ashby Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 5256 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Spanish
| Message 1 of 5 29 July 2011 at 1:22pm | IP Logged |
Hey, I thought I would share my method of learning new vocabulary.
Before I started using it, I used to prepare paper flash-cards for myself, you know, write a word on one side and its meaning on the reverse.
Anyways, I figured it wasn't the most useful way in the world. Carrying all those cards, using it on the bus, people staring at what you do etc. Besides it took me too long to prepare those cards, sometimes that piece of paper I snipped didn't have enough space for the definition.
So, here is what I do now:
I watch a movie/TV show, and if I come across a word I don't understand, I look it up in a dictionary, open a notepad, jot it down and save as, hmm, let's say 114.txt then I open another notepad and write its word meaning and save it as 114a.txt.
Then after I gathered some amount of words I transfer them to my phone (not iPhone) and then if I find myself in a queue or on a bus, I simply take my phone as if I was reading messages, check out 114.txt and if I don't understand it, I check out the 114a.txt .
Well, I don't know if it'd be any useful for you, but it does pretty good job for me.
Thanks for reading.
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ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French
| Message 2 of 5 29 July 2011 at 4:00pm | IP Logged |
Thanks, Ashby. You might investigate the Anki program, which would streamline your procedure and allow you to learn more words.
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jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5420 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian
| Message 3 of 5 29 July 2011 at 6:59pm | IP Logged |
I think you should check out the variety of flashcard programs out there available to
most phones, it would save you a lot of time.
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jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4962 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes Speaks: French* Studies: German
| Message 4 of 5 29 July 2011 at 7:29pm | IP Logged |
Don't forget that most of phones are not smartphone and are not able to run anki or similar software. But i agree it's definitively something to check.
Edited by jean-luc on 29 July 2011 at 7:30pm
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fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4867 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 5 of 5 31 July 2011 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
I'm just a beginner in Spanish (3 months now). What I do when I encounter a word I don't know (which is like every 30 seconds when watching a movie in Spanish, or every other sentence when reading) I pause the movie, or put down the book and write down a whole sentence using that word. Later I enter the sentence into Anki for review. My thinking is that it's a lot easier to remember a word by using it in a meaningful context.
When I first started out with Spanish I downloaded a couple Anki Spanish vocabulary lists, and it took a LOT of repetition to learn the first couple hundred words. And even when I learned them in isolation I was slow to recognize them in context. The minute I started using whole sentence instead of single words in isolation, my retention rate went way up and my need for repetitions went way down, and my speed of recognition in context went way up.
Listening to spoken Spanish (dvds, podcasts, online telenovelas, etc.) if it takes three quarters of a second to recognize a word you've just missed the next two or three words. But when I learn the word in a context I also learn how to pick it out of that context, so I can recognize a word quickly enough that I don't miss the next word spoken.
(My only other language learning experience was some Latin and German in high school in 1960-62. I mostly slept through class and forgot all of it the day after graduation.)
--gary
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