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My Thoughts On Sentence Mining and others | ||
Tags: Goals | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 49 of 66 25 August 2010 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Are you deliberately misunderstanding me? A sentence is a sequence in itself. Memorizing sentences, passages or whole texts makes active use of the way some -though probably not all- learners' brains favour the sequence over encoding every single items anew. Used wisely, memorizing chunks of language even larger ones than those that are stored as single items in a native speaker's lexical inventory can be helpful. Getting artificial repetition is a tool you might consider when the material you want to work with is just so much higher than your current level that you can not work with it yet, and you do not have an easier way to get there (like intermediary material or a tutor.) There's no point in repeating things you know already, or things you don't even understand yet. So, what I do is that I pick a text, work through it (intensive reading/translation) and add those parts that I don't remember the next day. Ideally, I repeat those items a couple of times; remember most of them and have a chance to figure out why the others don't stick (typically interference in my case), and then hopefully can work with my new material or equivalents. For me, repeating both the sample sentence and new vocabulary items/structures has shown the highest retention rate so far. It's a tool to help me focus my attention in a way I can't do it when working with entire texts or in conversation with native speakers. And sadly, I have a problem with particles (and certain kinds of grammatical structures, too). Memorizing them as an item with the words in question doesn't work, nor does memorizing the rules, and when I just work with texts (reading, listening, reading aloud) I ignore the particles. The only thing that worked so far was to memorize sample sentence (usually just for fun), and afterwards get more exposure. Memorize more, get more exposure. Maybe I am unique when it comes to that problem, but I doubt it. Cainntear, to learn non-existing collocations (or rather more than any learner will learn in the initial stages) one would have to seriously overlearn the sentences, exclusively or almost exclusively work with the sentences - and have quite a small sample size. If somebody's actually happy doing that leave them be. Leosmith, I didn't mean to say you were off-topic, but rather that many parts of the discussion seem to compare apples with pears. (I prefer pears. =) ) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6356 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 50 of 66 26 August 2010 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I believe it can have nice 'over-learning' effects. Repeating the basics will also help you having them fresh in your mind when you need them. Not trying to disagree with anyone. -And of course you should always focus on learning new things, (and make sure you don't lose the things you've learnt). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6948 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 51 of 66 26 August 2010 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I guess we are all arguing the same thing, in the end. I've been focusing my Japanese learning on reading and listening in large quantities, and only add a few new cards a week - for sentences that really interest me, or for items I want to remember but feel unlikely to come across again. I delete cards liberally and have about 13 scheduled reps each day. I guess you could say they're a supplement in my case, too. But I also feel they're an integral part of my study. My reading speed in Japanese is still very slow so it tires me to read a lot, and my experience shows me that I can't rely on context to help me remember (understand, yes, remember, no) a word unless I encounter it what seems like a ridiculous amount of times (I suffer from the 'I know I've seen this word a hundred times, I hate myself for having to look it up again' syndrome).
This seems very effective for a beginner or intermediate level. What would you recommend for someone with basic fluency in the language, at the point where they are just building their vocabulary more than anything? The words we want to remember at that stage are unlikely to come up very often in texts. I suppose you can argue that the words that are used so little don't warrant being memorized, but I want to be like a native speaker and have words like 'child support payment' or 'I dislocated my shoulder' at my command. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 52 of 66 26 August 2010 at 4:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
For a given definition of knowledge. I was rather thinking about knowing something well enough that you could use it even when woken in the middle of the night. Actually I believe that not even conscious overlearning might give that level of skill; I would rather think that it's something one has to gain from actually using the language in high-stress situations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 53 of 66 26 August 2010 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I learned the large majority of my English vocabulary through extensive reading (and interaction) as well, without using an SRS. Clearly, it's very useful to have what you want to say at your command. Reading helps a bit with this. Perhaps more than that, when you're already fluent, write. Look up what you want to say and don't know how to. You can ask native speakers to check that it's correct, and (often more usefully), you can find tons of sentences written by native speakers, using the word(s) you want, which starts to give you a taste of how it fits into the rest of the language. Learning words alone, by rote, I find I lack nuance with them, and use them in slightly incorrect or jarring ways. Putting occasional striking sentences into an SRS strikes me as fine. There's a bit of a trade off between exposure and repetition here, and I think a fairly broad range on that spectrum is fine. I weight it heavily towards exposure, and consider this important, but 'pure exposure only with no exceptions at any point in learning a language' is silly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5280 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 54 of 66 26 August 2010 at 7:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm just going to chime in with my particular take on sentence mining. My particular method if you will. It appears that in general nobody else uses anything truly resembling my approach, so here goes.
I mine everything. Everything. Almost. OK, a point of clarification here. First of all, I use sentence mining in conjunction with a basic vocabulary deck with pretty much every word I've ever come across in the language since I began using SRS. Almost literally. I note every single unknown word I come across regardless of context, then more often than not I plug that word direct into my vocab deck. There are some exceptions, such as when it is considered archaic or poetic, but most often I put the word into my vocab deck to review later. Then, simultaneously, I go into my trusty paper dictionary chock full of sentences, and I type up every single one for that word. If there are none, that sometimes causes me to reconsider adding the word into my vocab deck, but not usually. I want to be able to at least recognize the word in question, even if it is relatively rare. I use sentence mining to figure out the nuances of each word, and my dictionary is great for covering every major (and most minor) usages of each word it caries. That's good enough for me. Another point of clarification. I am an extremely global learner. I mean that in the most sincere and extreme sense. I want to learn (as well as learn to use) every single word in my target language (Finnish as the case currently is), and I don't care if the likelihood of my seeing a particular word again is second to nil. I will still put the word into SRS, and mine it to the best of my abilities. Yet another point of clarification. I am a firm believer in the input before output philosophy. Or at least of the belief that it is what works best for me. Sentence mining in the form I have just described is the specific method of input that works best for me as well. If anyone disagrees with this, that's their business, but this definitely works for me, no doubt about it. Something else will work for somebody else. Oh, and one last point. Contrary to the AJATT philosophy, I don't believe that every sentence I mine needs to be of interest to me. I don't even believe that these sentences need to somehow be better than the other sentences. I'm perfectly happy to fill my dumptruck with dirt, then play in that dirt finding extreme enjoyment in the experience of playing in that dirt. Because for me, the enjoyment is the language itself. Not some particular context in that language. Just the language itself. Which is why I think it is a perfectly fine idea to mine every sentence I find. I know enough grammar and vocab to be able to cope with 95% of what I come across, and the rest I just suspend for a later date. And the other thing is, I do come across a nice, juicy diamond every once in a while. An "aha!" moment if you will. But for all the other sentences, I just enjoy being around the language, and learning how the language works. That's what makes it fun for me. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6549 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 55 of 66 26 August 2010 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Bao makes a logical point here. But I do remember seeing at least one article that said it's more efficient to have easy stuff mixed in with your hard stuff. And I have to say that in my experience this is true. So heavy flashcard users should have some easy cards - and don't forget to add new stuff on a regular basis too, which another article says helps improve retention of the whole deck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 66 26 August 2010 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I reckon that I'll get my overlearning (as well as my idiomatics) from reading and listening. Very common words and constructions are bound to pop up there a lot of times.
My wordlists are reserved for new (or forgotten) words. But even within that group there are easy and there are difficult ones. I address this problem partly by lowering the number of words per group in the list (learning just five or even four words in one go instead of seven), or by including 'crutches', such as root words or related, but simpler words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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