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Text Jigsaw Study Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6262 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 1 of 27 04 October 2008 at 4:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I am sure this method has been used by others before me, but I came up with it last night and used it (with Turkish, but any foreign language is probably appropriate).
First I copied out a text in Turkish. Then I made another copy. The first copy was a crib, the second I cut up with scissors into individual words and phrases. I then mixed up the individual words and gradually started re-assembling the original text, referring to the crib where necessary. It was a little like putting together a paper jigsaw puzzle. After doing this a few times, I had the original text memorised. Also, the sentence structure and vocabulary, especially the previously unknown words in the text, were well engraved in my memory. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5940 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 2 of 27 04 October 2008 at 5:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, this is what I call a creative approach. I definitely want to see how it's like. My only doubt is, what happens with highly inflective or strongly agglutinative languages? The units you cut up will not be basic vocabulary entries that might be worth memorizing as they are, but inflected/composed forms out of the 10230 possible forms a word can take. This could be a little un-economic, perhaps?
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| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6070 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 27 04 October 2008 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds good William, I like it.
I may try it later, and will post here again about the results TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6460 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 27 04 October 2008 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Very innovative and interesting idea!
How difficult was the text you used? How many words in it were new? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jar-ptitsa Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5888 days ago 980 posts - 1006 votes Speaks: French*, Dutch, German | Message 5 of 27 04 October 2008 at 6:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Sometimes in my school we play a game similar with this: we have some sentences mixed up and we must place the sentence in the correct order. After, we read the letter, or the text (it depend of the type of thing) and discover if we had correctly done it.Other times we have this game with some words what you must put in it, and those words are written on pieces of paper as well. It's fun I think.
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| jstele Bilingual Senior Member United States Joined 6645 days ago 186 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean* | Message 6 of 27 04 October 2008 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I think this approach is most effective with individual sentences. But one concern I would have is that you are spending a lot of unnecessary time figuring out which word is the subject if you don't know the text. (Let's say there are more than two nouns.) You don't need to learn how to reconstruct a sentence from a scramble in order to be as good as a native speaker. You just need to know how to construct native-level sentences. This is a great exercise because it helps you see how all the parts fit together and gets you to think about how grammar creates meaning. You would develop a deeper understanding of grammar this way. Edited by jstele on 04 October 2008 at 12:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jstele Bilingual Senior Member United States Joined 6645 days ago 186 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean* | Message 7 of 27 04 October 2008 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm thinking that there is a much easier way to create the pieces of text without using scissors and manually cutting. You could probably find a program online that allows you to cut and paste text which gets turned into a big scramble.
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6262 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 8 of 27 05 October 2008 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I've done it with three separate texts, none of them huge - the longest so far is about 50 words, although the structure of Turkish means that a word can carry the same semantic load as three or four in English. The Turkish was all from the same source, with somewhat old-fashioned vocabulary (1950s). Only two or three words in each text were unknown and these were words that are going out of fashion now, though there was also a previously unencountered idiom.
I would say the method actually lends itself particularly well to languages with complex inflections. Trying to put the sentence back together forces you to avoid examining the word in isolation - you are constantly trying to relate it to other words in the sentence. I find that copying out the text by hand twice (although I could also cut text out of newspapers and magazines if I wanted to use that as the source for texts) and then cutting everything up and re-arranging it manually is helpful for fixing vocabulary and structures in my memory. Doing it by computer is possible, but I like the "hands-on" approach. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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