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The Cheating & Consolidating Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6929 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 129 of 136 13 November 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi emk,
thanks for this thread. I actually discovered this thread after I read your blog post on studying one Assimil lesson per week in Ancient Egyptian. I've been re-studying French with Assimil for a couple of weeks by now ( There's a a great shared deck with audio and all the sentences from the exercises). In the early morning I listen to the audio and read through the lesson in the book, and during the day I just do my sentences with Ankidroid. I have set the number of new cards to 10/day which seems like the ideal amount for me to study without stress. Because of this setting (and the fact that I just found the Anki deck last week), I'm basically always getting sentences on anki that I already know. Before I found your post, I had thought about creating reverse cards for the "Assimil active phase". But now, that I've seen the MCD examples, I'd love to give cloze deletion a try. I've studied French before, so I'm more interested in testing myself on the grammar and tricky parts. Could you write more about your workflow? Do you input the sentences and create the cloze deletions in one large batch on the weekend, or is it part of your daily routine? Is it possible to create MCD cards on the fly from your sentence cards? That's the issue that I have right now. It looks as if you can only create cloze deletion cards when the note format is set at cloze note card. Is it possible for me to review my sentence cards (front: French sentence, Back: Translation) everytime I find an interesting card, to simply add this card as a cloze deletion note? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5307 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 130 of 136 13 November 2014 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I find that exaggerating. Learning Spanish after native English and good French is not learning a "brand-new langugage", your English and French are not "nothing", and I'm sure you can dream up even more excessive forms of cheating very soon :D Also from an English and French background, back on my 3rd day of learning Spanish, I only missed the 5 underlined words in this sentence:
I was using advanced textbooks by month 2, and reading Wikipedia smoothly by month 3. I felt I could reach B2/C1 by, what, month 4? But it turned out that the next few months weren't as easy as the first 3. What took the most time was listening. So I think you're on to a good start to approach Spanish from listening.
And again, no, your's is not THE MOST extreme, because mine has to be extremER. I'm cheating with Russian :D I mean to do some sort of experiment, but I haven't yet settled on one good cheat that's both systematic and reproduceable. I'm still just doing micro-cheating here and there, nothing to write on HTLAL about. We'll see. Thanks for all that writing and screenshot you do. - Edited by smallwhite on 13 November 2014 at 3:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 131 of 136 13 November 2014 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I haven't found a good way to create MCD cards on the fly while reviewing, though I agree that would be a very nice idea. I generally wait until I have a couple hours free, and make up a whole bunch of cards—enough to keep me busy for a couple weeks, ideally. For working with native materials in French, I use a custom set of tools which allows me to capture sentences from ebooks and websites, add dictionary definitions and images, make clozes, and do bulk imports into Anki. I'm going to make these tools available to the HTLAL community one of these days. I like working from especially fun or interesting native materials when I can do so easily—Assimil is a wonderful course, but it's more fun to work with quotes from native books or movies as soon as I can figure them out without too much work. A few thoughts on MCDs: - I like larger MCD cards, with more context and multiple clozes that turn into separate cards. Khatzumoto's "official" MCD style is quite good, and it creates a nice quantity of cards for minimal labor. - There's an MCD approach that Khatzumoto recommends that's hard to create with Anki, but that I'd really like to try someday. For example, this would involve creating cloze cards that automatically clozed all Spanish verb endings—one card per ending, which hides all instances of that ending on that card. And the same for articles, prepositions, etc. - The easier the better. I'm especially fond of "half-word clozes", where I only hide half a vocabulary word. Or sometimes I'll make two cards which each hide half. These work surprisingly well, even with horrible Egyptian vocabulary words that consist entirely of consonants. - As long as I fill in the cloze, I count it as a pass. I read the rest of the card as needed for clues, or it seems amusing. - As always, I delete any card which annoys or bores me, or makes me say, "Oh, no, not that card again." I always have far more cards than I need, and deleting annoying cards will rapidly make Anki far more pleasurable. So that's how I do it: I create in bulk, I prefer longer chunks of text, I make several cards from the same source, I make things as easy as I can, I set low standards for passing, and I delete ruthlessly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 132 of 136 13 November 2014 at 3:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, fair enough. I spoke with too much enthusiasm. :-) But I do have another experiment with fewer cognates. It takes a bit more work to learn new vocabulary, and I appreciate the graded nature of Assimil more, but it feels pretty similar overall. Personally, it doesn't really seem to matter why I understand something. Cognates and and parallel text and pictures work equally well. Similarly, inferring from context and looking things up in the dictionary produce similar results if they produce similar understanding. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| blank_frackis Newbie Scotland Joined 6019 days ago 15 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 133 of 136 07 December 2014 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I guess I use a similar method to this, but just on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing I've found the Simpsons is actually a great set of source material for learning French. DVDs are so cheap these days you can buy a whole season (25 episodes or so) for less than 30 euros on Amazon.fr.
I'm not a massive Simpsons fan or anything, but I've found it really useful for a number of reasons. First, the audio is far clearer than using a French film or a regular TV show - everything is pronounced very clearly and there's no background noise. Second, the French subtitles on the DVDs I've used are pretty much completely accurate because obviously the actors are just reading from a script (I've noticed you often get subtitles that can differ quite significantly from what's actually being said, which is a pretty big issue if you're using it to learn a language). Finally the episodes are both short enough and entertaining enough to not make it a chore - whereas realistically watching a whole film, for instance, isn't something you can do every night with your dinner. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5475 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 134 of 136 11 December 2014 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
.... I don't know why, maybe it's the class-clown that isn't funny in me, but I have to point out, this is definitely me. I must say I am managing to progress better than ever now, but in the past I definitely reused the same courses over and over as i'd come back from long periods of doing nothing and restart from the beginning. I know this doesn't come as any astounding revelation that warrants grand attention, but I just feel like sharing.... (I don't think i"ve really gotten used to talking about myself on forums, although I seem quite good at waffling on once I get started). Maybe I should learn to divulge more useful information to others than simply talking back to myself. Oh, i'm very vain indeed.... Anyway... Nowadays I'm certainly still fixated on courses and can't seem to let that go- i'm not willing to actually - i'm willing only to solider through them. My main issue was really procrastination which isn't entirely absent from my study patterns still, but at least now i'm progressing further and not entirely reusing old material (yes still some, it's going I swear... gradually). Can you believe it, I do actually have more advanced courses to come (if I ever get there), and I am actually using native materials now. But if anyone wants to learn something from my waffle - don't buy 750 different courses that you feel you MUST work through. If you're anything like me in that respect, buy materials as you progress, this way you wont feel obliged to use them all and take forever getting to your goals! Mind you C2 is a tough goal, and using multiple courses does have some merits. This forum has helped immensely to teach me the importance of native materials. And emk... your advice and help to other learners like myself on this forum is incredibly valuable, even if with stubborn ones like myself you only make a few inroads on their flawed methods. Thank you emk.. just to clarify this isn't sarcasm, I do appreciate your advice. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 135 of 136 13 July 2015 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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some inspiring posts from Kuji <3
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rozzie Senior Member United States Joined 3411 days ago 136 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 136 of 136 11 August 2015 at 2:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Can you do this method with any language program? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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