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Are flash cards a necessary evil? | ||
Tags: Flash cards | Usefulness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| 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 33 of 83 26 January 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Flashcards officially don't work on me. I need a context, and I need to see the word in the real world to learn it. Every time I try, I give up after it fails miserably. I don't know why I keep trying, but it doesn't work for me.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5287 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 34 of 83 26 January 2011 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
I disagree on this matter, and believe that flashcards (I have not used anything electronic such as SRS yet) should be introduced into the mix sooner, rather than later. When I was in Germany, someone had once told me that "Asians typically know lots of complex vocabulary words which surprise me, but they cannot speak very well." Of course the guy was stereotyping a bit, but his point was that one cannot memorize a dictionary and then speak a language well, there are other facets in addition to having a large vocabulary. On the other hand, I believe that developing a large vocabulary sooner, rather than later, can greatly facilitate one's ability to progress in the foreign language. I have had more success learning grammar points (via a book, course, etc) and then complimenting the vocabulary in the book with additional vocabulary, while putting the important words on flashcards. At this point in the game, I feel that since there are more foundational words to know, flashcards become a quick way to learning the necessary words to be able to converse. Once reaching the stage when one can converse, then it becomes much easier to dance around the point and pick up new vocabulary without the usage of cards. 1 person has 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 35 of 83 26 January 2011 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was planning on writing a fairly long blog post on this topic, but I'll give a quick summary just now. The problem with learning vocabulary is that words don't exist. There is no such "thing" as a word: a word is a collection of morphemes. Where we draw the boundaries between words is arbitrary -- it's just what seems most convenient to us. If we believe in words as something separate from morphemes, then we end up drilling the most common words early on. But many of the most common words are less common than the most common bound morphemes (morphemes that cannot be used by themselves as a word). So, for example, there is no noun in English that is more common than the plural -s suffix or the possessive -'s suffix. I don't believe there is any verb more common than the singular third person present -s, the past -ed or the continuous -ing. ("to be" may be, if you include all conjugations. I'm not 100% sure.) The effects of frequency of occurrence are quite profound. Automaticity is a function of frequency of occurrence. "Functional" morphemes are individually very common in natural language, and no language has many function morphemes. By functional morphemes, I mean those that have no explicit concrete meaning: pronouns, conjunctions, grammatical markers. "Lexical" morphemes, on the other hand, are generally much rarer, and there's always a lot of them in the dictionary. If you achieve greater automaticity with lexical morphemes, you're in a bit of a hole, because natural language is all constructed with the assumption that you will understand the functional language easier and quicker than the lexical language. Your language is therefore back-to-front. 3 persons have 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 36 of 83 26 January 2011 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is the part I do not get. I forget things I don't use. If I don't use them, I therefore do not need them, therefore I don't care if I forget them. Therefore, no need for SRSing unnecessary words/phrases. It makes no sense to SRS things I won't use. On the other hand, if I use something frequently -- be it in speech or in reading -- I do not forget. Therefore, no need for SRSing. My Japanese, for example, is in this sorry state of standstill for various reasons. Shoud I be SRSing to not forget those things I already know? When I'm not going to put it into use in immediate future, that would just be keeping alive dead words, which have no real use for me, when I do not move ahead with my studies and bring them alive with reading and listening again. But if I do that, I'll start getting context and repetitions from those sources instead of flascards. What am I missing here? Where would flascards fit in this process? I understand that we're all different learners, but perhaps there are more nuances I'm not seeing? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6610 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 37 of 83 26 January 2011 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you are learning Japanese and you are working in Japan with Japanese colleagues, you do not need any SRS system. You already spend all day in Japanese. If you live in the US, it will be very difficult to find time enough to immerse yourself, you will forget words that you know, but you use less frequently. SRS systems come in handy. 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 38 of 83 26 January 2011 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I do not immerse myself in Russian, but I keep it floating (not sailing in full swing, mind you) by occasional reading, watching and listening. That seems to do the trick. I've no doubt forgotten quite many words but then again, would it be worth it to try to retain words like "custody", "detergent" or "falconry"? How does one determine exactly, what they need to retain? Where do you draw the line? The more I think of it the less I could do it myself. I'm confused. Which words and phrases do you have in your SRS? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 83 27 January 2011 at 1:22am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know what to make of this foggy dissertation, but I do think it is important in early stages of learning a language to pump up the vocabulary. For some reason that I can't seem to understand, people seem to think that flashcards consist of one word on the front and one word on the back. They can be so much more. For me, a flashcard is just like an entry in a notebook, only a bit more flexible because I can put the cards in any order. As I said in my earlier post, flashcards are basically mnemonic devices that one can easily carry around. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 40 of 83 27 January 2011 at 7:45am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm a always in awe of the ability of some people to transform some rather simple concepts into something incomprehensible. The only reason I respond to this mumbo jumbo is that I fear this stuff does more harm than good. To say that words don't exist is sheer nonsense. Why do dictionaries exist? In linguistics, a word--at least in languages with a writing system--is a written unit that is separated by spaces. The following utterances consist of countable numbers of words: The house is very big. La casa es muy grande. La maison est très grande. One immediate complication arises from the fact that words that are inflected or conjugated may have to be lemmatized or reduced to some basic form for purposes of counting different words. This is particularly common with verbs. So "is" is lemmatized in "to be", "es" in "ser" and "est" in "être". Many dictionaries will only contain the lemmatized word; so one of the difficulties of finding a word in a dictionary is how to determine the lemmatized form. The reason things get very complicated is the fact that the word is not a unit of meaning. And the terminology can become very murky. A basic concept here is that there are lexical words and functional words. Lexical words describe, conceptualize ideas or things in a very broad sense. They are unlimited in number. On the other hand, functional words are limited in number and have certain functional roles in the construction of utterances. Determiners (articles), pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions are examples. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning. It may be a word. But a word may also consist of more than one morpheme. One could say for example that the word "trader" consists of two morphemes; one derived from the verb "to trade" and "er", a suffix in English that designates an agent. French and Spanish use a complex system of morphemes to indicate grammatical gender. "grande" in French (unlike "grande" in Spanish) consists of "grand" + "e" to indicate a feminine gender word. Prefixes, infixes, suffixes, conjugated forms, grammatical markers often make use of "bound" morphemes, i.e. morphemes that cannot stand alone. In passing it should be noted that English has a very interesting system of multiple-word verbs, the so-called prepositional and phrasal verbs. Forms such as turn off, turn on, turn out, turn in, turn up, turn down, etc. raise interesting technical questions which I won't touch here. Then there is the complication of idioms. English is notoriously rich in idioms, but all languages have similar features. "To bark up the wrong tree" or "To wait for the other shoe to drop" have meanings that cannot derived readily from the words that make up these phrases. This is one of the hardest things to master in a foreign language because there are two levels of meaning. In Spanish, for example, "todo el pescado está vendido" (all the fish is sold) usually refers to the fact that bids or offers for public contracts or jobs have been rigged and everything is all arranged beforehand. Edited by s_allard on 27 January 2011 at 4:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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