To mzatanoskas: I'm very happy to see your post. All of your thoughts are very insightful and I understand everything. In the past, I've tried *as hard as I'm able* to understand and to explain similar ideas.
I don't have much time now. Please just let me say I understand your post, and repeat some things I've posted here before. Briefly stated problem: Doing the standard, "minimum information" flashcards is like memorizing a dictionary. This is very helpful, in Chinese above all, but I get the impression that the information is **not stored in the brain in the place where real words lie ready to be automatically linked into thoughts** (as you suggest above). Use this dictionary, yes, but more work must be done before the words become useable language. Some of this work gets done *incidentally* (as you mention above) while doing the flashcards, but manyfold more must be done, eventually. Looking at this additional work (real reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc), I offer two observations: 1. It seems to me that it is *much harder in nature*, necessarily, than answering flashcards (as riding a bicycle is, initially, harder than reading a book on how to ride a bicycle). 2. Although it is harder, it is *wholesale* work; while doing those four tasks, for example, tens to hundreds to thousands of items get fed into streams of real language. *That* is the necessary practice, facilitated by the internalized dictionary. So the problem is that what the flashcard program is doing for me is somewhere far short of what I thought (as you also seem surprised about above). Some thoughts about a solution: Reinterpret the flashcard program's function, acknowledging that it is just a dictionary. Suppose you've been patient and have done the additional work described above and are "fluent" through lesson n. Now you need to learn some new words to master lesson n+1. The flashcard program 1. ensures that you don't forget the words you needed through lesson n, and 2. minimizes the effort of adding the additional words to your mental dictionary. Although (as I argued above) this is not in itself the additional language of lesson n+1, it is a convenience to use while you're *really* learning lesson n+1. Now *that* sounds like no more and no less that what the flashcarding theoreticians claim. So where are my grounds for complaint and where did I go wrong? I grossly overestimated what the flashcard system was doing for me and forged ahead, by at least 2500 words, past my "fluency", and ended up with what has been for me a millstone around my neck. I'm very happy to "know" a dictionary of 3200 Chinese words, but now I must retain it while real "fluency" hopefully catches up. I would urge beginners to slow down and somehow really, really master lesson n (the real language of the lesson, not just the flashcards) before adding too many more cards. How many more? I'm not sure. Probably 10-100 rather than 100-1000. Attempt at a general solution: Now I'm going to mention something that will happen someday. There is a continuum, not yet handled easily by flashcard programs, and out of their scope some will say, between the minutae of minimum information cards, and larger real-language structures like whole stories, etc. I tried to describe elsewhere a system that would recursively parse whole books down into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words (storing the intermediate chunks), make minimum information flashcards of the smallest bits (characters, words), then as those cards are mastered, would automatically back up the parsing to the sentences constructible from those words and make flashcards of those sentences (perhaps then suspending the word cards). (These larger flashcards would probably call for smaller multipliers when promoted.) Continuing this process, one would work toward the ultimate goal of let's say having the whole book scheduled for a once a year reading. Miss a word, can't understand a sentence, reactivate those cards. (Do this with audio and dialogue too.) So the program would escort one from the bits to the whole language. Does this help you at all, mzatanoskas? -- 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.
