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New techniques learnt this year? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5882 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 9 of 20 13 September 2012 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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For me, the best new thing for this 2012 language learning season has been by far Learning with Texts. A great tool for intermediate students.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5207 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 20 13 September 2012 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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The two big things that I discovered, although I think it might have been the end of last
year as opposed to the start of this year that I found them, are self-talk (a godsend when real conversation opportunities aren't consistently available) and Luca's "full circle" method for working through Assimil. Thanks to these two techniques I reached a basic conversational level in Italian in a few months. I've also recently rediscovered SRS, and how to use it well, after having given up on it a long time ago. My current philosophy towards SRS is to use it in moderation - only a few minutes and a few new cards per day, only for learning things that you'll actually use, and only for "activation" (L1 front, L2 back) as opposed to recognition. To me it's something that's far more useful at the advanced level, since beginner and intermediate level language is common enough to already reinforce itself naturally. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 11 of 20 13 September 2012 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've discovered that you don't need SRS to work with flashcards. Making small decks and working with them for a few days, then deleting them works really well for me at the moment. Maybe I'll take up garyb's idea above on limited use of SRS, but for me, who often have long breaks of several months of not working with my TL (or even not doing language learning at all), SRS hasn't worked out too well, though it played an important role in my intensive period of learning Mandarin.
This is also the reason why I gave up my idea of "chunky SRS" for now. I might return to it, but for now I'm not doing it. It might be useful for others, though, so I'll explain it here anyway. Basically, the idea is to use Anki or similar software on a tablet computer. Instead of words or sentences, you put a longer text, maybe about a page in length, on the front of the card. On the back, you put some of the more difficult words as well as their translation, and then you rate yourself based on overall comprehension of the text. I think it can work well and it did work well for the time I used it. If I try it again, I'll make sure to change Anki's settings so the first interval is longer, and maybe only add one new text a week or so. Maybe I'll combine it with my current method of working with texts. Hm, I might have to revisit this technique. Good thread! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 20 13 September 2012 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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1. Memrise, an SRS which I quite enjoy. Yes, it has got some bugs and there are some
disadvantages compared to Anki, but it is still a great option for me. 2. The Pomodoro Technique. A wonderful thing not only for languages, one of my tools against procrastination and to more success in several areas of my life. 3. Don't Break the Chain. Another great thing, especially in combination with Pomodoro. As you see, last few months were mostly about time management, procrastination fight, success and losses, etc. A huge topic which emerged in my life and needed to be solved. I've already said several times that I use my languages as a sort of "mind lab" :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5924 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 13 of 20 13 September 2012 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've just become interested in learning a language by creating an immersion environment, although I haven't been actually able to fully immerse myself in Finnish or any other language just yet.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 14 of 20 14 September 2012 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
I've also started L-R-ing in Danish, something I always wanted to do, but I thought I ought to try to at least get to the end of the TYS book before I started, and have some basic vocabulary and grammar to get me on the right lines. I'm reading and listening to "Kvinden i Buret" by Jussi Adler-Olsen, and I'm surprised how well it's going. I should quickly add that I am not really listening for meaning at this stage, but just continuing to learn to associate the printed word with the sound, and getting exposed to a lot of vocabulary which maybe is being lodged somewhere in my brain, and which I may at least recognise when I meet it again, and sooner or later I'll look up or find out the meaning of. I'd already read this in English ("Mercy"), and I have a German audiobook version of it, so I usually listen to a chapter in German, to refresh my memory as to what's going on in the chapter, then listen to and read it in Danish. I might have started with "Naiv. Super", but was disappointed to find there was apparently no Danish e-book version (although there is an audiobook), and I was blowed if I was going to pay twice as much for the postage of the printed book as the book cost! Anyway, Adler-Olsen's books are originally written in Danish, so there are no translation issues to worry about at least. I wouldn't call myself a particularly aural learner though. Oh yes, trivial, perhaps, but I've only just discovered that PF5 in "notepad" automatically puts the time and date in the text! Quite useful if you want to datestamp a log, for example. Since our little contretemps with the forum, I've been keeping my log offline, using notepad, and then pasting it in here, and I was looking for ways of getting the system date into the clipboard so I could paste it into my log. I googled for free tools, and found there is a free notepad++ which allows all sorts of fancy things, and was wondering whether to install this, when I just thought I would take a closer look at the top line of notepad, opened up the "Edit" menu, and there it is at the bottom: F5 Time/Date. It's been staring me in the face for (presumably) years, and I'd never noticed. Doh! Edited by montmorency on 14 September 2012 at 12:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 20 14 September 2012 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Monty, you don't realize just how grateful I am for your contageous enthusiasm!!! <3
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 20 14 September 2012 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
The new Anki 2, now in release candidate 4, i.e stable but not quite complete, allows with its use of sub-decks added to tabs, the ability to make a much more granular use of decks. And there is no special reason to delete currently easy vocabulary, as one can just make a new deck with the same name + EZ or something, and then move them there. Which might be useful in the future if you let a certain language go for a while without maintenance. The only problems with this approach are that since decks typically are in alpha order, you still get sub-decks in alpha order unless you manually configure them, though I suppose a script could automate that. And if you use tags you get a super long list of tags in the browser list which are not collapsible like the decks and associated sub-decks are. I too like to work on smaller units so sub-decks have been great for me, as is the easy ability to move cards to different decks. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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