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Multilingual flashcards | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Kary Groupie Canada Joined 5945 days ago 85 posts - 113 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, German | Message 1 of 4 05 July 2010 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe this has been discussed before as a generally bad idea, but I wonder if there isn't a time when this would be beneficial.
Right now, I have French-English, Spanish-English and German-English sets of cards. I very occasionally have French-Spanish confusion issues - such as once mixing olvidar and oublier into some strange hybrid word. I think this is mostly because I don't have enough sound files. I find that if I have a sound associated with the visual representation of the word that solidifies both the spelling and the language. I wonder if this would be better addressed by directly comparing French-Spanish rather than trying to build a barrier between the two languages via English. Also, it almost seems wasteful associate words with English. If I know the meaning of a word in French, why not learn the Spanish in association with it, re-enforcing the words in both languages? Often there is a better correspondence of meaning. ETA: Also, I think it's unnecessary to keep multiple copies of each English word. There are a set of core words that I need to know in all four languages. It's easier (if not more effective) to set up one model with fields for each language (plus audio) and have card templates for appropriate Q->A (e.g. French audio->French text, French text->Spanish text, Spanish text->French text) so I can still control when I study each language. Edited by Kary on 05 July 2010 at 4:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Akalabeth Groupie Canada Joined 5315 days ago 83 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese | Message 2 of 4 05 July 2010 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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One place where you can find a lot of sound files for words is http://swac-
collections.org/. Especially French, but it has a fair number for German and Spanish too. If the words are more closely related in Spanish-French than in English I don't see any reason why not to ladder them like that. Just be sure that they are in fact very similar in meaning. You could conceivably have two words in two languages that are both approximated by the same word in English, but poorly approximated by each other (likely if the English word has multiple meanings). I wouldn't like doing things like that, at least at the early stages of a language, mostly because it requires you to already know if those problems exist with a word, and if you're just learning it you don't. The vocab lists at http://smart.fm/users/Glossaria also might be useful for what you're doing. The words are supposed to be chosen such that they mesh well if you're doing multiple language at once. The accompanying audio sounds weird listening to a few of them though...might be text-to-speech. Edited by Akalabeth on 05 July 2010 at 11:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kary Groupie Canada Joined 5945 days ago 85 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, German | Message 3 of 4 08 July 2010 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the links. (Sorry for the slow response. I temporarily have limited Internet access.)
Of the two audio sources you mentioned, I prefer swac-collections.org. I'm leery of the computer generated audio. Sometimes the sound is quite different from a human voice and I'm afraid that the I won't know the difference for unfamiliar words - especially the German. Another source I use is Wiktionary. Again French (fr.wiktionary.org) has the largest collection of sound files of the three languages. German (de.wiktionary.org) has quite a few but Spanish has almost none. (Ah, Spanish, so smug with your highly phonetic spelling!) The good news is I have tonnes of Spanish audio CDs (and quite a few German and some French, also), so it's just a matter of slowly editing for the words and phrases that I want.
I feel pretty comfortable with distinguishing the different meanings for French and Spanish, but I double check using two or more sources (e.g. desk reference dictionaries, Wiktionary and other online sources). German is a lot harder and every word has to be triple checked. Also, I'm using an "invisible" English field as the anchor between the languages. That is, the English field never shows as part of the question or answer, but I use it to know the exact meaning I'm trying to match. I know this won't work for every word or phrase, but I think there are a set of core words I want to know in all three languages and that translate well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 4 of 4 08 July 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Kary, I don't know how helpful this may be. Since you are working on French and Spanish using flashcards, you might be interested in a Canadian product that takes the idea to a higher level. It is in the form of wall-charts and sound files on the Internet: www.langcal.com. I use it for Spanish with fabulous results. People always ask me how I learned Spanish.
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