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I don’t like SRS | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6528 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 9 of 46 23 March 2012 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love SRS, but learning individual words gets boring very easily. If it looks useful and you wish you could enjoy it, have a look at ajatt.com and try sentences. Also, see the various types of items you can use :)
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| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5912 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 10 of 46 28 March 2012 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
The goal of SRS is long term retention. I'm just curious to know how did you ascertain the efficiency of physical cards in that regard. Are you testing those cards after a year or something? On another matter I suppose that with "Choosing how many times to look up a card myself" you actually mean "more times", so I think you should also consider the extra time you devoted to physical cards and work out how many words could you have learnt using some sort of SRS, just for the comparison to be fair. Edited by Javi on 28 March 2012 at 2:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5361 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 11 of 46 28 March 2012 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have nothing against Anki or any electronic flashcard system, but I prefer physical cards any day. Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I like not having to turn anything on or having to look at a screen. And the big plus is that I can make notes on the cards on the spot.
As for this spaced repetition stuff, I don't think it such a big deal. I look at my groups of cards when I want to and don't worry about the exact intervals of time. Every time I take the bus or the subway, I grab a set of cards and study them during the trip. Nothing could be simpler than that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5912 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 12 of 46 28 March 2012 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, a computer program is simpler, provided that you are currently living in the
twenty-first century, but on another matter, I don't have any problem with the first "big" interval (one day). The SRS concept is not thought up specifically to learn languages, but rather to memorise pre-learnt facts in your native language, or to learn English vocab when you are a Polish guy already confidently intermediate in English. Actually, once you're familiar with the phonological system of your L2 and with its basic grammar, learning vocabulary in your target language shouldn't be that different from doing the same in your native language, it just that you'd like to speed things up a bit. So, if someone needs fifteen reps between today and tomorrow for the word to stick, that only means that the TL is still totally alien to them. Maybe you shouldn't be doing SRS at that stage. I would definitely go for Assimil first, and then an Inversenian period of cramming words just before starting to face native materials, only that I'd do computerised lists of course. That way you can leave SRS to the long voyage from intermediate to native-like fluency. The way I see it, it's nonsensical trying to learn vocab in the conscious and conscientious way the concept of SRS encourages when you can't even tell apart a ship from a sheep. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6528 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 13 of 46 29 March 2012 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5361 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 46 29 March 2012 at 6:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll be the first to admit that an electronic SRS system has a major advantage over paper flashcards: the electronic cards never wear out or get dog-eared. That said, I'll stick with those flashcards for various reasons.
I understand the reasoning behind SRS, but I find it is of little use for me. I have about 600 cards of Spanish flashcards that I made by hand. I have all kinds of scribbles all over them. Usually I have the keyword with one or two entire sentences on one side and a very brief translation on the other side. I think that learning individual words is nearly useless. I always want to see things in some sort of context. I divide my pile into three piles. The first stack is my high priority items that I'm working on currently. Then I have another stack of medium level priority. Finally, there's a large stack of things that I know fairly well. Every day I work on the high priority stack. Then maybe one or twice a week I'll work on the medium priority stack. And then every two weeks or once a month I'll go through the whole set. As aside, I'll point out that one of the advantages of physical cards is being able to lay the cards out a table and make associations between. So, I guess that's a kind of home-made SRS. It works fine with me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4632 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 15 of 46 29 March 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Why exactly do you think that learning words in isolation is useless? Are definitions not clear enough, is it that you need to see how to incorporate them in sentences, or is it for some reason easier to remember them when "surrounded" by context-related "sounds"?
I find this interesting, because I'm learning vocab in isolation all the time and it works pretty well if I do it through German... not so well when trying that through English. My grammar is good enough to know how to use parts of speech, so the only difficult point is the definitions. Given they're clear cut, there's no problem at all for me... except for some words that Just-Won't-Stick(TM). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6513 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 46 29 March 2012 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||
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My latest thing is SRSing longer segments, a couple of paragraphs up to about a page. I read the section on my iPad and then on the back I have a few glosses, some explanation or even a translation. I rate my understanding of the text overall and choose a suitable interval for when I want to read the text again. For languages I know better, I'm trying using poetry in order to get a suitable level of difficulty on the text.
I find it great for several reasons. First of all, you get the added bonus of getting familiar with the texts. In Spanish I use sections from a book by Jorge Luis Borges and bits from Wikipedia, and I've done some poetry by Beaudelaire in French. Secord, you get a helluvalot of context for the words. Third, you get to do a lot of reading, even in languages where you don't read too quickly, as you'll be already familiar with the text. I've just started with this method, but I like it a lot so far, and I think it'll take me to that level of effortless reading in Mando/Canto that I've been striving for, once I get back to doing more intensive Sinitic work (I've been focusing on Spanish and French lately). I need to keep the number of texts down, though, as each rep takes several minutes. I'm doing about one new text a day at the moment. Might be worth trying for those who don't like single word SRSing and aren't that keen on sentence mining, either (I'm not). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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