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Frequency vocab method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5786 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 33 of 55 17 October 2009 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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For the love of god and everything that is holy -- I beg you not to go through with the frequency list method. It was my FIRST instinct when I started learning a language for the first time 9 years ago, and I held on to the idea (which I now believe to be extremely mistaken) for 7-8 years. When I become literate in my 4th language (it's going to be a while longer) I'm planning to write a comprehensive document describing my grasp of what 'language acquisition' entails, and one of the first things I will say it does not entail is "scientifically" tackling the process by memorizing high frequency words with an SRS. It is painful, demoralizing, and extremely time inefficient (contrary to what we both expected when we came up with the idea, I'm sure!):
You'd do well to reread doviende's replies a few times. Demoralizing aspects: (1) Words that you just can't remember come up more and more frequently and make you more and more irritated because you have no idea why such a word is within the most frequent 1000 (different languages have different and surprising ways of expressing things, and if you aren't "needing" the word from encountering it in authentic speech or text, you aren't going to know why the word is special or important). Or it SEEMS like a word which you just have no use for and don't care about -- even though you would naturally start caring if you were encountering it in an authentic text and realizing it is INDEED useful. (2) (if you are like me -- even if you BELIEVE in the high-freq+SRS formula) Words simply will not stick because your brain knows you aren't doing anything with them but playing a "memory" game and have no legitimate reason for remembering the random bits of info. You WILL NOT notice this immediately -- but you will be extremely demoralized 6 months and 2 years down the road when you say "why does this crap keep coming up" and perhaps even give up on learning entirely because of the frustrating SRS experience. Time inefficient: (1) SRS seems beautiful at the beginning -- but as the old stuff needing review comes up more and more frequently and you realize the time investment each day JUST to keep 4,000 words in your head is frustrating. 6 months in when you are still trying to keep up just on keeping the SAME TIRED information in your head without moving forward much in % proportion to the whole -- you'll see the time wasted is just too much. If you instead had limited SRS to ~20% of your study time and ~80% or more engaged each day in intensive reading (some with dictionary use some with none -- do what you feel like), -- you'll see words you add from your actual reading, and which you encounter repeatedly and have to look up repeatedly, go into your memory with much more ease, or at the very least go into your SRS with but a tiny % of the cost to keep them in memory. If authentic texts which are of interest to you are too brutal at this point -- get a copy of Assimil and just read the dialogs for good reading practice. If you can handle that (maybe repeating several times with other materials interspersed in-between iterations), you'll have at least the first 2,000 out of the way -- and with a STRONG feeling of the importance of each word and why it is legitimately useful in the real living breathing language. By the way -- the one place in which I have no regrets with using and abusing an SRS is learning isolated Chinese characters, readings, and approximate English meanings. It really is a pure memorization task (one which makes dictionary work looking for "words" 100x faster when actually trying to read) akin to learning an alphabet IMHO. Edited by parasitius on 22 October 2009 at 7:44pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5799 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 55 18 October 2009 at 3:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Careful with your terminology -- Assimil is not "authentic" material in that it's designed for beginners, not natives. That's definitely not a bad thing in my book -- I'm not in favour of authentic materials from day one -- but it's just dangerous to start mixing your terms. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| cymro Triglot Groupie Wales Joined 6242 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Welsh, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 35 of 55 19 October 2009 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
To cleave. To cleave together or to cleave apart. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| John McEvoy Newbie United States Joined 5292 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: English* | Message 36 of 55 31 October 2009 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Oops! I,m new What does SRS mean?
John 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5505 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 37 of 55 31 October 2009 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Spaced repetition software, or system. The intervals between your drills get longer and longer, so that you have to
recall it just before you were going to forget it. This is the best time to do a rep. Visit supermemo.com to find out about it, although Parasitius has me worried now. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5774 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 38 of 55 31 October 2009 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I think what Parasitius was saying is that if you hope to learn a language through pure flashcards of important vocabulary, you will bore yourself to death, but if you combine it with reading enjoyable native materials, then it can be extremely helpful.
This has been my experience for sure. At different times I vary the percentages, but I like Parasitius' estimates of 20% SRS and 80% reading. Also, Iverson has given some good advice on this too, saying that his wordlists are for giving him just a general sense of a word's meaning, but it's really reading that gives him all the multiple meanings and real usages of the words. Flashcards or wordlists will never teach you all the subtleties of usage. Also, I recommend avoiding the idea that you can "scientifically" learn vocabulary "in order", focusing on "completeness". Although those things appeal to me, having a background in math and computers, I feel that this mindset is a bit of a dead end for language learning. Instead, I tell myself that I will need to experience each word multiple times in its "natural environment" before I'll really understand it, and my flashcard work is merely "prep time" that will get me ready for the real thing. In my mind there are several stages of "knowing" a word. At first, I might see a word a few times in books and I sort of recognize it in the sense of "hey, I've seen that before somewhere". Next, I might look it up once, and get a general sense of the meaning, but I tend to forget it again soon unless I add it to Anki (my SRS of choice). As I keep reading my novels and seeing these new words several times, the word evolves from "huh?" to "oh ya, I recognize that", to "I know the translation for that" to "I know the meaning without translating" and then to "I can use it with ease in speech". I've found that the key to moving along this path is just repeated exposure. If you're really worried at the start that you need to collect 4000 common words and become an expert at all of them, I think you're going in the wrong direction. Just consistently investigate words as you encounter them, and your vocabulary will grow over time. Curiousity and diligence, that's all. When reading, you don't need to highlight EVERY word on the page that you don't know. Just pick the two that are most interesting. You'll see the other ones again eventually; you won't "lose" them or anything, they'll still be around later in another book or magazine or movie. As long as you're somehow improving every day, then that's enough. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5755 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 39 of 55 31 October 2009 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's exactly how it works for me, too. I wrote something very much like this in my own notebook! Normally, the more often I see a word used in several contexts, the better I know it. I try to limit the number of flash cards I use, because if I wrote every word I don't know onto a card, the pile would just grow and grow, I'd get intimidated by it, and I'd avoid it. So, I only use cards for essential vocabulary, irregular verb forms and plurals, phrases that must be used as a unit or with a certain preposition, and those words that I continually forget. Also, I try to put an example sentence or two on the card, so when I review it, my memory will be jolted a little faster. So far I've kept the card population around here low. The cards I use regularly fill a large business-size envelope, and that's it. For some reason, I prefer actual physical cards for the hard stuff. But I keep my books and computer full of notations, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5786 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 40 of 55 01 November 2009 at 3:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Another thing I just remembered that I think drives home my exhortations for caution in SRS abuse is: I noticed something very queer with regard to word exposure through SRS vs through reading. I actually had words on a list (a Japanese Proficiency vocab list of several thousand words) that I had been repeating for a year and still I would encounter ones that I had no memory of ever having seen before in my life. Others would be so vague I would feel I was making a wild guess even when I got the answer right. If I encountered the same word as many times from reading -- there is no way I wouldn't at least recognize having seen it before. (Simple check: reread pages in a book you read 3-6 months prior) I wonder how many other people have had the same experience? I think it makes sense that my brain refused to value (and therefore remember) context-free trivia that could not be associated with the context of a story or specific usage of any sort. I just wish I hadn't taken so long to do something about it.
So based on that I have two addition 'safety' tips for anyone using an SRS: 1. If you list multiple English meanings as an answer for a single foreign term, do NOT torture yourself by marking your answer as anything less than "Perfect" if you can supply any single one of them. (In fact, don't even try to recall more than one.) Even if a word has multiple and opposite meanings, as soon as you encounter it in a reading context where an opposite meaning is used you will notice something wrong and remember the addition definition with very little effort. Learning these multiple meanings with supermemo, however, is very much like using a medieval torture device on yourself. 3. Never make English / Known Language -> New Language cards. For anyone who has read about extensive comprehensible input theory, forcing yourself to produce even a single word before you are ready will only incur a huge unnecessary cost in frustration and learning time. You might do this for the occasional term you need but just can't remember in conversation, but mostly you'll be surprised how naturally passively learned terms encountered enough times in reading (not SRS!!!) will come to the tongue, while force-learned SRS English->New Language words refuse to come out except when you are staring at the computer screen smacking yourself in the head. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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