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Synonyms in your SRS? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7115 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 7 02 November 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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A major part of my studying recently is centered around reading and drilling the vocab
I pull from my books in Mnemosyne. I'm starting to find that a lot of my words overlap- I currently have two words for "to decorate" in there, two for "law," two for "murderer," two for "witness," and about a million for more common words like "joy" and "gradually". It's becoming a bit of a problem. I don't really want to combine all the Turkish synonyms on one card, because some of them have more than one meaning- and I wouldn't know how to grade my answer if I got one synonym but not the rest. Still, having them on separate cards doesn't seem ideal either. When I see "to decorate" and answer "bezemek" when the card actually says "süslemek," that's no good. Has anybody worked out a good solution to this? How do you handle it- all on one card, all on separate cards, on separate cards with hints as to which answer it wants (like "to decorate, first letter s") or what? I feel like my SRS is about two more words for "angry" away from devolving into a total mess, thanks to synonyms. Thanks in advance. Sierra 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hardheim Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5190 days ago 34 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, French | Message 2 of 7 02 November 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I study vocabulary, I lessen my confusion by writing the first letter of the word in the target language underneath the English word if mutlitple options exist in your target language. For example in German there are a ton of ways to say 'to receive'. My level of German is high enough that I am familiar with all the options for this word, but if you were to quiz me, there is a good chance I'm going to give a version of the word not on the other side of the card. So, under 'to receive', I would write the letter 'e' to indicate I am looking for 'empfangen' and not 'bekommen'. If you have (2) words in German starting with 'e' for the word 'to receive', such as 'empfangen' and 'erhalten', I would note the first 2 letters of the German word under the English word. This has worked very well for me in the past. Edited by Hardheim on 02 November 2010 at 5:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5181 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 7 02 November 2010 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not an expert on SRS, but if I were creating cards I'd try to do it so I was reminded of the original context of the word when it comes up in the SRS system. So I'd perhaps tag the card with the title of the book or the chapter name (not chapter number, which is meaningless) or even a particular scene - e.g. "in the courtroom, at the trial of Mr. Smith". I'm sure with computerised SRS systems this tagging would be easy. I know this won't solve your problem completely (e.g. if all the synonyms appeared in the same section of the text), but I think if you can picture the exact scene where the word comes from, you'll usually get around the synonym problem.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 7 02 November 2010 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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They say there's no such thing as synonyms. To a learner, "murder" and "assassinate" may appear to be synonymous, but to a native, they are different. If you look closely at the definitions and examples in a dictionary, you'll often see a conceptual distinction that you can use.
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| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5950 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 7 02 November 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
I would enter that as; [v] to decorate (not bezemek) There are some that I combine on one card such as long and short forms of the same word. My card then would say something like; [v] to change (1 and 2 syllable forms) Good Luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5409 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 6 of 7 02 November 2010 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Certainly true for the most part I'd say, there probably aren't huge numbers of synonyms in most languages. English may have more than most due to our linguistic heritage with the mixing of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, perhaps a little Old Norse too, so we end up having words which are truly interchangeable. I would expect in most other languages that there would be far fewer than what we are used to using in English. Then of course we have words which have the same general meaning but different connotations. For example, the numerous words we have in English for excrement have wildly differing connotations but in the end describe the same thing. (Apologies, best example I could think of off the top of my head!) Assuming you're simply going for recognition of a word rather than production, it would be good to include notes on the word's connotations and perhaps a couple of sentences for different usages to help clarify any definitions you end up putting on the answer side. Just using an approximate English translation of a word won't truly illustrate its full meaning sometimes. Some examples of what I do in Norwegian: Q: Synes A: Think, in the sense of having an opinion about something. e.g. "Jeg synes filmen er spennende" - I think the film is exciting. Q: Tror A: Think, in the sense of thinking about something that could be factual. e.g. "Jeg tror de kommer nå." - I think they are coming now. It all depends on what words are being put in but it is probably best to try and research a bit into every word you want to learn and get your head round its connotation and usages. Of course, this is not strictly necessary, though can be very useful. After enough reading over an extended period of time you would start to get a feel for why words which appear to have pretty much the same meaning are used differently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hnedka Triglot Newbie Czech Republic Joined 5318 days ago 5 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Spanish | Message 7 of 7 06 November 2010 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I do two things to solve the "synonyms problem". Note that I always translate to a target language, not from it.
The first thing I do is that I list all the synonyms as part of a question, so I can easily see which ones are not the correct answer. This gets of course problematic when you have several synonyms. The second thing I do (with all cards) is that I add pictures to them (from Google Images). This way, I have a different picture for each synonym and I can most of the time immediately recognize which one is needed. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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