|
 |
How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4839 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes  Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 9 of 350 20 April 2015 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Right. I didn't mean to imply that you said it was all answering cards. So according to my calculation, you would be able to get through (2.7*60)/(2 minutes to make cards + 0.5 minutes to learn a card) = 65 words per day. That seems reasonable.
I don't mean to be pessimistic. I said I think your method works for you, and I described how my methods, which work for me, are different. I don't suggest at all that you failed to achieve your goals of 10,000 words in 500 days using this method. I am skeptical of a suggestion that it took only 8000*0.5 = 4000 minutes if that figure is derived from 2 seconds per SRS review. When I did SRS, I was not able to do a review every 2 seconds. I do believe that you can.
I was referring to the 2.7 hours figure, not the 8 minutes. Doing this kind of drilling for 8 minutes should be easy. If you can spend 2.7 hours per day looking up words, making and doing SRS cards, then I'm impressed. I don't think I could do that. But you don't need that much time to achieve your long-term goals, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Is that in ~8 minutes per day in those languages? Or is it 8 minutes of reviewing cards plus the time it takes to make the cards? Either way, that's not bad at all.
Agree on the multiple sessions. I'd still be interested to see scientific research on the differences in results using different strategies.
I wholeheartedly support any vocabulary study that has a net positive effect on the amount of reading you do by getting you reading better sooner. Other methods do allow learners like me to learn vocabulary and read books soonish, though. Of course one must learn vocabulary. The question is whether reading and not doing target vocabulary study is one effective way to get there. I think it is. I think I learn a good number of words per hour when doing level-appropriate reading.
If you can do that, then you get about one fluently-spoken-language-worth of vocabulary per year. If that can be sustained in the long term, it would be really exciting. Do you have, or would you write, a guide for how it's done? Or is it just regular standard dictionary + Anki? Edited by robarb on 20 April 2015 at 3:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3322 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 10 of 350 20 April 2015 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
After I finish a textbook completely, I add the words from my vocabulary lists for that book into my study deck, but I keep most of the words "disabled". For example, when I was in the beginning of my French textbook, I wrote down the following entries for some words in my notebook such as
je suis student vous êtes professeur After finishing the textbook, it's pretty clear that the above words don't need any additional effort to learn. I went ahead and added them to my deck for reference and to track the total, but they are in a clearly marked "disabled" category so that they never appear during normal study, but I can look them up if I wanted to reference something. Depending on your experience, I suspect at least 70-75% of the words that you learn will belong to this category. Save the flashcards for the 25-30% of words that didn't stick for whatever reason. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6985 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 350 20 April 2015 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I think the easiness of cards, or my readiness to learn them is an important part of SRS. If I recall correctly,
smallwhite also adds the easiest words. Hard words make SRS drudgery, unless I only add a tiny number at a time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 12 of 350 20 April 2015 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You misunderstood some numbers, and you took some things that I gave as examples as the whole. I'll just rewrite. 1. The SRS that I use does not involve flipping cards, which is slow. Mine lists out all the questions along a column in Excel, and I type the anwer along the next column. Qu1 Ans1 Qu2 Ans2 Qu3 Qu4 Qu5 It's much faster because you don't wait for the cards to flip over, and as you type an answer, you can already read the next question. Takes 2 seconds per word. Memrise takes 6 seconds because of all the fancy displays. Let's say you average 4 seconds - answering a card, that is. 2. With Memrise, you answer a card 15 times over the course of a year. So, for each word, it takes 4 seconds x 15 answers = 60 seconds to answer, over 365 days. [[** It does NOT mean I spend 60 seconds answering a word each day. This is a per-word figure, not a per-day figure. **]] Learn 1 word? Spend 60 seconds over 365 days answering card. Learn 8000 words? Spend 480,000 seconds over 365 days, which is 21.92 minutes per day, over 365 days answering cards. 3. One of the ways I get words into SRS is by reading novels, extracting unknown words, looking them up, sometimes googling for an image to clarify things, and entering them into my Excel file (note where this process ends - my Excel file). That takes 2 minutes per word on average. ie. After 1 hour at the computer, I have 30 new words in my Excel file. 4. If I use my Excel file to do SRS, I can start SRSing right after step 3 above. If I use Memrise instead, I need to export words from Excel to Memrise. This can take forever because Memrise isn't very well designed. 5. The 2.7 hours I spent per day during the last 6WC included: * Extracting average 21.9 words per day (920 words over 42 days of the 6WC) * Answering cards. Note that I don't answer just these 21.9 cards, but also cards from previous months. * Answering cards from ready-made Memrise decks. * Looking for ready-made Memrise decks to learn. * Fighting with Memrise's bugs. * OTHER vocabulary-related activities. Note that I don't just SRS my own words. I also take advantage of ready-made decks, which save time. But I don't count these towards my goal of 10000 words. So I actually learn more that my goal. 6. The original reason I wrote about my stats was to answer OP's question. How much vocabulary-study time is right? For me, with the goal of learning 10,000 words, 8,000 of which I SRS, the time I spend answering cards would be: ( 4 seconds x 15 times x 8000 words ) / 365 days = 21.9 minutes per day answering cards Little further time needed if I download ready-made card decks. 2 minutes per word further time needed if I extract words from novels. More time needed to fight bugs if I decide to use Memrise. Less if I use a better SRS. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 13 of 350 20 April 2015 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I wrote about learning the 7972 German words here: When is word frequency irrelevant? I wrote over several posts so you may have to skim through the whole thread to locate the relevant posts. (I suddenly realised that the method mentioned in the link above is intrinsically leech-free. We all know that leeches waste a lot of time. So it's a method that guarantees cards to be easy and leech-free. Like a dream ^^ ) In my Spanish Excel file as at 14-Feb-2013, for example, 6173 words were being SRS'd, and 915 words were waiting to be learned. Answering cards itself takes just 21.9 minutes a day. (11.5 mins if I use my Excel file to SRS). What really takes time is sourcing words. Extracting words myself from novels and news would be best, but it takes the most time (2 minutes per word). Using ready-made decks is fastest. Copying word lists from language-teaching websites (eg. About.com) or frequency lists from Wiktionary is quite fast. I use the fastest method(s) until they don't work for me anymore, eg. until similar words get too confusing, until a simple English translation is not enough, until the words are far too irrelevant for me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| shachak Newbie Albania Joined 3925 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English | Message 14 of 350 20 April 2015 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
smallwhite how do you use your excel file as an SRS?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 15 of 350 20 April 2015 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You mean scheduling dates? That's semi-manual. Each row is one word (one card) and one cell contains the date I last answered this card, with another cell containing the due date for next time. So, before I answer a card that was due today (Apr20), it looks like this: noir ... black ... adjective ... Apr15 ... Apr20 (last answered Apr15, due Apr20) (interval 5 days) After answering it today, I copy-n-paste formulas into the row, to make it look like this: noir ... black ... adjective ... Apr20 ... Apr30 (last answered Apr20, due Apr30) (interval now 10 days) I think that's just the same as what Anki etc do, just that they do it behind the scenes and I do it right before my eyes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4839 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 16 of 350 20 April 2015 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Thanks smallwhite! I think we've gotten a much clearer idea of what exactly you do and about how long the
different parts take. When I multiplied out the numbers you gave I didn't mean that I think that applies to you. It's just a thing in the abstract, a how-long-would-it-take-to-run-across-the-US-if-I-do-a-10-min ute-mile kind of thing. I think it's useful to think about how those things compare to real, long-term results that you've described for us. Unfortunately it's too hard to estimate how much vocabulary I acquire from reading without SRS, so I don't think we can know exactly how much my lack of enthusiasm for it is slowing me. But in the long term I do seem to have learned a lot of words, somehow. I would guess that a really optimal solution would be to use some SRS but vary the amount depending on whether the conditions are favorable for you retaining words from just reading or not--since that will determine the relative benefit of SRS. We may not have a good way to measure that, but as a rough guide, if the words seem to be sticking, you might not need (as much) SRS. If the words are not sticking, you should do more SRS. Edited by robarb on 20 April 2015 at 6:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
