Hi Peter, I've also moved away from trying to memorise vocab etc with flashcards, and noticed the same issue you did with sentence cards (not really understanding the sentence itself, but just remembering it from previous study... in the same way I'll often remember the exact starting tone of the next song in a playlist or CD, but if you asked me to sing it on the street I might not be able to... something about the context of the task). I watched some talks by Stephen Krashen and others who suggested that drilling vocabulary and (especially) grammar rules is primarily a declarative memory task, whereas understanding spoken and written language is primarily a procedural memory task (aka implicit memory), and by focusing too much on the declarative retrieval task you could somehow obstruct or impair procedural learning. I'm not so sure that practicing the declarative memory task of retrieving "atomic" vocabulary facts is actually *detrimental* to the procedural skill of automatically understanding others' speech and constructing your own, but after a few years of studying thousands of Chinese character and sentence flashcards, I realised that even a very basic conversation was extremely difficult and awkward, and that I'd been wasting a lot of my time as you said -- getting good at answering flashcards rather than understanding language.
At that point I started to move toward just watching TV in the target language and having conversations. I still find flashcards handy for getting started with "basic fact" information, but mostly for other topics rather than language learning. Thanks for sharing your insights on this. Oisín On Sat, 1 Jul 2023 at 11:11, Peter Bienstman <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > Not sure if this is interesting to anybody, but I thought I'd share how my > methods for language learning have evolved over the years. > > As you can image, I spent quite a lot of time doing flashcards, amassing > more than 30k of them over more than a decade. However, when I started > hitting 300 daily reps, I realised this was not sustainable anymore. So, > that's why two years ago, in Mnemosyne 2.8, I added a feature to stop > showing cards once they had a certain number of successive successful > reviews. > > That helped getting my workload under control, but after a while I started > to realise that if you're doing a lot of flashcards, you're getting really > good at... doing flashcards... I didn't really feel like the flashcards > improved my actual language abilities a lot. This was even when using > sentence cards, because I would often remember what a sentence meant simply > by reading the first few words. So, reading the rest of the sentence had no > more benefit. > > Rather then using fixed sentences, I then started experimenting with > having different sentences for a word each time. I initially thought of > doing this inside Mnemosyne, but the interface was not a good fit for this, > and grading became kind of meaningless anyway with this approach. So now I > have a bunch of scripts which pull words from a list, using a finite and > fixed sequence of intervals, and then collect sentences from the web > (mostly from Reverso Context, but I even experimented with using ChatGPT > for this). I originally generated an epub ebook from them, but now they are > collected in a webpage, so that I still have the benefit of using > browser-based dictionaries, sound files, shuffling word lists, etc. > > Anyway, over the last year or so, I felt that spending 15 minutes doing > this generated far greater dividends than doing flashcards for 15 minutes. > In hindsight, this should have been obvious: if you want to get good at > something, you should practice exactly that, and not something that's > tangentially related to this... > > Cheers, > > Peter > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mnemosyne-proj-users/c09548b4-3122-4980-b179-07fa1c0bf4efn%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mnemosyne-proj-users/c09548b4-3122-4980-b179-07fa1c0bf4efn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mnemosyne-proj-users/CAO-0pXAcK5VSam0D3abf10JR%3DfeB2Ur8_5mOUoC60Gbfid5OvQ%40mail.gmail.com.
