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Learning vocab: Did I do something wrong? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4634 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes  Speaks: Czech* | Message 9 of 18 19 January 2012 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can't use it before you can recognize it. You probably can't use it any better than you can recognize it, you just don't realize how much you are mispronouncing it. You have to learn to understand it first, only then you can learn to use it.
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 18 19 January 2012 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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My experience tells me that “if you can say it, you can hear it” is not a myth. However, this isn’t a one-to-one correspondence: saying a word in isolation won’t necessarily help you pick it out of a sentence.
The general claim is that the more easily and naturally you can express yourself, the more likely you are to understand natural speech. I’ve yet to see a credible counter-argument to this. In a way, it’s almost a self-fulfilling prophesy – if you want to express yourself naturally, you must learn how to do so, and this implies that you must expose yourself to a minimum of natural speech and listen critically. If you increase your critical listening skills, then the potential for learning increases. In short, if speaking is the focus, the rest follows. Let’s not forget either that it’s easy to feel outraged by the things we can say yet can’t understand, when there is inevitably a disproportionate amount of things you can’t say and can still understand. Could your problems have come from your use of SRS? I don’t know. If you’ve learned thousands of words, then you probably haven’t learned the wrong ones. Did you learn words in isolation? If so, then yes, it might have had an impact. Vocabulearn presents words in isolation, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that you are having difficulty parsing them in sentences. Still, I can’t make sense of how you could know and use the word 土曜日, yet not be able to recognize it. If you’ve used a word “a thousand times” as you say, but you can’t recognize it yet, it is rather odd indeed. If it isn’t because your ability to parse sentences or your understanding of pronunciation is limited, then I don’t what’s happening. If your understanding of what constitutes correct pronunciation (sounds, pitch, etc.) or sentence intonation is partial or inadequate, then saying one word incorrectly may cause you to misunderstand the correct pronunciation (while still being understood). Perhaps having no feel for sentence intonation affects your comprehension. There is no doubt that the ability to predict what kind of words or patterns are likely to come up next in the sentence makes the sentence much easier to understand -- and this is something native speakers do all the time. On the other hand, the culprit could be a lack of critical listening skills, i.e. the ability to notice little hints that native speakers typically pick up on. This is where self-talk comes into consideration, because your ability to listen to yourself is greatly diminished with you speak to others in a real life setting and a million other distractions come into play. I don’t personally divide recognition and production – it’s a single step. If I learn a new word, I’m going to try to use it right away in a sentence. This brings me to question how the word is used (lexical category, usage, meaning, how its sounds blend with previous and following words, how its intonation differs depending on where it stands in the story, etc.) and allows for a better feel of how the word can be useful for real communicative purposes, and for an increase in my ability to predict how it's going to be used. If I can then use the word in a sentence that flows, and if I can do that in spontaneous speech, then yes, I’m going to understand the word when it’s said to me. Perhaps this approach is incompatible with massive SRS’ing – there’s no doubt it’s slower, but it also leads to a smaller gap between passive and active knowledge. Edited by Arekkusu on 19 January 2012 at 6:30pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4636 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 11 of 18 19 January 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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The (not so) funny thing is this: When I learn a new noun, it is clear how to use it. Adjectives and verbs are rather straightforward (because we're talking about Japanese here). I do, however, look up example sentences on sites like eow.alc.co.jp or jiten.net or tatoeba.org if i'm not sure if there's a nuance to it, or a special way to use it. Let's say I learn 酷い and 激しい, and both could mean "harsh" in some context, and I need to find out where the difference in nuance would be, I'm looking at example sentences.
Another hindering factor is, that I learn my vocab via English most of the time, and English and German are not always congruent. You seem to be pretty close though. While I do talk to myself all the time, I'm not doing it how you propose. I just talk to myself how I'd talk to myself in German. Making a coffee, I'd probably say something like いったい、砂糖はどこかな。。 maybe I should attempt your approach rather than mine, because my self-talk feels rather forced.. or I just do both. As for listening comprehension, I plan to listen to and translate dialogues into German, than back into Japanese, using my own words. This will hopefully help. Pronunciation has never been a problem for me. German is not too far off, sounds-wise, and all my flash cards have audio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 18 19 January 2012 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
I tend to use different methods. My "core" method is something like this: * Get a hold of material with text and accompanying audio. * Read through the text and add any new words to Anki. (Step 1) * Listen to the text whilst reading the transcript, then without the transcript, then do some shadowing of it, until you can understand it effortlessly as you hear it. (Step 2) * When you encounter old words in Anki, make some efforts to use them actively by thinking or speaking. (Step 3) This is supplemented by all sorts of peripheral study, like watching movies and listening to radio stations, which works to solidify step 2 by encountering the words "in the wild". Also, I will keep a growing playlist with audio snippets that have passed through step 2, and I listen through it on random sometimes at work, and do shadowing when walking, to keep all this stuff in my head. In general, though, I'm not very systematic and I mix it up a lot, but the above is a method I regularly return to. Edited by Ari on 19 January 2012 at 7:22pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6487 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 18 21 January 2012 at 11:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Are you placing the words in context?
One of the major mistakes I made with German was rote memorization of 2000 words from a basic vocab book. I learned and forgot, or I learned and was unable to use or recognize. One can learn to copy a sound. One can learn a set phrase. One can learn a word within a context, give it meaning, give it a mental image of reusability. In short, create a context of use of the sounds that represent an idea. This is one of the inherent traps of SRS systems that you need to watch out for. One learns a meaning but not a context. In my opinion, this is also one of the reason with grouping together 3-6 words in a wordlist works so well. I really became aware of the success of lists or sentences over single words while using a list program called Intense-DE (I learned about it on this forum) my learning with that tool is faster and more effective than any single word process - so with Anki, which I use, I'm also trying to contextualize. Hope this helps. Edited by zenmonkey on 21 January 2012 at 11:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4636 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 14 of 18 21 January 2012 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you mean by contextualize, putting in a sentence in the TL? I learn vocab with audio, but I could imagine embedding them in German words to make the meaning clear, for example..
勘定書き Herr Ober, ich hätte gern die 勘定書き This way, I had a fast way to grasp it. I also heard that entwining vocab with your mother mother tongue has some useful side effects, but I can't find the posting again. Some things, like adverbs, could probably put into a German sentence as a construct.. building the German around it could be a nice indicator on how the mechanic works. Like: (Ich) pro Tag 50 Wörter 以上、 aber nur 60 Wörter 以下 lernen kann This would produce some weird looking German, but it would illustrate how and where to put in the stuff. The words themselves I would get from the context alone ("Ich schaffe es, pro Tag mindestens 50, maximal aber 60 Wörter zu lernen" would be the original sentence. Maybe I should give this a try. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6405 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 15 of 18 21 January 2012 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find it counter-productive to have any Latin characters in my Anki cards because I'll
stop looking at the Chinese. Besides, the more Chinese in your life, the better. There's no reason not to have the sample sentences in Chinese. Right now I'm actually using cloze sentences to learn Chinese vocab in order to get a better feel for the context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6487 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew | Message 16 of 18 21 January 2012 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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By contextualizing I mean creating a system of your own that allows you to put a word in a mental structure that creates a reference. The reason that is a vague definition is that I do not believe there is only one way of doing this, otherwise we would have a single simple learning system that works for everyone. Here are some concrete examples of context that might help.
If one is trying to learn "sits", "enters", "studies", "man", "boy", "book" and "writer". (These are actually the first words in the Arabic ASSIMIL course) One can learn them in your target language by putting them each in a card individually and memorizing them. One can place them in a variety of context: 1) TL/SL mix The ولد sits .... boy The man دخل ... enters (I don't like this, as you've done because it creates a false grammar) I have used exactly this to teach my girls a strong noun sense when learning animals, for example (Fr/Sp/En/De). 2) Visual or structural context on one card boy ولد man ..... رجل father والد (see the difference between the first/third arabic words - close "relatives" words - no pun intended) 3) A key sentence ولد : الولد يأكل. .... boy: The boy eats. 4) A description Boy - The male child ... 5) Something completely different Thomas Gainsborough painting (The Blue Boy) .... الولد الأزرق. etc... Context needs to be what works for you. But if you think about how memory games work and all those mnemonic tools, such as The Loci Method, they offer synthetic context for the mental placement of new items. I beleive the mind learns better when it is not trying to grasp isolated concepts but can ground them in previous experience, a sort of anchor of meaning. SRS works better for me for words with those anchors. See if this helps and creating a differentiating context helps (and balancing it with the effort of doing so). By the way, this last element is also important - whatver context you use it needs to allw you to position those words as unique or sufficient different that one can keep a meaning in mind. If one cannot tell the difference of the sense between "boy", "youngster" and "child" in the target language it is going be harder to learn the words and maintain a sense of them. So the contextualizing should be somewhat structured to create those differences. Of course to ground words better, we foten use example exercises and grind through them to even further anchor the sense of a word. The boy sat. The girl sat. The man sat. (When I was learning English I still remember the silly sentences we used. Pat has a pin, Pam has a pan, Pete sat on the pin. And the drawings ... all context) These exercises work. Maybe that is the context to use. See what works. Keep the vocab learning fun! Edited by zenmonkey on 21 January 2012 at 2:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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