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Hoarding data instead of learning? | ||
Tags: Memory | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 17 15 July 2012 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
In my case, it's the opposite - I don't want to invest the time to enter the word into anki, when I want to have it present in my mind (and brain and head and spirit and all of them). There's this disctinction between item memory and source memory. In a study I read, people generally built up either item or source memory. Source memory often is easier to build up and maintain because it attaches to autobiographic memory or data storage routines you're already familiar with, and using source memory works with recognition, which also saves energy and effort. So, when I enter an item into Anki, I am under the impression that I'm creating a secondary source to refer to, not the actual item memory. It feels like going two steps back in order to go one step forward, especially as as a learner, I still do not know how important an expression or how exact a translation is, and I lack the heuristics gotten from working with a lot of real language to teach me that. I usually throw away my exercise sheets a few weeks after I did them. Either I know the pattern now, or I don't know it, but looking back at the old sheet a year later will only reactivate the old mistakes (which are based on interference from my other languages and my misunderstanding), so I'd rather go through a similar exercise from scratch to see what I can do now and what I can't. Also, I never completely trust study materials, and least of all my own faulty ideas at that one point in time. And that's what I hoard: Massive amounts of raw data. In the hope I might find time to work with it. Edited by Bao on 15 July 2012 at 3:29pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 17 15 July 2012 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting! I tried Googling around for a bit to learn about item memory and source memory. These two terms seem to mostly occur in highly technical papers, and I haven't been able to get a good feeling for exactly how the experts distinguish them. Here's an interesting paper about "flashbulb memories", those instants that you remember clearly many years after the fact. Source Memory in the Real World I have a few flashbulb-style memories for French—mostly where communication broke down in an embarrassing or hilarious way. For more ordinary words, I do occasionally have source memory—I know exactly where I learned it. But often I just know it, and don't know why.
That may be way I dislike vocabulary cards in Anki, but love sentence cards. Instead of trying to commit bare facts to memory, I merely encounter the same contexts over and over again. The effects vary: Sometimes stuff becomes active knowledge, often it lies just below the threshold of active knowledge, and often I gain strong passive recognition. Over time I've gotten quite good at knowing which cards to create. But I still spend 75+% of my time encountering French in the wild. For me, Anki is a very powerful supplement, even an essential one, but it's not how I spend the majority of my time. Edited by emk on 15 July 2012 at 3:38pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Mae Trilingual Octoglot Pro Member Germany Joined 4991 days ago 299 posts - 499 votes Speaks: German*, SpanishC2*, Swiss-German*, FrenchC2, EnglishC2, ItalianB2, Dutch, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Swedish Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 17 15 July 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Cool, I do something similar. I have lots of material too, but as soon as I have memorised it, I just keep a few notes in my notebook and delete the files. Otherwise I would need more memory every year... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 12 of 17 15 July 2012 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had the same experience of being a data hoarder. Worse, I was a data hoarder for multiple languages, trying to master the same phrases in each language, a terrible approach to effecting polyglottery. Nowadays, I spend a lot more time reading or listening. Since my primary interest has shifted from living languages to dead ones like Sumerian or Sanskrit or threatened ones like Alsatian and Breton, more of that time is spent either reading or working with a limited stock of audio materials. And what I'm finding is that doing it this way, the language is something I relate to the world with, rather than an object to be learned, piece by piece. Someone commented about having lots of data and needing to find the time to use it. That's where I was in my data hoarding days - page upon page of lists that, once memorized, would bring me to my language goals. But doing scriptorium exercises with Sumerian for just a few pages of text have given me a far higher comfort level for the material than my majestic lists for the Romance languages and Germanic languages that I had but never could find a way of changing from information into something that I had lived.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 13 of 17 16 July 2012 at 12:08am | IP Logged | |||||
I can relate to this. It wasn't Anki in my case, but simply taking notes, whether by hand or in the computer. I am at risk with another type of activity, which is to collect the materials for making parallel language books, and then spending time in constructing them, and then polishing them, etc. I try to counter this by making myself do some activity in each of my active TLs each day, be it ever so little. As far as note-taking is concerned, for the moment, it is mainly Iversen-style word- lists (my own take on them, but I retain the important principle of aiming to put them and keep them in long-term memory), plus similar idiomatic phrase lists. I do separate written grammar exercises, but no longer tend to keep them as notes. The value is in the thinking, then writing. Then hopefully the points are in my memory, and I have no need to keep the notes, which I probably wouldn't look at anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 17 16 July 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Anki is nice but I've found it tiring to keep up once you stop using the basic textbook
as regularly. I do like Iversen's wordlists. Also, if you forget a word, not such a big deal. You'll stumble upon it again. The real key is simply use and practice anyway. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5866 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 15 of 17 16 July 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am very guilty. I have collected enough resources to last me for years. Most I'll never get to. But it is not just in language learning. It is everything. Bookmarks, other hobbies, all manner of knowledge, etc.
I just hate to miss a good opportunity, or risk letting it slip. For me, I'm sure it is all part of having a "scanner" personality, as discussed here on HTLAL, on the web, and exposed in the book "Refuse to Choose": http://www.amazon.com/Refuse-Choose-Revolutionary-Program-Ev erything/dp/1594863032 1 person has 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 16 of 17 16 July 2012 at 8:14am | IP Logged | |||||
And yeah, hoarding is dangerous. I mostly just collect native materials. When they are difficult to find/download, having them feels as good as actually using them :D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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