This is an old conversation about language learning, but I feel that my
French has gone up a level in the last 12 months because of 2 tweaks.
I used a pretty good system that works for me for the last 15 years. I
have the English word (my native language) on one side with 3 French
sentences (target language) with gaps on the Front side. If I am having
difficulties, then I will add pictures form Google Images to the
flashcard. I may include synonyms too. On the back, I have the French
word (target language), the international phonetic alphabet symbols to help
with pronunciation, and the complete French sentences. I may include
additional notes.
Here is an example:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FRONT:
to escape winter (to have a break from winter)
1) Chaque année, ils partent dans le Sud pour ...
2) Elle rêve de ... et de passer quelques semaines au soleil.
3) Nous avons décidé de ... en partant aux Caraïbes.
SYN: le froid, partir au soleil
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BACK:
fuir l'hiver
{fɥ.ir} {i/vɛr}
1) Chaque année, ils partent dans le Sud pour fuir l'hiver.
2) Elle rêve de fuir l'hiver et de passer quelques semaines au soleil.
3) Nous avons décidé de fuir l'hiver en partant aux Caraïbes.
Note: "l'hiver" -- "le" is necessary
Note: "échapper à" sounds less natural,
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWO CHANGES
1) The biggest change is that my teacher and my administrative assistant
allow me to *record our conversations on my iPhone*. I then run the audio
through Happy Scribe to get a transcription. Afterwards, I *go through the
transcript and find the areas where I have run into difficulties expressing
my ideas.*
Personalizing the content of the Mnemosyne cards has been a huge help. It
is highly motivating (my insights and what I want to say) and also work
related (with my administrative assistant).
2) The other big change is that ChatGPT can give me sentences for the
flashcards very quickly.
Here is the prompt that I used to start a new "chat" when I wanted to learn
the word for "maggot" in French. (Don't ask!)
----------------------
*Could you give me 5-10 example sentences to help me understand the French
word "asticot"? All French sentences must always include correct accents,
straight apostrophes ('), and English translations. Please include a cheat
sheet with comparisons to similar words. Please identify any common learner
mistakes.*
-------------------------
After this point, I will use these kinds of prompts to generate useful
sentences:
*- Could you give me 10-15 example sentences to help me understand the
difference between "deuil" and "chagrin"? *
*- Could you give me 10-15 example sentences to help me understand the
difference between "rationnel" and "analytique" when describing people?*
Thanks
On Friday, December 1, 2023 at 9:42:39 AM UTC-5 [email protected] wrote:
> I'm also looking into literal translations.
> Phrases (and words) translated to the English meaning without literal word
> for word translation is confusing.
>
> I prefer to "get into the French way of thinking".
>
> Au revoir=Goodbye?
>
> Nope, it's something like "At(till?) see again"...
>
>
> Most lessons don't seem to add the literal translations.
>
> Anyone any tips?
>
>
> Ciao, Max
>
> On Thursday, November 30, 2023 at 2:16:51 PM UTC+1 Peter Bienstman wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The scripts are very tailored to my own personal use case, so it would
>> be a lot of work to make them accessible to anyone, without requiring
>> programming experience by the user, I'm afraid...
>>
>> BTW, small personal update: I recently started learning a new
>> language, and at this level, I do feel again some advantage of going
>> back to flashcards. The 'ideal method', as far as it even exists, also
>> very heavily depends on your language level.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Peter
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 2:12 PM MAX BAX <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > Hoi Peter,
>> >
>> > This is probably exactly what I am looking for.
>> > I just started to use Mnemosyne for learning French and noticed that
>> just single words felt empty. (copy and paste lists of words)
>> > Lots of question marks would pop up in my head, where exactly can i use
>> this word???
>> >
>> > So I thought about adding a few more words just to make it make more
>> sense. (lot of work)
>> > Plus I looked for lists of short phrases.
>> > Today I read more of the documentation and saw the 'sentence' option.
>> > That's also good. (even more than a lot of work?)
>> >
>> > But I would love to see and read more of what you described.
>> > Is it possible that we can see it or even use it?
>> >
>> > Greetings.
>> >
>> > On Saturday, July 1, 2023 at 12:11:16 PM UTC+2 Peter Bienstman 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
>> >
>> > --
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>>
>>
>
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