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Viewpoints on SRS Effectiveness. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5122 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 9 of 25 31 July 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I use an SRS that I made myself, with very simple and easy-to-answer cards, where I type the answer in the target language, and the SRS checks it for me. Takes just 2 seconds per card, and only needs half of my attention so I can listen to the radio at the same time. So, yes, quite boring, but just for a few minutes.
I had some downloaded recognition cards in Anki on my phone, but I found the new words difficult to remember, and the old words were taking me very long to answer. Edited by smallwhite on 31 July 2014 at 9:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4068 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 10 of 25 31 July 2014 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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My problem with his example, is that he's talking about learning Ukrainian after, it sounds like, having already learned Russian. To me SRS isn't useful for acquiring things that would be easy to figure out seeing them in the wild, if a language is similar enough to something you already speak that you could figure it out with native materials, go dive into native materials.
For me, the primary usefulness of SRS, is establishing a beachhead in languages that are completely incomprehensible to you. Typically if I learn something in SRS it sinks very quickly into consolidated long term memory, so my SRS study is supplemental to coursework/native material study, and it somewhat lags behind. Ideally I want to SRS words I've already encountered and have a fuzzy idea of, and SRS quickly consolidates them, to help me have a stronger foundation so I can work quicker in my normal studies. I also think most problems people have with SRS being boring, is because they use boring decks. If you wouldn't find reading the dictionary a fun way of studying, you're probably not going to enjoy an SRS deck that looks like a dictionary either. Recently I've been making SRS decks that alternate between vocabulary and appropriate level sentences with audio and they're radically more effective and fun to use than the old soundless vocab crunchers I tortured myself with when just beginning. These have been so effective that recently I've been starting to use them completely independently of normal course work, for difficult languages I want to put on the backburner but make continual progress in. Edited by YnEoS on 01 August 2014 at 2:40am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mowli Triglot Newbie Norway Joined 4737 days ago 19 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Mandarin | Message 11 of 25 31 July 2014 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I use memrise for Chinese characters. Mostly to make it easier to jump into texts. In Spanish I could just start reading, easily following along with the text even understanding a word here and there. With Chinese I would have been completely lost using this method. I had quite a long time of only learning characters before I started reading and listening at all which made the reading and listening more rewarding for me as I could at least look out for those characters I knew.
For English, which I am quite advanced in, I put sentences with new words into SuperMemo. This is because I seldom meet new words so it doesn't build up to a lot of work. I find sentences more fun than just a word with it's definition. I haven't really got around to any testing in this case, it just shows me the sentences at various intervals and I read it. German I can read with out to much difficulty, but I want to improve my grammar. I have started using clozed captions for this. I read a grammar book and then search for sentences showing the rules I just learned. Then I make clozed captions for all the "interesting" words in the sentences, which means I am usually tested on about 5 different words in each sentence. My reasoning behind this is that I will learn the sentences almost by heart and I hope this will help me in "feeling" what is right when it comes to grammar. I find my sentences from the books I am reading at the time so it is material I find interesting and the reviews are quite fast as it is only a single word I need to remember. So I have never really used SRS like it is "meant to" be used. I will probably stop reviewing the Chinese characters as soon as I can learn mostly from context. The English sentences will probably be continued to be reviewed, but the German ones I am not sure about. I use about 25 minutes on Chinese characters in memrise every day, where I first review and then learn new words. For English I add a sentence or two every week. With German I mostly review each day an add a lot of sentences once or twice a month, as I find it more fun to just read. I use about 25 min with SuperMemo each day but this includes reviews of cards from my field of study so only a small amount of that time is German or English. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5159 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 12 of 25 31 July 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Language is a system of meaning, and the best way to acquire it is through meaningful use. Frankly I don't see the point of using flashcards for languages that are not comparatively rare and starved of suitable, progressive reading materials, where you might be reduced to extreme measures out of sheer necessity. People learn in different ways so if it works for you you shouldn't abandon it, however I am certain in my case at least any time spent with flashcards could be much more profitably invested elsewhere.
Exception is made of those elements in particular languages such as kanji and hanzi that do contain a strong element of rote memorization. Outside of these, I think a semantic approach to language is one that will provide the most comprehensive and robust workout and returns. Learning a language is not a feat of memory, but of acclimatization. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 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 13 of 25 01 August 2014 at 2:48am | IP Logged | ||
I took a break to focus on the previous Super Challenge and never quite picked it back up, tbh. But in general I try to use SRS the way I use the fave button on Twitter or bookmarks. I save cool stuff that I want to see again, even if it's nothing special grammar-wise. My biggest challenge is indeed the need for different strategies depending on the language. Also, I LOVED the tag-based system that I used before Anki 2, and I thought it's really weird that filtering active cards by tag was abandoned because people tend to forget that they have excluded certain tags. Hmm maybe I just need to find an app that can do that for me. I loved the simplicity of choosing the languages/tags for the session, and then ticking the boxes differently for the next session depending on my mood, needs, or simply what I have buzzing in my head after a football match etc. edit: I decided that the 6WC is a good excuse and Anki forced me to get the new version and there's an awkward but acceptable option to do what I used to do much more easily :D Thanks for the inspiration ;) As for the content, my preferred source is Twitter, since tweets are so short. I started this thread ages ago. The front side is nearly always one-two sentences, with or without gaps in them. The answer side can contain anything, I'm not fussy about that (although if I include a translation, I normally translate to Finnish or maybe English, not Russian). One important trick for me is that for sentences with gaps, I don't put only the missing word into the answer field - I paste the whole "correct" sentence and bold the word(s) that were hidden by the gaps. Also, I generally don't have any schedule for adding cards. I get more than enough just by adding whatever I come across (and want to add), and sometimes I might decide to tackle a specific topic and add new cards every day. But even then I don't necessarily start learning them immediately after adding. What else... I'd be bored if I tried to add all Assimil lessons, but I know many do that. Personally I think it's better to just follow the multitrack approach and use parallel texts or pop-up dictionaries. Overlearning is against the idea of Assimil and it mostly makes sense for opaque languages, or if you do only one lesson per week etc. I also think that I used to create new cards when I should've been making my own exercises. Oh and as for languages, I have cards for all of mine apart from English, Ukrainian and oops... Swedish. I also have cards for Indonesian, Norwegian and Esperanto which are not currently on my list. I only revise Norwegian though. On HTLAL, it seems more common to SRS either only the basic words, or only start using it when you're done with Assimil or similar and know enough core vocabulary that what you don't know tends to reappear too seldom for learning it naturally. The main exception is emk, as far as I can tell. This also seems a bit more common in the AJATT world. I also think there's nothing wrong with starting a new deck when you get excited about it, working on it for a few months and then abandoning. Ari does that, and I'm sure he's not the only one either (out of successful learners). It's only a danger if you know you're likely to abandon the project too soon, and maybe spend more time entering cards than actually learning them. Speaking of that, here's an excellent blog post by emk. For me the most important points are: -effective cards don't have to be difficult (or even shouldn't, at least not overwhelmingly tough) -don't aim to "craft perfect cards artisinally" (this might be difficult for perfectionists, especially if you get motivation from sharing your deck too... then just keep it simple and try to stick to the same format from the beginning, I guess? and learning the advanced features may be worthwhile) Edited by Serpent on 01 August 2014 at 3:02am 5 persons have 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 14 of 25 01 August 2014 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Very interesting, Serpent!
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5021 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 25 01 August 2014 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I wrote a post on a very similar topic on Polydog a few days ago about my thoughts on SRS: here it is copied and pasted, with some changes to suit this discussion.
Personally I find that passive acquisition of basic to intermediate vocabulary mostly takes care of itself through exposure and usage. The thing I've found Anki most useful for is "activating" words, expressions, and grammar points (which preposition to use in a certain place, etc.): helping me to use them as opposed to just understand them. For this I tend to use sentence cards with half-word cloze deletions, with a "clue" in English, the target language, or another related language I know - whichever is quickest and most direct. I get the sentences from a mixture of sources: Assimil dialogues, online articles and websites, ebooks (I highlight sentences on Kindle then eventually make cards from them), and example sentences in grammar books. Basically if I come across something that I think would be useful for my active knowledge, I "keep" it. It's certainly not the core of my language learning, it's just an accessory that I spend 5-10 minutes per day on and that I find keeps things moving along nicely. A while ago I hit a big plateau in French because I was trying to just learn extensively with input and conversations, and adding Anki back into the mix was what got me progressing again. Of course, maybe simply more input and/or more conversations would have also had the same effect, but spending a few minutes a day making and reviewing cards is far quicker than spending another hour a day watching TV or reading and far easier than trying to find French people to talk to! I also find it useful for learning the obscure/advanced vocabulary that doesn't come up often enough in "normal" contexts to stick, and I think that especially if you're not in an immersion situation then there's nothing wrong with a bit of "artificial" help... but I think that many learners would benefit more from getting more solid at using the basic/intermediate stuff well rather than trying to learn every last obscure word. I realise it doesn't have to be one extreme or the other and it depends on your goals, but I'm happy to focus on using day-to-day language more effectively at the expense of some fancy vocabulary. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5076 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 16 of 25 01 August 2014 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Everything in moderation. I think GaryB makes some great points. I don't use Anki at all, never have. If I have a word or short phrase I want to remember I'll write it out and say it out loud a few times for a few days repetition. I like GaryB's and emk's use of this tool.
In my four years on the forum, where I see people going wrong with srs is relying too much on it to do all the heavy lifting. It can start out small but can quickly grow into over-dependence. It's a tool. When a learner is working for srs too much, srs won't be working for the learner. These programs can give a false sense of learning- "I now know 1,437 words!". That's nice, what can you do with them? I've seen that quite a few times here in the past. That's just a symptom of a greater problem, which is inherent in relying too much on structure and not enough on learning how to use the language. When a hammer is the primary tool, all the problems are nails. If nails are all you have, how can you build a house? Many tools and materials are needed to build a house besides a hammer and nails. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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