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Memorizing lists of "phrases" rather ...

  Tags: Memory | Idiom
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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 Message 65 of 65
07 December 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged 
Nowadays I have mostly sentences in my SRS. However, I agree that you have to know most the elements of the sentence - staring at 3-4 unfamiliar words in a row is very discouraging. (And now that i think of it, that's one of my biggest problems with German at uni. Textbooks tend to introduce as many new words as possible, so these annoying blocks often appear... and then I have gaps in my basic vocabulary (according to dialang's placement test) so these blocks also form when the words I'm supposed to know meet the words I'm supposed to learn... argh)

Anyway, when I add sentences/chunks to SRS I either make sure there's just 1 unfamiliar word per 5 (not counting unfamiliar forms) or I googletranslate it and put that in the answer. As per AJATT, I don't aim to memorize the sentences, merely to be able to look at them and understand them. Sometimes I also include a gap and I've recently learned how to change the card layout so ANKI tells me to type the missing word (or even letter). (If I don't use this, I just put the unfamiliar words into the answer field with translations - almost never translating into my native Russian)

It's quite interesting with Karelian, as I have a good dictionary with examples for almost all the words, and while I might not know the surrounding words, I understand them from Finnish. So even if all words in a sentence are new to me, there are always one or two that look random/different and/or that I'm just focusing on.

However, I'm not sure what I'd do if I started a new language which is not similar to those I already speak or study. I guess I'd have to learn at least a little before starting to add sentences to SRS, and then I'd struggle to find sentences that don't have too many unknown elements for me.

And, how to put it modestly... I guess I have the experience to know what to expect from a language and what not to. For those new to language learning and linguistics, I'd recommend to try to shift away from this native language bias. Like, often even if you translate quite literally, one L1 word will correspond to two L2 words and vice versa, some will have to be left out in translation (but they do alter the meaning), some might "stick" to other words (English: my car, Finnish: (minun) autoni where minun is not obligatory while in the standard language, ni is). I try to stop translating ASAP, even if I don't know much.

This might also depend on the language. When I did the 6 week challenge in Esperanto some 4 years ago, I wanted to try out the sentences method (hoping that for EO I'd need less than 10,000;) but it was the wrong language for this. It's so regular that it just doesn't make sense to learn this way, at least before you're at a high enough level to just learn the vocabullary this way. (makes me feel like looking for some interesting affix combinations and learning the words by adding sentences with them to SRS:))))

So IMO, learning sentences is awesome but it has its limits. You can start by admitting that when you think: "interesting, I gotta remember this way of saying that thing" you're unlikely to remember it unless you see it again - and adding this type of stuff to SRS before actually starting to hunt for sentences (where google and twitter are your best friends).

Edited by Serpent on 07 December 2011 at 1:32am



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