Letting go of SRS (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

Letting go of SRS
Tags: Anki \| Spaced Repetition (SRS)
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4

patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4328 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes

Studies: German

Message 25 of 26

14 August 2014 at 11:49am | IP Logged

montmorency wrote:

There are at least two regular posters here who have reported excellent results with
extensive reading like that.

But I still wonder whether extensive reading in that mode is so effective if the ratio of
unknown words to known ones is too high. I could not define what "too high" would mean
exactly, but when the act of looking up words became so frequent that it became an
irritant.

I guess what "irritant" and "too high" means is subjective and would vary from person to person.

For what it's worth I used Anki to get enough words that I could start reading after about six months of German study (I continued to use Anki for another six months before giving it up).

The first books I read took ages to work through - 10 pages per day max - and were more translation than reading. However, I quickly learnt a lot of words and after a few thousand pages was basically reading not translating.

I would have had an easier time if I had picked even simpler children's books to begin with, but Harry Potter was about as "low" as I wanted to start with.

Even after a year and a half of reading (+16000 pages) there is still plenty of fiction that I find too difficult to read comfortably, so I still need to find books that fit my level and I can read without too many unknown words. It's not clear why some authors seem so much harder than others - for me Murakami is easy, Ian M Banks difficult - presumably a lot of it has to do with pockets of vocabulary that I do or don't possess.

What I find great about ebooks is that they allow you to comfortably tackle books that would be too irritating to read in paper form - so your choice of reading is greatly expand in ebook format.
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slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6470 days ago
1296 posts - 1781 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

Message 26 of 26

14 August 2014 at 12:27pm | IP Logged

montmorency wrote:

Well yes, if you really want or need to read something enough, you will tackle it and
probably finish it with a good pop-up dictionary.

There are at least two regular posters here who have reported excellent results with
extensive reading like that.

But I still wonder whether extensive reading in that mode is so effective if the ratio of
unknown words to known ones is too high. I could not define what "too high" would mean
exactly, but when the act of looking up words became so frequent that it became an
irritant.

If you have a basic knowledge of the language (one hundred most frequent words), you can start reading with a good pop-up dictionary.It depends on the language and how much related is your L2 to your L1. Extensive reading works for me.

If you are English and you are learning Mandarin, I don't know.

1 person has voted this message useful

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