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Sick and tired of SRS part 2 | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5257 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 33 of 41 21 June 2015 at 5:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Sometimes I'm not worth paying that much attention to. I was waffling on a bit and pretty much stating the obvious. Anyway thanks for dropping by Lusan and good luck with your language learning! PM 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5257 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 34 of 41 21 June 2015 at 6:03am | IP Logged | |||||
As usual emk your logic speaks of logic. All your points make sense. To be honest that link I provided (not sure if I called it reasearch, it was more one language blogger's anecdotal experience on why flashcards are rubbish). I didn't necessarily agree with the guy but at least in part it allowed me to question how I was using flashcards (too heavily, too complicated). He basicall stated that he learns language in context as it applies. If he's in a restaurant in Mexico wanting to order a certain dish but doesn't know the names of some of the items on the menu... he learns them. I find this theory rubbish when I think about it. I mean let's say I want to become excellent at basketball (used to be obsessed with the game)... so I play whenever I come across basketball courts? Whenever I see a ball? Whenever the opportunity arises that someone else wants to play? You have to practise. Okay let's be fair and apply it to languages. Then I only learn new words as they pop up on television, or in my courses, books, speaking, and so on? 1 I'll forget them. 2 it's too messy a style. I think there's got to be a balance in language learning (which i'm not so good at and often shoot myself in the foot here) between intensive language study (analysis of phonetics, single words, dictionary use, SRS, deliberate vocab acquisition- that doesn't bog you down too much... and extensive exposure/learning). There's got to be some logic to my intensive study for me, some routine, some flow, and something to make it stick! In terms of science. I think your arguments are why anyone with a little wisdom takes most research nowadays with a grain of salt. The could've either asked the wrong questions in their research, have a biased for wanting a particular answer, have been funded by invested interests, have biased testing, stand to gain a lot of money, and so on. Yourself being a lover of science I'm sure you're all too aware of such things and as such have demonstrated so in your explanations on language acquisition and research. Once again thank you emk Edited by PeterMollenburg on 21 June 2015 at 6:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5017 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 35 of 41 21 June 2015 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have an entire anki deck in Mandarin where the "front page" is just someone saying a sentence in Mandarin with two (hidden) hints, the characters, then the pinyin. I try to translate the sentence without using the hints. I find this helps my listening comprehension. Also you might want to look into subs2srs where you can drill lines from movies or television with the subtitles in TL & NL. EDIT: Fixed spelling mistake. Edited by rdearman on 21 June 2015 at 12:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4818 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 36 of 41 21 June 2015 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Anki comes in at different points for different purposes. Wisdom is to know what you
want from it and tailor it to that end. For me I use it to learn a smallish set of words in a new language; revise irregular aspects (e.g simple past and past participles of German, noun genders), a small set covering German prepositions where usage is different and a deck of words I discover as I go along, but stressing expressions that are idiomatic and distinct from English. In some cases I want to learn vocab, in others anchor things like idiomatic usage or reduce my error rate with gender and common verb forms. I am not obsessing about getting it right but just hoping that the idiomatic usage is helped to 'stick' and come more naturally (like for example, 'worthy of the name' in German would be rendered using the verb (das den Namen verdient) or in English you make history, in German you write it; things like that. Consequently I go to zero trouble making cards - they are just hooks for a point of attention that increases the probability of using the correct term or recognising it correctly. Things I have learnt about Anki: 1. Advice is to avoid downloading a very big deck - I have done this but I advise doing it under caution and you should already be very good with the language. In this case be very trigger happy with the delete button and delete any words you don't know in L1 for or are never likely to use and .... leaches. 2. If you can't get a word because it is confused with another interfering one solution is simply delete one of the two words, fix one of them in your mind, the other will likely drop into place naturally if you ever meet it in the real world (context will help you). 3. Accept there is forgetting. Forgetting is a normal part of the way our brain works. And you probably didn't forget the things you think you forgot anyway. If you came across them in context you may have been OK. Anki is organising your forgetting - you meet a word as it is dropping out of your memory. A better way of thinking about forgetting is to think of neural connections as weakening. Similarly with recall. It is in your head somewhere but you may not be able immediately to recall something, just because you learned it in anki. So don't despair. I tend to have an 'error' rate with anki of between 10 and 20% and have now accepted this (remember most of the words you really know don't get shown to you....) 4. Part of the point of anki is to develop automaticity when encountering a word a 'meaning' is already there. In no way, shape or form does that mean translating each and every word you come across in the real world, say reading a book. It is in the reading and listening that the word really beds down if it is a word you are likely to come across. My experience is that tying a word down in anki helps me read more fluently rather than the opposite. (This is a separate argument from looking things up which is a whole different area of discussion). 5. In general advice is to delete leaches. I generally don't however and put this down to a quirk of my personality. Put simply the word you are trying to force in isn't going in and the effort you are using to make it go in is by and large wasted. If you come across the word loads and loads in the real world it will stick on its own. If you never come across it again then why waste time and angst forcing it in? (memo to self on this one!!). Downsides of Anki to be aware of: - you may be spending time on words you might be able to ignore altogether in order to be better able to focus on areas of communicative competence - anki tends to be somewhat failure orientated because you're always forgetting words. This tends to pull your attention onto things you are not doing well rather than what you have learned or know. There is nothing you can do about the downsides but being aware of them means you're more likely to keep perspective. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 41 22 June 2015 at 10:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll just add one grievance with much laboratory testing of vocabulary learning: the use of multiple choice tests. Giving people some alternatives including the correct answer means that the researchers effectively test recognition under the best possible conditions (which I would equate with the level you need for extensive reading). The test level I use is that I can produce a sensible translation or explanation - but that is obviously harder to score. Even a machine can score multiple choice test forms so financially challenged (or lazy) test teams favor those, but at the expense of the relevance of their data.
During my research up to the Novi Sad conference last year I found some tests where the researchers had used both methods with the same test group, and the scores were dramatically lower when people had to produce translations/explanations out of the blue. When the task was to learn words from spoken sources the results with the hard criterion were close to nil - which doesn't exclude that you can learn words you meet in relevant situations (provided that you get an explanation right away - or can guess the meaning yourself), but only that a setup where you listen to talking heads in a laboratory won't function. Learning words from written sources functions better. My perrsonal experience is that I may hear the name of, say, a new dinosaurus in a TV program, but unless I write the name OR I get repetitions in later TV programs down I'll forget it. However if I already know the name I'll get my recall reinforced, and with a little luck I'll even be able to use the name of the critter actively. This is exactly why I have been adamant that I learn most of my words through wordlists - those words that aren't reinforced will be forgotten. The same argument applies to SRS systems: they permit you to get a hold on the kind of words you don't hear or read again and again and again and again in your daily life. And how? By making sure you see them again and again and again and again. Edited by Iversen on 22 June 2015 at 10:20am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 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 38 of 41 22 June 2015 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hm, why expect different people to pick up the same words from the same content? Nobody will remember everything, and in a somewhat long text/recording everyone's background will vary, ie the familiar words, the vaguely familiar words, the opaque/unknown words, the associations, the relevancy, their knowledge/understanding of L1 (for example the uncommon French and Latin loans in English). People will understand the same text slightly differently.
Admittedly this doesn't explain the difference directly, but most learners are far more used to learning from reading. If they've done a lot more reading than listening, I don't think the experiment makes sense. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cod2 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4335 days ago 48 posts - 69 votes | Message 39 of 41 22 June 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have updated the post and the link should be working now. There was an extra space. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5257 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 40 of 41 27 June 2015 at 2:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Cod2,
Thanks for the update Cod2, Your conclusions (naturally) are different than mine. @all participants in this thread... Thanks everyone for your input in providing your opinion(s), relating your own methods, or suggesting potential improvements to mine. In the end I walked away (yet again) from complicating the issue and have stuck to a basic deck that uses this principle: Front = clue (usually 'half cloze' cards) Back = answer side 3 = dictionary form (eg infinitive for verbs) and some other details. I am finding more and more that side 1 is entirely French. Side 2 is always French. I don't see much point now for translating the other way. I need to feel more immersed and thus ridding myself of English wherever I can seems to be involving me more in French. I'm unlikely to become a translator and I still believe you can translate (maybe not with 100% accuracy) if you've learned without the crutch of L1 so much. Side 3 as usual includes the dictionary 'standard' form (eg infinitive for a verb), a word class eg nf (noun, feminine) and phonetics with words that are tricker to pronounce. For my clue side (side 1): They are often sentences with a missing word or a few missing words. Sometimes I use a French definition instead with an expected typed response as well with the first letter of the word at the end of the clue (cloze again). With the cloze cards I provide a hint in brackets in French or English, whatever I feel is more appropriate, favouring French in general. And I'll still sometimes just use an English word for my clue, and type the French answer (basically a stock standard L1-L2 translation). I'm still using my old deck for reviewing of all those words I've come across up to creating my new deck. After I've finished reviewing new words (just another 220 to go) I'll go into 'exclude' mode with that deck and systematically exclude as much as I possibly can to minimize my reliance with that deck until some time in the future that deck becomes completely excluded, or perhaps what little remains I transfer to my new deck. Thanks again peoples, peace up PM, for realz 1 person has voted this message useful |
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