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Flashcards vs. Extensive Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Kami_77 Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 3891 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 33 of 39 31 August 2014 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lately, I reached the enlightenment about language learning: you can not master a
language. There will always be words, idioms and expressions that you did not know, no matter how long and methodically you have been studying. This is something that every polyglot must accept and deal with in the first place. You can not be perfect. Studying with flashcards is related to this kind of perfectionism. That demanding need of storing and testing our knowledge about the language. Keeping track of our improvement in a systematic way etc... Edited by Kami_77 on 31 August 2014 at 2:03pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5104 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 34 of 39 31 August 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
It is exactly because I know I can't learn all words in my L2, that I use flashcards. If I had wanted to learn all words, I'd simply study off a dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Enrico Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 3541 days ago 162 posts - 207 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Italian, Spanish, French | Message 35 of 39 31 August 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
I prefer to learn vocabulary from reading. For looking up unknown words on web pages I use Apple pop-up dictionary and for reading books I use Kindle with built-in dictionary. I have tried SuperMemo and Anki for several month but it was not too helpful for me and at the same time it was too boring so I gave them up. Edited by Enrico on 01 September 2014 at 6:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6499 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 36 of 39 01 September 2014 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't use flashcards, but three-column wordlists, and most of the words on those lists come from texts I have studied intensively. And sometimes I get tired of looking words up all over my dictionaries and I just run through a few pages where I select maybe 100-200 words and put them into wordlists to learn them like a farmer harvest his fields. Learning words from texts is generally less satisfying to me because I prefer autoritative standardized definitions and translations rather than my own loose guesses - and besides it takes time before I can read native materials without looking words up all the time. But once that level is reached and I can start to have fun with native texts and speech I do read voraciously - and watch TV and travel in relevant countries whenever it is possible. And then the amount of intensive text study and wordlist use will of course diminish drastically. Edited by Iversen on 02 September 2014 at 10:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 37 of 39 01 September 2014 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
What sort of dictionary do you like to start with? A student's bilingual dictionary, or something different? Once you've made it through your dictionary intensive word study, do you have an estimate of how many words you're familiar with? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 38 of 39 01 September 2014 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Flashcards when I can't do even more extensive reading 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6499 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 39 of 39 02 September 2014 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
This may be veering out along a tangent, but... Maybe I should first mention that wholesale dictionary projects where I go through a dictionary from A to Z (or whatever it is in a given alphabet) is a rare and time consuming activity which I normally only do with languages I have studied for quite some time, and where I feel it would be nice to fill out some holes. On the other hand I don't do it for languages which I feel I already master at a reasonable level. The only exception to this has so far been Serbian, where I have tried to quantify the efficiency of my wordlist layout. And based on this mini-study I can at least give an answer to the last question. When I made wordcounts (using a 12000 word dictionary) for a section of the alphabet where I hadn't just made wordlists my results would hover around a third known words. Within a day or two after I had done wordlists for a given letter that rate would rise to around two thirds of the words in the dictionary - that is: including words I hadn't even used in the wordlists (I had used around a third of the words in the dictionary). I have just reached the end of the alphabet, and I intend to do a wordcount later in September to see how much my vocabulary size has changed. A rise (which of course is what I expect to see) would not be the result of wordlist studies alone as I also continue to read and watch TV in Serbian and Croatian, but given the the very marked difference at the short range it would be strange if doing wordlists hadn't had an effect. I know that I found it much easier to read Greek and Russian texts after similar 'dictionary campaigns' in those languages, but I didn't do any statistics to check it out. Please translate that into flashcards/Anki/goldlists for those who use those methods. As for the choice of dictionaries my firm conviction is that monolingual dictionaries are worthless bordering on harmful for beginners, and that more encyclopedialike formats would work better for advanced learners and native speakers than mere dictionaries. At home I have two monolingual Danish dictionaries: "Retskrivningsordbogen" with correct spellings and minimal morphological informations, and "Nudansk ordbog" which also has etymologies and expressions. I only use the latter. I do own things like "Le petit Robert" & "Micro Robert" in French and "Garzanti" in Italian, but in practice I use bilingual dictionaries because I generally find the translations more informative than some short and vague verbal circumlocution in the base language of the dictionary. If the circumlocutions were extended into real encyclopedic articles the situation might change, but then the book would stop being a dictionary: it would have become an encyclopedia. And I do like encyclopedias. My preferred dictionaries have around 30.000-60.000 headwords (or lexemes). If they have more words I might use them once in a while, but they wouldn't be handy when I'm sitting in my armchair with some papers or another book. If they are smaller then they most likely lack a lot of words and probably also have cut down on the morphological information and examples. To witness: I have noticed that my two Serbian dictionaries have a fairly low overlap. They have 12.000 and 8.000 words respectively, and the low overlap is a sign that neither is comprehensive enough. And in practice I often have to check with my somewhat larger Croatian dictionaries when none of my Serbian dictionaries can cope with an unknown word in a text. On the other hand dictionaries are different, and I have often wondered how it could be that most words I looked up in my Tuttle Indonesian dictionary were found there - and amply illustrated with related words. But it is not bigger than the two Serbian dictionaries which often leave me without an answer. How come? Some authors of tiny dictionaries just seem to have a knack for choosing the right headwords. Others don't. The worst case of this kind was a Danish-Latin dictionary from Gyldendal which almost never had the Danish words which I searched for when I wanted to write something in Latin. In contrast I once bought a English<->Latin dictionary ('Cambridge') in Manila which seems to have been conceived precisely with people like me in mind: when I want to write about something I generally find the things I'm looking for, as if the authors first of all had sat down to ask themselves the obvious question: why would anyone want an English -> Latin dictionary? Well, then give them the English words and phrases they might want to look up and find ways to express those things. The people who made the Danish -> Latin failure based themselves on an older dictionary, which apparently was based on the the premise that only words and formulations used as translations in the Latin -> Danish dictionaries were relevant. And that is a totally idiotic way of doing things when you consider how different the world is today from the one Cicero and Caesar inhabited two thousand years ago. Edited by Iversen on 02 September 2014 at 11:21am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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