Thanks for the replies querido and gwern! I feel that I kind of agree with all the insights in your comments above.
I know nothing of the theory of SRS and memory aquisition, but I feel that what we're talking about is a tension between the origins (I presume) of SRS as a simple memory retention aid, and how far we can push it to give us a complete knowledge and skill training software that can teach us anything with maximum effectiveness. It is interesting to hear how different people are approaching this. As far as language is concerned, I've done a number of approaches so far. For the language I am learning from scratch, Russian, I started using picture question cards from Rosetta stone and audio + written answers. I quickly had to adapt that because pictures are not clear enough and so added english translations to the questions. I also found vocab lists with audio and did the classic question english word = answer russian equivalent. I quickly stopped this though when I realised that just learning these words in isolation was boring, unsatisfying and frankly not very useful. After a while I also felt the Rosetta course was really not my thing, (I don't think the whole not a single grammatical explanation approach is a time effective way of teaching languages well Russian anyway for adults). I started using the Princeton Russian course available online. This is a classic grammar heavy approach and I added all the sentences for each lesson as the question in English and the translation in Russian as the answer. I've been carrying on with this for quite a few months now. The problem with this approach was 1), at the pace of 1 lesson a day, I was adding 40 or so difficult flashcards a day and although every morning my brain gets a might translation work out, it felt like I was spending too much time in English, and well translating/memorising sentences is still very different to the feel of speaking a new language. All the time I've had my worries about the "naturalness" and the applicability of these flashcards to the actual act of speaking a new language, as I never touched a flashcard before in my life to learn the other languages that I speak. One step I did which helps a lot I think was to make sure I wasn't treating flashcard retention as the goal during a revising session. In other words when dealing with vocab lists, I would make sure that if the flashcard for book came up, I would answer it and make sure it was correct, but then take the opportunity to look around my room, pretend I was Russian and spot all the books in the shelf, and loudly call out, "ah, a book!" Even though I could only say one word at a time, if you try really hard, and have a good imagination, you "feel" more Russian immediately and you "own" the word much more this way! (at least I did). Whenever I go to the kitchen for a break or something, I make sure I name everything I see in sight too. For sentences it's the same thing, but I stick myself in an instant role play situation. "The cup is on the table." I make sure I get the answer right first, and then turn away from the computer and imagine a beautiful Russian girl is asking me where her cup is, a angry Russian hoodlum is shouting at me to get his cup, a worried old man is looking for the cup his grandfather made him etc... all sorts of ridiculous situations which I answer with the sentence with varying degrees of emotion and accent! It's all very crazy when you're doing it on your own in your room, but for me it's the essential link that makes these sentences mine, and part of my new language ability rather than just being a flashcard answer in my "memory bank" as such. Recently because of the amount of time spent on these sentences in English, I've been thinking of other ways to make flashcards. What I'm doing now is cutting up the dialogues, and all the other audio in Russian I have for each lesson in the Princeton course. And simply putting these into both the question and the answer sections. If I have the written transcripts in Russian I'll put these in the answers too. I listen to the question, repeat it and the check I repeated correctly with the answer, and then do my little role play rigmarole too when I have time. This way I'm getting much more listening practice of Russian, much less translation practice (which is fine as I don't want to be a translator), it's easier on the brain and takes less time too. The only problems so far with this method, 1) it seems to sometime crash Mnemosyne !! (see my other thread!) 2) I'm not sure how well it works to get that understanding into practice. Ie although I can repeat the sentence effectively how well will this help me to use the sentence/vocabulary actively later? Well I'll give a few months and see. Well if I'm not careful this is going to turn into another humdinger of post which noone will want to read. Just a few comments on the more "classic" flashcard formulation that you suggested Gwern: basically as I as I understood your post, I've come to a very similar conclusion to you. That for "one" piece of information, (and I don't mean one sentence that contains multiple bits of information), you actually need lots of flashcards, from all sorts of angles to help prevent that flashcard from just becoming a "word" remembered in context. But I'm still not sure quite how easy it is to remove the context from the flashcard, I didn't quite understand the foobar example. Also as it is it takes me ages to formulate flashcards anyway, I'm wondering if it's not more time efficient to make actually "wrong" flashcards, ie vague and not simple like suggested by Supermemo, and then work your brain a bit harder to think and understand at reviewing time. Re your multiplication idea, I actually had exactly the same idea (honest!) when I started using mnemosyne, I was in a self-improvement binge and was practicing mental arithmetic on other sites too. However my doubt was that the algorithm in mnemosyne was not designed to do this, and that the skill of mental arithmetic is very different from memorisation. There may be some memorisation at the basic times table level, but that should be dealt with as normal flashcards, ie however well you remember the answer to 9*2=18, doesn't help you remember the answer 4*5=20. Rather than try and make mnemosyne, the one stop shop for all my cerebral activity, it was just easier and made more sense, for now at least, just to dedicate 15 minutes a day to mental arithmetic and leave it at that. Final problem for the day: the amount of time thinking and preparing and wondering about learning stuff, and the amount of time actually doing it!! Especially with the net, I find it oh too easy to spend all the time i wanted to spend on a learning a new lesson, on investigating new ways of learning, new resources, formatting new and funky flashcards etc! I guess it's always a matter of balance. -- 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.
