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Flashcards vs. Extensive Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| khad Newbie United States Joined 6603 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 9 of 39 10 May 2006 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I suppose that's true if your cards are native to foreign. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 10 of 39 10 May 2006 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
My compromise was using a notebook for recording words. I think it gets you 90% of the benefit of flashcards, but is not nearly as much of a pain. And you can take it off the shelf 5 years later, scan the pages quickly, and see right away how your vocabulary is holding up. Also, what people think is bad for memorization - word order fixed for eternity in a notebook - is actually good for review later. If some number of pages in a notebook have words from a single novel, it helps recall them later, since knowing where they are from helps remember the context you saw them in first. Once I started using monolingual dictionaries, I stopped recording alltogether, although I am not sure it was the right decision. Edited by frenkeld on 10 May 2006 at 3:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6715 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 39 10 May 2006 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for bringing up this topic because I find it very interesting. Having studied languages for over 18 years, I too have a love and hate relationship with flashcards and vocabulary lists and have since developed a combined system that works for me.
Many moons ago I was quite zealous about creating cards and vocabulary lists. I even once created a list of over 35,000 German vocabulary words and idioms using books at the university library, etc. and then had the list bound. I thought that if I could gather all the information I needed to know together in one place and then learn it, I would be fluent in the language. However, despite all my efforts, it turns out that learning advanced vocabulary like this is not only extremely boring, but you also tend to forget the words quite quickly if you do not later meet them in real life. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t matter how long of a list you make, there are always more words to learn. It did not take long before I realized that it was possible for me to put considerable effort into learning a particular word and then in reality, I may never ever come across it in real life or if I ever did encounter that word (while reading or listening), I may be able to guess its meaning through context anyway and I needn’t have spent the time studying it. I took a variety of materials in the foreign language (books, magazines, etc.) and read a random selection from each, writing down each word I did not know or had never encountered before and beside the word, I wrote down my best possible guess as to what the word might mean given the context. Sometimes the guess was obvious, sometimes a stab in the dark. There are always context clues that give you some idea of the word/phrase’s meaning. (Is it a noun? Does it describe something positive or negative?, etc.). After obtaining a list of about 100 words in this way, I then proceeded to look them up in the dictionary. I gave myself one point if I correctly guessed the meaning of the word and half a point if I came reasonably close. It was kind of like a game. The result was that I found I was able to correctly guess the meaning of a word over 75% of the time. It is highly likely that if I were to see the 25% of the words I missed again in a different sentence or context, I would probably be able to increase this to 85%-90%. Another trick is to read a book (preferably not a library book) with a pencil in hand. As you read, lightly underline each word you do not know (and quickly guess at its meaning). After you’ve finished the whole book, go back to the front and look up the underlined words and I’ll bet you’ll find you won’t need to look up most of them. The idea is to find something you enjoy reading and since authors tend to re-use the same vocabulary, by the time you reach page 100 or so, you will be so into the story that there will be less and less unrecognizable vocabulary. Books for young adults (such as Harry Potter, for example) are good because there tends to be more context for unknown words. Sometimes you meet a word over and over again that you just cannot seem to grasp. If you come across the same word repeatedly and still have only a vague idea as to its meaning, go ahead and resort to the dictionary. Since you have now seen the word a number of times before looking it up, you probably will never forget the meaning. This happens to us all the time in our native language. We hear people using a word that we do not know until finally we just have to go and look it up in the dictionary – and then you never forget it. By learning words through reading, I avoid the original problem of studying lists of words that I will never meet again. The more frequently I encounter the word (while reading), the faster it will become part of my vocabulary. If I never encounter the word again, then I won’t learn it – but then I probably don’t need to. However, don’t throw your flash cards away too quickly. I still find them useful in two incidences. Firstly, when you are studying beginner’s vocabulary (dog, cat, sing, wish, etc.) they can be useful because these are high-frequency words that you will soon encounter over and over again in your textbook. Secondly, I still use flashcards to study lists of words that I want to know, but am unlikely to learn through context. An example of this being slang, vulgar and very colloquial expressions. Depending on the type of books you like to read, it will take you longer to acquire this type of language through reading since these words occur more often in speech. The same also works for listening practice. The single greatest investment I made for my language learning was the purchase of a satellite dish. Dish network has over 15 channels in Arabic, 3 channels in Italian, 3 in French, 2 in German, 4 in Portuguese as well as many other languages. Just as it is possible for you to learn words by reading, it is also possible to acquire vocabulary by listening. The trick is that you have to find something to read or a program to watch that is interesting to you and that you would watch anyway. The more interested you are in the storyline, the more attention you will pay and the more you will learn. Chances are that if you are interested in a particular subject (other than languages), you are going to want to talk about that subject, so it only makes sense that if you read about that subject in the foreign language, you will acquire the vocabulary that corresponds to that subject. Does reading in the foreign language work? Remember that book of German vocabulary I mentioned at the beginning – I recently dusted it off after it sat on the shelf for more than 10 years. Guess what? I know more than 80% of the vocabulary in it and I didn’t have to study. If I had studied the list instead, not only would I have wasted a lot of time, I doubt that 10 years later I would remember more than 50% and I would have also wasted time studying the 20% of that vocabulary that I apparently did not need. Find a system that works for you. If you enjoy making and studying flashcards, then by all means do it. Whatever works. But if you are not enjoying what you are doing – what is the point? In summary while it may take you longer to acquire more vocabulary this way, you will be having fun and the words you do learn will be the ones you need to learn and not be so easily forgotten because you learned them in context. Unfortunately, I have not reached the point yet where I can say whether this also works for non-Romance/Germanic languages such as Arabic, Japanese or Chinese where the lack of short vowels (Arabic) and the use of characters (Chinese/Japanese) does not correspond to the spoken word in the same way. Can you learn Kanji through context? Edited by translator2 on 10 May 2006 at 6:49pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6837 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 12 of 39 10 May 2006 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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translator2- you are the friggin man. Much respect.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6653 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 13 of 39 10 May 2006 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe that this is true. The reading can become the word list itself. It reinforces the words, just like repeating your stack of flashcards, but in a context.
I think the hard part is choosing material where you can at least get the context, and enough so that the reading is enjoyable. I also think what makes this emotionally challenging, and what draws us to word lists and flashcards to begin with, is that we want some quantitative proof that we are indeed learning something. Otherwise, without that stack of evidence, each day feels pretty much like the last. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tomasus Pentaglot Groupie Czech Republic Joined 6828 days ago 54 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Slovak, Czech*, EnglishC1, German, Russian | Message 14 of 39 10 May 2006 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Great posts. Some more quick comments:
- flashcards attract more technically oriented people, that is valid twice that much for software flashcards. See for example research made on Supermemo website. - flashcards are great for exams where you know what you will be tested for, they will help you keep on track and ensure the required retention rate - it is crucial to have a selective process, not just feed your flashcard program with everything. I have heard about people that have tens if not hundreds of thousands items in their flashcard sw (of course not only languages, bunch of subjects). That is an exception. The rule IMHO is to keep the database as small as possible. Return on investment is important, as already mentioned elsewhere. Eg. I mostly input items that I know I will need in the future, and those that don't have like tens of possible meanings - those I believe are better left for context learning. - what is great on software flashcards, they are much easier to develop a routine with than it is for usual learning , especially for people challenged with learning disabilities like ADD, ADHD, or just us regular procrastinators. I am unable to setup a regular learning routine myself, but my computer helps me to do my flashcards each day easily and enjoyably. - flashcards are perfect for a jumpstart into new things. When starting a new language, you can learn the basic 1000-2000 most frequent words very quickly and throw the database away after some time without regret, knowing that you don't need to repeat more as you will be meeting and thus reinforcing the retention of those common words the natural way afterwards. As for time investments. Takes me up to 30 seconds to create one flashcard. Each repetition takes anywhere from 5-15 seconds. Supermemo folks might have better stats, off the top of my head guesstimate is one easy well-formed flashcard item takes 2-3 minutes of our time during its lifetime (10 repetitions). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 6900 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 15 of 39 10 May 2006 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not into flashcards and can't stand that type of repetition. That doesn't mean they wouldn't work, it just isn't my style to stare at an index card with a word on it.
I've been able to pick up a decent amount of words through context alone, however these are usually rather common words. Writing down unknown words in a notebook, looking them up later and reviewing them seems like an easier way to learn all the words you were reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| braveb Senior Member United States languageprograms.blo Joined 6993 days ago 264 posts - 263 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 16 of 39 10 May 2006 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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What I do is seperate the flash cards according to their sources. So far I have Assimil, 200 words a Day, and Linguaphone cards.
Sometimes I find that I make a mistake and have doubles, but it is not very common. I hope that this summer I can add a "Lord of the Rings" series of flashcards. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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