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FSI "Overlearning" | ||
Tags: FSI | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5012 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 9 19 April 2011 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone-
The FSI course I'm using (Hungarian) has in its introduction the concept of "overlearning" which I understand to be equivalent to "memorization". Is this a correct assumption? Essentially they are asking you to memorize the dialogue as part of the learning process, although this is never explicitly stated; and I'm not sure why. This makes me question whether I am correct about just what is meant by "overlearning". Thanks for any insight. Michael 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5661 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 9 19 April 2011 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Overlearning
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| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5012 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 9 19 April 2011 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for this explanation! Intuitively, and from my own experience, this makes sense. I have noted a significant decrease in my communication ability when talking to strangers in another language; my mind goes "blank". I think this is a very valuable piece of information! I will definitely have to give some thought on how best to incorporate this into my studies. Michael 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pfn123 Senior Member Australia Joined 5075 days ago 171 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 9 21 April 2011 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||
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When the FSI manuals refer to overlearning, I take it to mean repeating (aload, usually) again and again and again, till it trips off the tongue almost involuntarily, and you dream about it at night. Well, something along those lines, anyway.
So long as 'overlearning' is not just mindless repetition, but coupled with analytical study (grammar, &c.), then I think it is very helpful. Latin Proverb: 'Repetitio est mater studiorium' (Repetition is the mother of learning) Edited by pfn123 on 21 April 2011 at 10:09am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 9 21 April 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Memorising a dialogue will always be easier by mindless repetition than by meaningful learning. That's why "overlearning" sentences should be avoided.
The goal of "overlearning" is to get it to the point that it comes back without thinking. Real learning relies on learning to the point where your thinking is so quick that you don't notice you're doing it. Consider the following verse from a Basque song loriak udan intza bezela maite det dama gazte bat ari ainbeste nahi diotanik ez da munduan beste bat Why this one? Because I've memorised it and I don't really speak Basque. There are grammar points in there that I know -- "bat" is "one" and goes after the noun it qualifies. "Loriak" is either "flowers" or the ergative of flower. Lots of little bits and pieces. But none of this knowledge is needed for me to sing the song. I sing the song purely by "overlearning". A language is a set of choices. When you sing a song you do not choose each word, you simply push it back out. If you repeat a small set of example sentences too often, you memorise the sentence and stop needing to make a choice. Don't believe me? You can find lots of examples of fixed phrases that we treat as a unit and never actually think about. Little things like "At the end of the day..." (equivalent to "in the final analysis") don't change, and if you think about them literally, they make absolutely no sense. But they don't need to, because we think about it as a unit. Another equivalent phrase is "When all is said and done...". We don't really use "all" as a pronoun like that these days, but the fixed phrase has stayed because it is memorised, not built up from grammar. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5012 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 9 22 April 2011 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for your response! A not so latin proverb which is nonetheless related... 'Lather, rinse. Repeat' ! ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5012 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 9 22 April 2011 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||
I really like this concept of "overlearning"; especially given the idea that a certain arousal level is "good" for learning... not to much, and, apparently, not to little. This makes sense within my own experiences, ideas learned while studying in a nice quiet environment do not always provide optimal results in a different environment. Perhaps changing the environment under which learning takes place, or, at least, the arousal level under which ideas are learned, will make a difference. Michael 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 9 22 April 2011 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
Language professor Wilfried Decoo once said that in language teaching, the medium makes the method In the days of the FSI, as he points out, the medium was tape. Not hugely cumbersome, but they take a long time to duplicate and what comes out is relatively fragile and has a fixed sequence. If you start reordering the content on the tapes, so that in order to have a pseudo-random sequence on each listen, the set of tapes would grow exponentially with the length of the course, There was also paper, which is pretty heavy stuff, so you don't want to carry too much of it around with you. It is because of the restrictions of paper and cassette tape that FSI uses small sets of phrase and sentences and asks you to repeat them again and again. But with modern technology it is possible to cram a large variety of sentences and phrases onto a single disc, and to offer them in various orders. You can fit 1000 hours of MP3 audio onto a single DVD-R. A commercial dual-layer DVD can have 2000 hours... on one side. If you really pushed the boat out and had a dual-layer double-sided DVD, you could include 4000 hours of audio on a single disc -- that's more than 10 hours for every day of the year. With that much audio, you'd be able to include near-infinite variation on the patterns, and you would be able to jumble up any repeated phrases so that you wouldn't keep hearing them in the same order. You can achieve this for yourself with SRS tools like Anki, or with Gradint, a program designed to make MP3 lessons out of a set of words, phrases and sentences. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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