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Viewpoints on SRS Effectiveness. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5050 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 25 31 July 2014 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've just watched a video by Steve Kaufmann (owner of Linq) on YouTube. Steve has an interesting take on SRS which is to say he doesn't use them.
Steve Kaufmann & SRS Personally I'm not a big fan of flashcards but I do use them. I've even researched them sufficiently to publish a pamphlet on how to best create/use them (PM or google for the link). My problem with flashcards is I find them boring. Don't get me wrong, I have been using decks in Anki to help me to recall the top 3000 most common words in French, which is reenforcing the words as I see them in another context (reading or watching films in the Super Challenge). I do use them, I just don't like them much. When I start learning Hanzi (mandarin) next month I plan to create my own decks of Hanzi characters to remember with sound and characters, pinyin, and hopefully some pictures. Lately in both French & Italian, I've taken to just opening a monolingual dictionary up, pick a word, read the definition, then lookup any word I don't understand in the same monolingual dictionary. So using French, to teach me French, basically. After all if I don't know a word in English, I look it up and read the definition. But I don't load these into a SRS. So the questions I'd to open for general discussion are: 1) I find flashcards a boring but effective method of remembering things. But how can someone like me, or Steve Kaufmann make SRS less of a "time-sink", less boring, and basically get more from the 15-20 minutes a day I can dedicate to it? 2) I understand lots of people use a sentence and close deletion for flashcards, but is this anymore effective than my basic most common words method? 3) Are you a flashcard addict, or hater? Why? 4) Is is better to have only one deck to study? Do you use 2 or more at a time? 5) How do you harvest your cards? 6) Do you prefer images -> words? word->translation? I realise that there are as many ways to use Anki (SRS) as there are people, but what is the best practice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4048 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 2 of 25 31 July 2014 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find Anki boring. I use Memrise courses instead. There are plenty of methods to organize a course, I use the simplest one - a word, its translation and meme (image), reviewing things in test questions first and in writing afterwards. You can try some completed course just to see for yourself and then make your own course. I think I will just have to do this for myself sometime soon, hehe.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6411 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 3 of 25 31 July 2014 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sentences and cloze deletion are more fun for me. This alone makes them more effective than starting a single-word deck and then abandoning it. And of course they show more context.
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| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5050 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 25 31 July 2014 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||
Serpent, you're learning a lot of languages (12+) and your perspective is very interesting for me. Even with an increment rate of 10 per day, if you were doing all your languages in SRS, then you'd be spending a lot of time using it. In the video link I provided earlier Steve K is estimating he would be putting in 140 per day, so this equates to 14 minutes of time, and because these are spaced repetition systems, the cards repeat. You could be looking at 1-2 hours per day per language at some point? So when you use SRS and cloze deletion are you doing it for specific languages? For example in the beginner phase? Or do you do SRS for all your languages? What sort of time are you dedicating to this type of study? Where do you find SRS most helpful? At the start when you need to jumpstart your vocabulary and inject 2000+ common words? Do you do it consistently for the entire time you study a language, A1-C2? Do you use it with all the languages you are learning? Do you use it in conjunction with a course, for example loading all the Assimil lessons into it? And how to you keep yourself from getting bored and abandoning it? It did occur to me that use of cloze deletion and longer sentences could cut down the number of cards from 140 words (and 140 word cards) to ~10 cards of ~14 words (best case) but this still doesn't stop the repetitions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4163 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 25 31 July 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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1. To make my Anki time (which at the moment equals about 90% of my study time...) more
bearable, I do Anki while listening to music. There are so many full albums on YouTube, hours- long compilations (search for "epic choir" and Anki shan't be boring anymore :) ), etc. I tried doing Anki while watching TV, but it made me lose focus. Music is just fine though, even with vocals in comprehensible languages. And to make it take less time, limit the time you spend on... each card. I used to take 19.8s per card. Now it's about 5s (less on PC, but it's sometimes more pleasant to do it on my smartphone outside). 2. Personally, I don't like the idea of any hints - such as context - on my cards. Firstly, I could end up remembering the sentence, and not the word; and secondly, I could see the word in a different context and not recall its meaning. So I prefer to be sure I'll recall it regardless of the context. But to each their own... 3. Well, considering that most of my study time is Anki... I guess I'm an addict. It's just so effective. I've actually done some calculations. I "learn" about 60 words per hour of Anki. According to the Supermemo website, one remembers about 90% of their deck, so I guess that's more like 54 words/h. I just don't think you could learn as quickly through exposure or immersion. And yes, I know, that having a word in your deck doesn't necessarily guarantee a particularly deep understanding of the word, which can be achieved only(?) through extensive reading or listening; but to read native content, you'd need A LOT of dictionary look-ups at first. Anki allows you to develop a sort of pop-up dictionary in your mind. 4. I have one per type of information. One for Japanese Vocabulary (recognition), one for Japanese Kanji (handwritten production), one for Mandarin vocabulary (recognition), one for Japanese Grammar (recognition)... 5. Could you rephrase this question, please? 6. I don't really use images in my decks. I find I don't really translate to English (or any other language) when reading or listening anyway. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 31 July 2014 at 8:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5147 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 25 31 July 2014 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I used SRSing single words effective for Chinese, but when I tried for Persian, though, it just did not work. My recalling rate was terrible. When I switched to example sentences, instead of just the word, it was mind-blowing, the recalling rate was much higher, the extra context works as a memory peg from which I just can't fail to recall the meaning of the word, and, for some reason I fail to grasp, even pronunciation is a lot easier to recall. I suddenly started to pick up in listening all the words in my deck. I currently am working with two sentence decks, one which I reap form a corpus of movie subtitles, and another with images taken from comic books, which I save as I go reading, as I have recently expounded in a recent thread. I have done single words for years, but I don't think I'm ever doing it again.
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| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5050 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 7 of 25 31 July 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | ||
I was trying to ask how you find material to put into a deck. So harvesting words for phrases which will go into your deck. Do you take words from frequency lists, or sentences from magazines or film transcripts. Do you use "subtitles to SRS" to convert films into Decks. Of course I'm also speaking generally, although I use Anki (and you) others use different SRS some even use actual paper! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3958 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 8 of 25 31 July 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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1) How can someone make SRS less of a "time-sink", less boring, and basically get more from the 15-20 minutes
a day I can dedicate to it? I keep my anki decks for each language under 15 minutes (ideally around 10 minutes if I can). If I start having too many reps, I'll stop learning new cards for a few days until things become manageable again. Because anki is a small part of my daily study, I don't particularly notice whether or not it's boring. I mostly do reps on my phone, a few minutes at a time, using dead time throughout the day. 2) I understand lots of people use a sentence and close deletion for flashcards, but is this anymore effective than my basic most common words method? I haven't tried cloze deletion yet. I'd like to try it someday, but right now I can't be bothered to research and figure out how, exactly, to make cloze deletion cards. 3) Are you a flashcard addict, or hater? Why? Neither addict nor hater. I like to understand and speak, and to do that I find that it helps to review vocabulary. Anki is the best way that I know to do this. But anki is a tool to support what I really want to do: talk and read and listen. I would never let anki become the cornerstone of my learning. 4) Is is better to have only one deck to study? Do you use 2 or more at a time? I have multiple decks. In Spanish, I have a basic vocabulary deck (words, L1->L2) and a grammar/verb deck (sentences, L1->L2). I haven't been adding very many new words lately, and my decks are pretty mature, so it usually takes me about 6 minutes to get through them right now. When I do add new words, I tend to do a bunch at a time, and then I'll just set the new card limit at 5 per day to spread them out. In Tagalog, I have a basic vocabulary deck (words and sentences, L1->L2), an images-only deck (picture->L2) and a conversation deck (questions on one side, answer prompts on the other). I had an audio deck (audio on the front, transcript on the back), but I've stopped adding to it because I haven't yet figured out audacity, and the English intros to each dialogue were really annoying. 5) How do you harvest your cards? From everywhere: courses/dialogues/lessons, Skype conversations, texts, articles. I don't generally harvest from TV shows, podcasts or novels, because I prefer to listen/read extensively. 6) Do you prefer images -> words? word->translation? Depends on my purpose. See answer 4). While I enjoy using images, lots of abstract words don't lend themselves well to images. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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