|
 |
Are flash cards a necessary evil? | ||
Tags: Flash cards | Usefulness | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6207 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 9 of 83 15 January 2011 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
|
http://www.foreignbooksonline.com/german-deutsch-learning-ed ucation-c-22_35
I don't understand the assumption that flash cards are compulsory. Use whatever method works for you. I myself made headway at school using a Vis-Ed German Vocabulary set in c.1980 like the sixth one down in the link I give. I believe the updated Vis-Ed is more or less the same, with a different box decoration. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wilzy Newbie United States Joined 5118 days ago 15 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish | Message 10 of 83 15 January 2011 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I haven't used flashcards before, but am looking for ways to learn more efficiently, so I am using them now for Arabic (both to learn vocab and to try to make word recognition more automatic). I am finding them useful. I have bought some illustrated kids' readers with accompanying tapes. (The books are all about 48 pages long, one illustration per two-page-spread. They are stories like Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves or Pinochio). As I look up new words/phrases, I write the Arabic and English meaning on either side of the flashcard, and think for a couple of seconds about the context in which they are used in the book. When I finish a page, I spend a while looking at the illustration, trying to note as many details as possible.
At the moment, I have about 15 books with flashcards. Most days I listen to the tape for one of the books (the tapes last about 30-50 minutes each). Before listening, I go through the flashcards for that day's book, visualizing the illustration for each word and trying to recall exactly how the word is used in the story. Actually making the flashcards is a bit tedious, but overall they seem to be speeding up my vocab acquisition and helping with listening - during the listening, I seem to be spending less time trying to catch all the words and more time just listening to the story and noticing how sentences are put together. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5701 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 83 15 January 2011 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The whole idea behind flash cards (and word lists) is to increase the frequency in which you encounter a word. I personally find it easier to acquire now vocabulary when I'm still a beginner or already advanced than when I'm intermediate. That's because when I'm a beginner I learn the high-frequency core vocabulary and ignore the rest, when I'm advanced I know most words already and can concentrate on the unknown ones, but when I am still at an intermediate stage a lot of old and new words and rules fight for my attention and then I need more repetition of the same content to remember those items. I know various way to achieve this - repeating exercises until I don't repeat my mistakes, repeatedly working with the same or very similar texts, conversation or conversation practice with the same topics in mind, memorization of texts, writing/free talk exercises (those are no good for me) and memorization of isolated items that I find memorable (eg flash cards). That is to say, I'm a lazy person and just look for new input that's similar in content and level to what I've worked with before, and then look up everything that I feel I need to know for comprehension. When I'm pressed for active acquisition I also memorize texts and talk to conversation partners. Edited by Bao on 16 January 2011 at 6:30pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 83 15 January 2011 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I don't much like flashcards, but when I want to cram, I will use them.
The only really good thing about them is speed. If you're not going through them fast, I'm not sure you'll get much out of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5468 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 13 of 83 15 January 2011 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I've never used flashcards. I've tried, after seeing so many people ranting about them,
but could never use them. It's just... not engaging. As soon as I can, I start reading. However difficult it may be - I've currently started with German and at times I feel like I'm staring at the brick wall instead of a book - it is still inifintely more engaging than flipping flashcards. But I have a question to flashcard users -- at what point you ditch them? Do set yourself a limit that, for example, after 3000-5000 words you ditch cards and proceed on with texts? Or do you just keep adding words from dictionary? At what point you say that you're done with flashcards for that particular language? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5287 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 14 of 83 15 January 2011 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I like using flashcards, though I hate making them. As others have mentioned before me, I believe that everyone has his or her own techniques, and thus it doesn't matter to me if someone uses flashcards or not.
I can state from personal experience though, a few reasons why I always use flashcards. When I studied German at the university, I made flashcards and acquired a nice amount of vocabulary in one semester. It was enough that I was permitted to skip the second beginning German class and move to the lower intermediate class. Of course I self-studied the German grammar for the class I skipped (over the summer) before taking the intermediate class in the fall, but most people thought that I had studied German in highschool, which was not true as I had studied Latin! Now I realize that university classes are not necessarily the best way of learning languages, but the flashcards put me way above most of my peers, and in minimal time as well. When I later took Spanish at the university, I decided that I was going to go for a more natural approach and not bother with flashcards. This decision stemmed from the fact that I was taking some intensive English classes, and did not want to spend the time flipping through flashcards. An amazing thing happened - after four semesters of Spanish, I felt that my knowledge was still not as good as my German was after only two classes. I always used the excuse that Spanish must be "harder" than German, despite what many state, but after I went out and bought a pack of premade flashcards for Spanish, I quickly worked through them and feel that my vocabulary has dramatically increased. I am a learner who finds it to be an advantage to see the word written when I learn it, though this is obviously not always possible. It does help me retain the word better though, and as such, flashcards are a must for me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5287 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 15 of 83 15 January 2011 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't take an either/or approach with flashcards and texts. I feel that there are always words to learn, and as long as there are words, I crank out a set of flashcards. I typically focus more thematically though, after I have acquired the basic vocabulary that everyone should know. For instance, brewing beer and playing music are two of my hobbies outside of language learning, whereas gardening is not. Therefore, although I might learn some basic gardening terms, I will more often than not create a set of flashcards that deals with music or brewing terms, for instance. For me, flashcards + reading has always helped retain words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 16 of 83 15 January 2011 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't use flash cards because I feel I'm on trial or participant in a quiz show with somebody else in charge - maybe that's the evil angle of them? With my wordlists I decide which words to memorize and when. Actually I get the same thing as flash cards or Anki could give when I read or listen to genuine texts as they also are full of unknown words. but there it is all the words of a language that are in play, which is OK because I can work on limited sets of words using my wordlists if I want to. As usual it is a question of finding reasonably comprehensible or bilingual texts.
This is slightly surprising to me. I think it is much easier to learn new words when I'm at least intermediate, but it functions even better at the basic fluency level because I then 1) have seen most of the words before, 2) can form associations to all the words I already know. This holds in principle still true at the advanced level, but there the words I still miss are typically fairly technical, and then I learn them better from relevant texts (field guides, science mags, wikipedia) plus a good dictionary. Edited by Iversen on 01 February 2011 at 10:36am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
