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When do you add a word to SRS? | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7026 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 6 20 April 2012 at 2:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I've been experimenting with SRS for a few weeks. It's easy to put a lot of unknown words in and become overwhelmed with 50 or more words to learn each day. I prefer short SRS sessions. The question is, when do you add something to SRS?
What I've been doing is several things: 1) Read a book that is very comprehensible. Listen to it if possible. Read it again. This time, there are fewer unknown words, 1 or 2 words per page. Add them. 2) Intensive reading. A very short section may have 5-15 unknown words. Read it more than once. Read it the following day. Note the unknown words in a wordlist. Use Iverson's method of drilling 5 or more words at once. E.G., try to memorize the list. Then test with the whole list. Repeat as many times as necessary. Read the passage again. Review the word list again. If a word is unknown the second day I study the passage after reviewing the vocab twice that day and reading the passage twice that day, add it. 3) Difficult words for whatever reason. Look them up in a Root Dictionary (Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary) and add several related words. 4) Interesting video. Watch all the way through. Watch again. Look up the unknown words. This is doable in Spanish because it is a phonetic language. With 1, 2, and 4, I can review or test my knowledge by reading the passage or book later, listening to the audio, or watching the video. That also brings up the question of when do you quit using some peice of material. It's easy to get bored before you've completed or mastered a work of any length. Do you just move on? I know this is a long post, but I figure you all will understand and have helpful input. Edited by luke on 20 April 2012 at 9:43am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5353 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 6 20 April 2012 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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If you SRS 50 words per day, it may be no fun at all when you're reviewing 6 batches in
parallel a few months from now. :-/ I know that a lot of people do exactly that for Japanese or Chinese, but it might be overkill for your second Romance language or Esperanto, because you can pick up a ton of vocabulary by reading. I try to reserve SRS for the words that I see repeatedly without learning, and I try to limit myself to 10 or 20 cards per day on average, sometimes more in short bursts. Here are a few things I learned the hard way. Your individual needs and preferences may vary! - If you miss a card a few times, suspend it or edit it. If you don't, you'll quickly find yourself reviewing the same 50 miserable, evil cards every few days. Either there's something wrong with those cards, or you're not ready to learn those words right now. Ditch 'em. - You may like cards with context. Instead of staring at a huge stack of words, you could read a whole bunch of interesting, quirky or important sentences. I have a bunch of whitewater kayaking cards, and I grin like an idiot every time they come up ("un esquimautage très fiable"—whoo!). - Once you can comfortably read a good native dictionary (I like Larousse for French), experiment with avoiding your native language on your cards. This helped me break the translation reflex, and improved my real-time listening comprehension. - Cloze deletion cards can be helpful. "Multiple cloze deletion" cards can also be useful for multiword connectors and important fixed expressions. The AJATT site has a whole bunch of articles explaining this idea. - Most importantly, the SRS is a tool. It works for you, not the other way around. Feel free to suspend cards, drop entire decks, add hints when you miss cards—whatever feels helpful. If you get sick of working with a book, of course you should feel to blow it off. Or you can just switch to extensive reading, and only add a tiny handful of words to your deck. Basically, feel free to do anything that seems helpful; it will all work out fine in the end. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4522 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 6 20 April 2012 at 4:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I just want to add in regard to avoiding native language, where possible for things like nouns and adjectives I try to use a picture as the definition rather than a native language word.
Antimoon.com is also worth a look, it is the original AJATT. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7026 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 4 of 6 20 April 2012 at 10:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
All your points are excellent. Some make we want to comment further :)
Two things. This is when I add similar words with the Root Dictionary. I also wonder if I can suspend a card with Mnemosyne. (I have given cards the high 5 rating, which is basically saying "I know this one really well" when it is truly an evil forgetable card. I hadn't seen a "suspend" tip of the day come up yet.
What I've been experimenting with here is reading the sentence from the book. E.G. the "easy" type book in #1. I highlighted the words in the book in the first place. For some of the more difficult words I wrote a translation in the book. Then I sail through the book and read only those sentences that had a highlight. That may turn a section of the book that took 8 hours to read originally into a 30 minute exercise.
I have a native dictionary that I began highlighting the top 5000 words in from a frequency list. This still seems challenging and I've abandoned it for a couple of weeks.
That seems really great for those difficult words. A way to hit them from multiple angles.
Yep. That's what led to this post. I'm not at the point of dropping the SRS routine again, but I could see that coming if I don't hone my approach.
Thanks for all your advice. Very helpful. Edited by luke on 21 April 2012 at 1:38am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7026 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 5 of 6 20 April 2012 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's a good point too. Also, SRS seems to play a different role between an easy language like Spanish and a difficult one like Manadarin. With Spanish, I'm not at all sure that SRS is necessary, but with an exotic language, I imagine it is. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| en.fr.es Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4426 days ago 15 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 6 of 6 20 April 2012 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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All good points I myself use SRS for the bulk of my learning and I suggest learning the
vocab before adding it to your SRS as I feel if I review a word 5 times on a physical flashcard or list in the first day before being tested the next 1, 4, 7, etc. days I always learn vocab in context too apart from VERY specific scientific words or when I am just starting a language and doing intensive basic vocab learning (dog, cat, man, woman, house, garden, etc.) for example Q. The man fell over because his ________ were untied A. shoelaces This for me is the best method I have found so far. Does anyone have any other techniques or tricks for boosting vocab learning? I know there is no magic formula but I feel if I could commit to memory 1000 words in a month it would do a whole lot of good for my French. All good suggestions and have taken on board what has been suggested :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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