I know this has been discussed many times in many places. I want to mention it here *in light of* some other posts I've made, and because I have a big decision to make about it.
I began by flashcarding everything, characters, words, and sentences, welcoming any redundancy. Then for the sake of consistency I pushed this policy through six volumes, "two years", of my children's textbook series, 3600 cards. While it didn't hurt and I've made great progress, I now *must* decrease the number of cards I'm making (600 per month). Unless I'm overlooking something, I have two choices: 1) smaller: finally accept the "minimum information" principle, learning all bigger chunks outside of mnemosyne. Characters only, my latest text would yield about 250 cards. Characters and words, it would yield about 400 cards. 2) larger: generalize the "whole sentence method" to the "biggest chunks you're comfortable with method". Volume 7 lesson 1 has six poems of 3 or 4 lines each, and a 1/2 page story (the series is transitioning now from all-poetry to mostly stories). I can now (before studying it) *read* this lesson as real poetry and prose, with the exception of the 19 new characters and the words they form. I could make (in the extreme) two cards: "read (aloud) 0701", and "listen to 0701 (verify that you could dictate it)". This policy would yield 16 major-assignment cards for the whole volume. Broken a little smaller, into poems and stories, there would be about 100 cards, each carrying the full context provided for their new characters. (What is lost might be some of the assurance that the character would be recognized with no context, or in a different one.) The heart of this question is this: a sentence, poem or story has "something" that is more than its bits, and the above decision determines whether the something is inside or outside of mnemosyne. As a practical decision, I will probably choose that last option (individual poems and stories), but I haven't really condensed this theory, that your flashcards should gradually test bigger chunks as you learn a language, bringing that "something", the working language, into the flashcard routine. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
