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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 17 of 46 29 March 2012 at 8:48am | IP Logged | ||
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BTW I don't do much sentence mining - I just pick interesting sentences from whatever I happen to read.
And learning individual words equals being able to translate but not understand directly. At least for me. To get rid of the native word I then have to see the foreign one many, many times in real texts. 1 person has 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 18 of 46 29 March 2012 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Ari has expressed quite well the importance or value of studying words in context, whether it is just a sentence or an entire page.
The fundamental reason why a single word with a definition or, even worse, with just a single word translation on the back of the flashcard, is nearly useless is simply that it gives no indication how the word is actually used. I don't say totally useless because for some technical vocabulary you could probably get by learning words in isolation. But if you intend to actually speak the language you have to get some sense of a) what are typical word combinations that use the word and b) when is an appropriate moment to use the word. This is exactly what good dictionaries do. Just this morning, I was looking at a card on which I had written a Spanish verb on the front and the translation of the back. I realized that this really was useless. So, I promptly got out the dictionary and redid the card with three examples on it. 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 19 of 46 29 March 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||
To be clear, I hardly think learning isolated words is useless; I do it a lot. It's not enough to express yourself fluently if all you do is learn isolated words, but it's often enough for you to understand the word when you encounter it in a text or in speech. This begins your acquaintance with the word and you'll deepen your relationship with it as you go along, learning how to use it. You don't need to learn all information about the word in one go, and learning a translation for it is an excellent starting point. It sets up a space in your brain for the word and gives you a rough approximation. And very often you can start using it right away (most practical nouns like car or table are pretty easy to use), even though the finer points of usage might elude you and you'll be making some mistakes until you've gotten more used to the word. I personally tend to do a lot of passive learning before I try to speak, though, so I'll have plenty of time to acquire context (which I might do through my above-mentioned "chunky SRS" method, for example). To say that learning words with a translation is useless because it doesn't tell you how to use them sounds to me equivalent to saying learning grammar is useless because it doesn't tell you what words to use it with, or saying learning how to say "car" is useless because you don't know how to say "truck". You won't learn a language by only studying words, just as you won't learn it by only studying grammar. but as a part of your language learning method, I say studying isolated words, studying grammar, collocations and common sayings, etc., are all useful techniques. But this discussion has been had many times before, and I don't intend to start it again. Just offering my two cents. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5912 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 20 of 46 29 March 2012 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, even with simple words like the ones that represent physical objects, and the
simpler usage you could think of, which might be answering a question like "what's that?", you need grammatical things like gender, the notion of countable and uncountable and possible others depending of the language, so there's no such a thing as an isolated word. Even in a sentence like the Spanish "eso es arena", the lack of article or partitive accounts for something that must be learnt. Learning words "in context" is the only way to go. Edited by Javi on 29 March 2012 at 4:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5463 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 46 29 March 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had a French <-> English deck for a couple of years, and I have very mixed feelings
about it. A few thoughts: 1. "Leech" cards (the ones I often miss) were just a drag. It's better to delete these cards aggressively and add better cards when I need them. 2. Translation cards were a mixed blessing. I definitely learned a lot of important vocabulary, but I also learned to reflexively translate it to English. Beyond a certain point, this was counterproductive. I haven't tried French word -> French definition cards yet. 3. It's not clear whether long-interval cards are really useful. At some point, if I'm not seeing that word every month or so in native input, why am I trying to memorize it? I currently enjoy cloze-deletion cards with lots of context. They allow me to read an interesting sentence or two, and they force me to predict what word a French speaker would use in a given sentence. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6634 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 22 of 46 30 March 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
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I do wordlists based on texts and wordlists based on dictionaries, and the knowledge I gain about the words is not fundamentally different - in both cases I see the first memorization as a preparation for later encounters. The fact that there is a context in the first case has one consequence, namely that I can make the repetition of the words on the list by rereading the original text - if I had to look words up the first time but not the second time it is proof that I have learnt something in between. With words taken directly from a dictionary I can't use this method so instead I use a reduced layout to do a formal repetition round (the details are explained in my Guide here at HTLAL so I'm not going to describe the technicalities again).
Both with and without a context you need to find and memorize some rudimentary morphological information, and you probably also need to invent some 'memory hooks'. A context can provide some very useful memory hooks, but in my experience they doesn't work better than intralinguistical clues like a word's place in the alphabet, associations based on its sound, related words and even similar forms in another language. A beginner will typically be in the situation that his/her studied texts provide more than enough words to memorize, but once this stade is over you can harvest a far higher number of words in a given time by taking them directly from a dictionary, and you avoid relying on your own unqualified guesses based on some random piece of text. Any good dictionary will give you an overview written by an expert over different meanings and different construction possibilities for any given word. A context will only give you one glimpse of its possibilities. So when you meet the word later in another text you will be better served if you know what the dictionaries had to say than you would be if you only had your first impressions to build on. And no, I don't say that context is bad or irrelevant - I just prefer to be well prepared when I meet it. Edited by Iversen on 30 March 2012 at 12:57am 3 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 23 of 46 30 March 2012 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I think this discussion about isolated or contextualized words can be reduced to a simple question: if you use flashcards, electronic or paper, what do you put on the card? I like physical cards because I can write on them. And I say that if I have all that space, why not use it? I don't make the card illegible but I put some "meaningful" material on it because it helps me flesh out the usage of the word.
If you feel that this is a hindrance because it is not necessary, that's fine. We use our learning tools differently. Let me give a simple example that I have in front of me. On the front of a Spanish card, I have the word comida and on the back "meal, food." Can that work by itself? Sure, but I say why waste all that space? So, I added two examples on the front: Me encanta la comida china. El curso incluye tres comidas al día en el comedor. I don't translate these examples on the back because I can figure them out. Why do I find this useful? First of all, these two examples illustrate two common but distinct uses of the word. Secondly, I'm learning some real things to say immediately with the word. And thirdly, I'm seeing how the word interacts with other elements of the sentences. I see the verb "encantar" instead of "gustar." I see "china" not "chino." I see "al día" and "en el comedor." And last, but not least, for me the word is easier to memorize. None of this is particularly hard to learn, of course. But why would I limit myself to staring at "comida" all by itself on a card when I can kill a few birds at the same time? 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 24 of 46 30 March 2012 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
Well, I can think of two reasons: 1: Because if there's just one word on each side, revision will be faster and you can spend more time reading books, watching movies or doing something else to get context. 2: Because you might end up recognizing the sentence and what it means, thus learning only that sentence, but when you encounter the word in a different context, you won't recognize it. (This is why I don't do phrase cards.) Also, putting lots of text on the front, and editing the cards as you review them is easily done with electronic flashcards. As I said, I have a deck where every card is a page of text. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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