small, or looking up a word you heard later). I have found a solution that's working wonders for me, so maybe others would like to try it... Do ALL your vocabulary orally. No writing, PERIOD. Pretend you are an anthropologist learning an undocumented language and you're fresh out of writing materials. I got this idea after reading two articles...one about how we are less likely to remember specific facts when we can easily ask someone else or look it up (memory is collective), and one about an anthropologist who was writing down elicited vocabulary while learning an undocumented language. The natives asked what he was doing and couldn't understand why he couldn't remember the words they were teaching him without writing them down. He taught them the alphabet in response and was amazed that they were able to remember each letter easily after seeing it only once...an incredible feat of memory! I wondered about this and thought, perhaps keeping a written record means our brains subconsciously regard flashcards as a "crutch" and fail to commit the words to memory? This seemed likely, considering how difficult it is to call upon a new vocabulary word until we have actively used it many times - ESPECIALLY speaking! How many people here can read a novel without a dictionary, write idiomatically without pause, yet still have trouble speaking beyond a basic level? I'll be first to admit I've had that problem for a long time! Since deciding to learn all my vocabulary orally, I've experienced a huge, HUGE increase in memory retention, and where once fast speech was an aural blur, the fog is melting away and my mind can pick out even new and unfamiliar words clearly. I wasn't expecting such improvement to my listening comprehension, but it's happened. The only thing with this is that vocabulary MUST be learned in context! It's okay if the context is an exercise, as long as it's relatively realistic, like a dialogue - no weird grammar book sentences :) But the more interesting and relevant the source, the better - after all, this is your "anchor" to remember the word. You can't just take a list of words and say them over and over again; it won't work. Isn't it the words we first encounter in a meaningful context that we always seem to remember the first time? Make it emotional. Now I don't think I've discovered some magic method that will allow anyone to learn a language instantly (if only!), but I've been positively amazed by how much this has helped me in areas of weakness. It totally blew my expectations away. So, if you find yourself on a "language plateau" or are just bored of the same old exercises, why not spend a week without writing? No flashcards, no sentences...just listen and repeat. It's a lot of fun, if only because you end up watching a lot of movies. Oh, one last thing for an extra boost: if you're more than a total beginner, repeat phrases or even whole sentences. Do this with EVERY unfamiliar idiom and stock phrase! Keep repeating it, but change some words. Maybe you will only be able to swap the pronouns or verb tense or something (keeping in mind how that might change the inflection of other words in the sentence), but try to say something meaningful. If you can do this, you might even be able to speak a few sentences in response to whatever you just heard. This is the most encouraging thing EVER. So repeat sentences with small changes. If anyone tries it, tell me how it worked for you! Edited by Astrophel on 13 January 2013 at 4:35am 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5570 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 2 of 18 13 January 2013 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am reminded of what Plato has King Thamus say to Thoth about writing in his Phaedrus:
'If men learn this [i.e. writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.' I have the same problem with flash cards - I mean taking 25 minutes to make 20 picture cards! I find that using Wikipedia in the target language for lists of objects works better than flashcards (e.g. I want to learn furniture words in French - so I go to Meuble and then select Liste de Meubles and work through them) as one has there one has picture, word, context and idiom in a shortish article. Obviously only useful if wikipedia is in the target language and you keep track of where you have been to remember to revise. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4667 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 3 of 18 14 January 2013 at 5:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm using FSI German. Learning words in context is definitely preferable, however when I started using different material, I experienced a strange problem. It seemed like out of the exercises, I recognized many words but often couldn't attach a meaning to them, or I found out that I tended to mix adjectives and adverbs or verbs. It was driving me nuts. So after making it to unit 16, I finally started using Anki, and now finally I'm solving my problem. In Anki, because there is no context attached to the card, if I can recall it there, then I should be able to recall it in a different context and use it actively.
However, if I had attempted to learn all the vocabulary in FSI before trying the exercises, it wouldn't have been efficient. Also, Anki is useful because it's difficult to review all the vocabulary in all the FSI units in a short amount of time. Anki prevents me from forgetting it. Then when I revise the exercises, I don't need to focus on the vocabulary, I can focus on the grammar and drills instead. I have to add that in German, it is actually easy to hear a new word and look it up in a dictionary. It might not be that easy for other languages. I had trouble dinstinguishing the words in English myself, and I have a feeling that French is at least as difficult as English. I agree about repeating sentences and hearing them over and over again, this is how I finally managed to really improve in English. Unfortunately, I would need to have a passion for a movie or text, and that hasn't happened yet (not that there is nothing interesting in German, but I don't have as much choice in German as I did in English). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5737 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 4 of 18 14 January 2013 at 8:52am | IP Logged | ||
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You know I think we have the opposite problem. I STILL have trouble with German comprehension,
except Swiss German, which has always been crystal-clear to me. Most people say they have trouble with Swiss...yet listening to a comedy poking fun at this, I understood more of the Swiss than the Hochdeutsch. That was just weird. The Swiss tend to enunciate more and it's more "sing-song", so it's easier to pick out words...Hochdeutsch can be spoken rather softly with things running together. Even stranger, I've NEVER had a hard time understanding French, even before I spoke a word of the language...supposedly the silent consonants give people trouble but that never bothered me, if you know how the word is actually pronounced, they tend to spit it out. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Inno Newbie France Joined 6352 days ago 17 posts - 17 votes Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 18 16 January 2013 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for sharing.
However, could you please elaborate on how you create your audio material. Do you speak the words or sentences yourself or do you cut them out of some recordings? Do you do bilingual word pairs with a short gap between the two words for thinking about the solution or do you go monolingual? Do you just create mp3 files or do you use Anki anyway, creating pure audio flash cards? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 6 of 18 16 January 2013 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found this not to be very effective, or at least not as effective as what I do now, which is normal language usage with a component of memorization/writing/flashcards. I think taking learning to either extreme isn't the right answer for most people.
7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5267 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 18 17 January 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
Good to see you back again, leosmith! I agree. I don't use flashcards or anki, but I still use my own method to memorize a word or a phrase. I try to say it aloud 5 times (with the English word (or tl definition) in 5 reps. I'll also write the word down with a definition. When I am starting out learning a language, like I am now with Haitian Creole, this helps. What helps more is using multiple resources and seeing/hearing the word or phrase multiple times in different places. I agree that there is a happy medium between process and actual learning. Some folks on HTLAL get so anki obsessed that they end up being really good at anki but aren't satisfied with their progress in actually learning the language. I have nothing against anki, it's a great tool for a lot of language learners. The obsession with anki and word-counting can be detrimental. Just like a course isn't the begin all and end all of language learning, neither are flashcards. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 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 8 of 18 17 January 2013 at 10:56am | IP Logged | ||
I have exactly the opposite experience. When people tell me something orally I don't learn words, I learn content - or nothing, if the content isn't interesting enough. At best an idiomatic expression may cling on, but even that is a rare occurrence. To remember something I have to see it or even better: to see it and then write it, and then get my memory refreshed at a suitable later moment. I know that tribes without a written language have at least some memory masters, though it woulkd be nice to know whether ALL tribe members are able to remember everything they see and here as easily as the persons the anthropologist met. But for me it is too late to investigate whether I could have been an whizz at remembering things I heard if I had been an analphabet. The fact is that I learnt the wonderful art of writing at an early age, and now - after many years of practice - reading functions better for me than listening when it comes to vocabulary learning. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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