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Memorization Strategy for classification | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3876 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes  Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 1 of 38 13 January 2014 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Suppose you have to memorize the classification of a bunch of words into 3 separate
random categories, e.g. category "r", category "i", and category "s"; with no logic behind the categorization. What would be memorization strategies for this? Specifically, I am asking for German noun genders. I know about the general rule heuristics, but when these rules do not apply, how do you memorize? My brain tends to tune out der, die, das put in front of the nouns. There must be better ways to memorize. This is more of a memorization strategy question. I was thinking about this yesterday, and it occurred to me that putting der,die, das in front of the nouns may be suboptimal, as the "d" is common to all, making it easier for the brain to tune out the articles. Thus, it might be better to write r-Tisch (and pronounce it in brain as r-Tisch) rather than der Tisch for memorization purposes. The "de" part is just clutter. Edited by Gemuse on 13 January 2014 at 10:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4327 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 38 13 January 2014 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||
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How are you trying to memorize them?
I have had two strategies: A1-B1: lots of words in Anki plus listening (TV/movies). B1> : Lots of reading (books) and listening (TV/movies). For Anki my cards always had the gender and singular and plural forms. To get a card correct I had to say something like "der Tisch, die Tische". I wouldn't learn "r Tisch" or whatever as you'll never hear that in real life. The brain is learning the sound "der" associated with "Tisch" which is real German, not "r" and "Tisch" which doesn't occur. There are patterns for both gender and pluralization, they are not absolute, but it's certainly not random. Once you've memorized a few 1000 cards it should all become clear. :) Edited by patrickwilken on 13 January 2014 at 2:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4803 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 38 13 January 2014 at 10:58am | IP Logged | ||
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1. find some order in the chaos. There are usually some rules applying at least to a part of the mess. There are groups of words with similar structure, ending or meaning that belong to the same gendre, or oppositely to different ones. Notice these things. Notice the differences between these genders and those in languages you already know. It is nearly always possible to invent a net of connexions even in a seemingly chaotic and unrelated pile of data.
2. memorize the words with their gender, like patrick showed 3. A lot of input and exemples. There is no need to wait for B1 with that. Go through all the material and exercises your course (and vocab books and graded readers or anything you are using) offers as long as you are not entirely sure. Listen to all the audio. Get at least "prechewed" input first and get to real input when you are ready. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4327 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 38 13 January 2014 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
Yes. I didn't mention that, but for most of my cards, I had at least one or two sentences using the word I wanted to learn. You'll remember words much easier if you see them in context, and you'll be learning a bit grammar every time you see a sentence. I grabbed sentences/part-sentences, out of dictionaries (as well as converting all the sentences in my textbooks to sentences in Anki, and then any other phrases I came across I wanted to remember). If you have the Collins German-English dictionary for the Kindle you can copy-paste sentences direct into Anki, or the Langenscheidt mono-dictionary has lots of good sentences too (but those you'll have to type in). I was pretty obsessive with Anki for about a year, learning about 8000 cards, doing about an hour revision each day. I think I could have stopped after I started reading books (about six months after I started learning German), but I was a bit scared to lose the vocabulary I had. A more efficient strategy might have been to simply try to learn the 2000-3000 most common words and leave it at that. Now I believe the main use of memorization strategies like Anki is simply to get you to the point where you can start regularly interacting with native materials: reading books and watching movies. Once that happens you'll learn vocabulary and grammar quite naturally. Edited by patrickwilken on 13 January 2014 at 11:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3876 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 5 of 38 13 January 2014 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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At what level were you when you started mining sentences? The dictionaries have sentence
structures I do no understand yet, and also the example sentences contain words I do not know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4327 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 38 13 January 2014 at 11:26am | IP Logged | ||
Day 1. I was taking all the sentences straight out of my textbook after learning each lesson. The textbook also had word lists for each lesson, so I inputted both into Anki as I went along. I didn't attempt to learn a new lesson until I had 'memorized' the current lesson (I put 'memorize' in scare quotes as you never really learn anything fully in Anki, but there is a point where if you put more stuff in than you are learning the number of cards waiting to be learnt increases dramatically). So I did about one lesson a week, by the middle of A2 I stopped using the textbook and simply started reading. I was also watching TV shows from Day 1 as well. Edited by patrickwilken on 13 January 2014 at 11:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 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 7 of 38 13 January 2014 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I have used the bulk method, where I divide a sheet of paper into three parts and then go to a random place in a German dictionary and copy the nouns from there into those three sections. I knew some heuristic rules beforehand (like "all diminutives are neutrum", "most words on -e" are feminine", "most other words are masculine"), but sometimes I'm surprised by the gender of a word, and doing an exercise where only the gender of nouns is in play is supposed to give me a feeling for the gender of nouns in general. Actually I can speak German fairly fluently and have known the language since the 60s, but it is never too late to learn a bit more.
I have done the same exercise with Dutch, but there the situation is simpler because 'Dutch' Dutch only has two genders (apart from the pronouns - which by and large are dictated by biological gender), and a large part of the neutrum words are diminutives. In other words: just learn the remaining neutrum words and you'll be fine. However Flemish apparently has retained three genders so if that's your target then you are in the same situation as with German. But Low German has simplified the case system in the same way as 'Dutch' Dutch - i.e. two real genders and some vestiges of the old system with the pronouns. Most Scandinavian languages have now two genders (apart from the personal pronouns, where the distinctions are based on natural gender), but Icelandic, some Norwegian dialect and old hardcore 'Fynsk' (the old Danish dialect spoken on Fyn) have the complete set of three genders. On the other habnd, most Jutish dialects only have one gender for nouns like Modern English - and that is actually the most economical solution. Edited by Iversen on 13 January 2014 at 11:56am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 38 13 January 2014 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found two things really helped me with French:
1. Get really solid on the patterns and rules of thumb, and the common exceptions. This gave me a nice large base of words where I was certain I knew the gender. 2. Get really solid on all the other gender markers in a sentence: The articles, the adjective endings, and so on. These are actually much simpler to master than the nouns. The idea here is that when I heard a feminine adjective, for example, it should be clearly and unambiguously feminine as far as my brain was concerned. The idea was that I should be able to listen to television, and occasionally do a double-take: "Wait, what? That word's feminine?" That way, merely listening to and reading French will continually chip away at any gender errors that I make. And it works tolerably well: I still make gender errors in French, but more and more, I just know the gender of words without knowing why. I think a lot of people pay too little attention to gender markers on things other than nouns, just allowing them to blur together when they listen. If you're looking for a concrete exercise, occasionally take a passage of audio, and try to infer the gender of as many words as possible by ear, using nothing but the surrounding adjectives and articles. You can do the same thing while reading. And if you can afford the hit to your fluency, try to stop making gender errors when you speak, at least for a while. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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