nadiatims Wrote:

jcdietz Wrote:How do you develop an ability to talk about the weather other than being wrong and being corrected?

By having listened to and read so much in the target language, that you just know with confidence this is a natural way to say X in this situation.

The whole SRSing sentences thing is way overrated in my opinion. The most important grammar points that dictate how the language functions are demonstrated in every single sentence you'll encounter in the wild, so you don't have to waste time making cards for them. And the more obscure grammar points are for the most part not actually grammar, but rather nuanced vocabulary so these can be learned using simple vocab cards. About the only useful reason I can think of is for occasionally disambiguating certain problem words.

You don't make cards to learn grammar, you make cards to not forget stuff and to reinforce what you've already learned. Next to that I can reduce stress levels as most of what you're seeing is comprehensible, so that's also a reason I use SRS.

I've been enveloped by English all my life and there are still situations where I don't know for certain the grammar I use is correct (like this sentences). I just say it and no one corrects me, because usually they don't know any better themselves.

jcdietz03 Wrote:1. Translation
So how are you supposed to figure out the meaning of an unknown word where you do not have enough vocab and/or grammar to look up the meaning in a monolingual dic?

When one starts to learn a new language, he normally don't starts using a monolingual dictionary. But there comes a point where translation source-to-target language is no longer needed. At that point one just picks the monolingual dictionary off the shelf and looks up what it means - or looking it up on a website. Understand the explanation and you have aquired a good set of new words you could use.

Quote:Anything you do that's non-production necessarily involves flashcards because how do you understand what you don't understand otherwise? Do you "Rikaichan it" (that's one way of avoiding flashcards)? What would you do if you didn't have rikaichan? Even a list of words you don't know (only - no translations) counts as a stack of flashcards. He recommends you do a lot of production. e.g.. email, Lang8, online voice chat, real person chat. This could be good advice, I don't know - question everything including "production is bad."

Flashcards are not the A&O of learning, there are other ways, too. I could not possibly learn grammar, or whole sentences, with flashcards. Sure, SRS has the added benefit of spacing out all the things you want to keep in memory, but:

Why would someone constantly use SRS to learn the same grammar points over and over? The same question applies also for sentences that contain grammar points, or words, you want to learn. If you constantly add new material, you spend more time repeating, than adding new things you could have learned in the meantime. It's just a time killer in the long run.

For learning new vocabulary, yes, that is what i deem a SRS is good for. As for me, I only use SRS for remembering the kanji, and for that it is gold. For all other things, grammar, vocab, i use different methods. Methods that suit my way of learning best. Among those are Mindmaps, well formatted text files, vocab lists, books, to name just a few.

But, everyone has his or her own style of learning, as well as his or her own way of dealing with the material to be learned and remembered. SRS is by no means the only thing anyone should rely on.

Nagareboshi Wrote:Flashcards are not the A&O of learning, there are other ways, too....SRS is by no means the only thing anyone should rely on.

Has anyone said this? If they have... shame on them.

Quote:Why would someone constantly use SRS to learn the same grammar points over and over?

You don't use it to "learn the same grammar point over and over." Intellectual comprehension of grammar is not understanding grammar. Grammar can't be drilled. By using a few variations on a grammar point in an SRS, you can test your understanding of that grammar point across a given interval of time.

Quote:If you constantly add new material, you spend more time repeating, than adding new things you could have learned in the meantime. It's just a time killer in the long run.

We don't learn thing automatically, so the 2-10 seconds it takes to review a card has benefits. Also, you don't have any evidence that suggests that the time taken to review a card is actually detrimental to the time one could spend on new material, so how'd you reach this conclusion? The only time killer, that I know of, is learning material and then forgetting it and having to learn it again.

I'm a fan of any-which-way-up-the-mountain. Let's try to stay away from baseless claims, though. There are enough blogs out there with them.

It's really annoying to watch these bloggers ranting about subjects they clearly don't master. As many people wrote before me, that guy probably just used his SRS to blindly cram word lists or phone numbers or whatever in that line.

I've been using Anki to build, consolidate and retain the knowledge from my ongoing electrical engineering master's degree with great results. It's an invaluable daily tool for me, so that blog is, in my opinion, ludicrous.

Nomad Wrote:It's really annoying to watch these bloggers ranting about subjects they clearly don't master. As many people wrote before me, that guy probably just used his SRS to blindly cram word lists or phone numbers or whatever in that line.

Did you read my blogpost as well? Just that you know not all bloggers are like this ;-).

Hey Ramses, since a friend of a friend used tips on DLing audio from your site, even though your focus is Spanish rather than French, here is something you might like: it's a hypothetical Anki sentence deck, a 'French Core ~2000' similar to smart.fm's collection (made using frequent words), with audio. That's what I heard, I haven't tried it because that might or might not be immoral.

Here's the URL to something that is, um, entirely unrelated: http://sn.im/19i46uty - I know what you're thinking: What an ugly url! What is a snim? Well, maybe you could try replacing 'sn.im' with something less ugly, like tinyurl.com? What would happen? I don't know because that has nothing to do with me.

Not yet, I haven't. I didn't mean in any way that all bloggers share the same opinion, I probably should have said "...to watch *this blooger* ranting...". I'm slowly working my japanese sentences, and I never added isolated words (what for?...), so when I have the time I'll read your blog -- I'm sure I'll find good advice in it.

Just to reiterate my argument in summarized form for the 3000000th time since 2007 or so...

Sentences are the perfect microcosm for learning any linguistic information according to flexible structured strategies, especially for using multimodal integration for maximal robust encoding, and to enhance chunking and retrieval in working memory. In this way the SRS is absolutely superior for both learning and memorizing, i.e. encoding and maintenance, stability and retrievability.

The SRS alongside non-SRS exposure, strategically learning information up front rather than spending exposure to materials trying to parse foreign arrays of information and patterns, is using the spacing effect to maximize memorization, in order to make that form of contextual exposure much less repetitive, much shorter-lived than learning it through repeated non-SRSed encounters. It thus optimizes non-SRSed exposure time by eliminating extraneous learning processes and maximizing contextual usage of SRSed information. And much easier since the cards are designed in conjunction with expository information, you know exactly what they're for, what they represent.

The only argument against SRSing sentences I've seen that we hadn't covered in past arguments was the 'I don't know how to SRS sentences properly so I just rote memorize the most superficial elements of the sentences and thus test the surface aspect of sentence cards and find this really useless, and telling me how to properly SRS sentences will fall on deaf ears because can't I just watch i+1 anime and learn the language??' ;p

That said, I find individual word cards very useful as part of my perfect learning strategy which incorporates the best of every element, structured and unstructured, of language learning. Key to this is also understanding the SRS is just a HUD, having the information on the card doesn't force you to passively, rigidly process that information in a specific way.

A sentence card is a word card if you want it to be, for example. And with the tools we're developing and materials out there, 'time' of constructing these decks is nil and pays off in dividends. Exponentially vs. the absence of SRS. Did I miss anything?

I'm gonna have to agree that SRS just isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure it's great for memorizing stuff, but there's some very big flaws. For example, learning tends to be very isolated, I tend to memorize well only in Anki or whichever program I'm using, and it usually lacks output.

I don't know if anyone else has this phenomenom, but I can get 90% of my answers right on programs like anki, but if I see a Kanji outside of anki, I absolutely blank on what the meaning is, even if the card is mature in my decks.

Isolational learning does suck too. If you are given a word and have no context, then the word really means nothing to you, and this is usually why books, anime and what not can be bad learning materials, as you don't have enough pieces to put the puzzle together. Anime is bad for this as a lot of the time it's talking heads refering to something that is not being seen or interacted with and books likes novels... well if they don't have pictures it can be really easy to get lost.

Flash carding usually doesn't allow you any real output and output can be very important, kind of like people who watch people do something, but can't do it themselves because they never actually do it.

Also I think Japanese -> English learning is a very bad crutch to be using as the languages don't fit and you're forming a habit of translating in your head, or just translating when you shouldn't be.

Just some of my opinions.

J-E arguments aside since that's another oft repeated argument (I've never had problems translating in my head because I'm not memorizing the English definition as an attachment to the Japanese words, I'm using the sense of the definitions and the language context to internalize meanings -- English is a dissolving stitch, not a crutch), I think SRS isn't isolated in the slightest, it's just a piece of software and a principle for superior memorization through the spacing effect. It's on you to keep the SRSed information close to non-SRS input/output, and if you have output issues--which is something we've oft discussed, you might find my previous post on 'comprehensible output' interesting, too lazy to look but that's the keyword. Also, to anyone who has problems using info they learned in Anki outside it, which is a bizarre problem in my mind since it makes no logical sense, all I can say is: Don't test the card, study the information in the card.

Never tried learning isolated words, but pretty much of what you're saying makes perfect sense, nest0r.

KMDES Wrote:I'm gonna have to agree that SRS just isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure it's great for memorizing stuff, but there's some very big flaws. For example, learning tends to be very isolated, I tend to memorize well only in Anki or whichever program I'm using, and it usually lacks output.

I don't know if anyone else has this phenomenom, but I can get 90% of my answers right on programs like anki, but if I see a Kanji outside of anki, I absolutely blank on what the meaning is, even if the card is mature in my decks.

It could feel isolated.
After I see the Kanji but fail to recall what it means, after I look it up, I almost never forget what it means.
As for "output," you can't practice output with flashcards, that's something that's readily accepted. I don't know anyone who uses SRS for output.

Quote:Also I think Japanese -> English learning is a very bad crutch to be using as the languages don't fit and you're forming a habit of translating in your head, or just translating when you shouldn't be.

Repeatedly translating something is bad. But... after a while it just becomes accepted.
For example, we learned multiplication as a series of addition operations. 5 x 3 = 5 + 5 + 5, or 3+3+3+3+3.
Sooner or later, we're doing something like (x+5)*(x+3) and we just readily accept the fact we're doing multiplication. (I don't even know how to write that as addition...)

SRS is great, but it's just a tool to do work. You can have the best hammer in the world, but if you suck at carpentry, that hammer won't make a difference.

Nomad Wrote:Never tried learning isolated words, but pretty much of what you're saying makes perfect sense, nest0r.

Ramble:

I do two types of individual word cards: When I encounter interesting words 'in the wild' I make a note of them and stick them in my 'extemporaneous' deck, and when I take unknown words from subs2srs decks and study them likewise (also using them to activate suspended Core/KO2001 cards for multimodal integration study) because my subs2srs video clip cards (on the front) aren't for words, they're for listening/parsing.

Tangent for Comprehensible Output: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid92735

Also on the idea of how non-SRS/SRS correlate I think Brian MacWhinney on 'resonance' is good: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/CM-gen...nified.pdf (p. 30) - Re: When I was talking about SRS optimizing non-SRS exposure by reducing overhead. I'm big on this streamlining, production line process that Heisig started some of us off with.

I think alot of people never make it out of the 'English is a crutch' stage. One piece of advice I see time and time again on the forums is "Never stop SRSing the RTK1 kanji.' which of course most people do with the Heisig's English keywords, you can't even find a Japanese keyword deck on the anki shared deck list. So instead of actually dissolving the English keywords, a lot of people are just hammering it further into their brains.

As for isolation, I don't know of very many decks that having but words, which is pretty isolated. You're rarely shown any pictures, sounds, emotions or a lot of other depictions that could be used to help learn or memorize. Of course if you're at the point where you can understand most of anything and can use a J dictionary with ease, then those isolative problems don't really make a difference.

KMDES Wrote:As for isolation, I don't know of very many decks that having but words, which is pretty isolated. You're rarely shown any pictures, sounds, emotions or a lot of other depictions that could be used to help learn or memorize.

That's why I often use the exact same sentence I found a particular word or expression in. Heck, I'll even add a screenshot or audio fragment of that exact situation! Now, this is not always possible, but looking up a weird sentence that goes with the word certainly helps. Why do you think Heisig encourages you to come up with weird stories yourself? Because they help!

Nagareboshi Wrote:At that point one just picks the monolingual dictionary off the shelf and looks up what it means - or looking it up on a website.

Speaking of which, I need to get a monolingual dictionary on the proverbial shelf. I heard this one is good: http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4828865144/

KMDES Wrote:I think alot of people never make it out of the 'English is a crutch' stage.

I don't think I need to worry about other people right now. It works for me and it should work for other people.

Quote:As for isolation, I don't know of very many decks that having but words, which is pretty isolated. You're rarely shown any pictures, sounds, emotions or a lot of other depictions that could be used to help learn or memorize. Of course if you're at the point where you can understand most of anything and can use a J dictionary with ease, then those isolative problems don't really make a difference.

You could... you know, make your own decks. If I use sentences from a drama or variety show that I watched or from a manga that I've read, I usually remember the context. I don't necessarily need to see the picture or video to remember where I got it from.

That's what usually ends up happening. I'm rote memorizing KO2001, and when I see a word "in the wild" that I should know based on deck stats, but I can't recall it... after looking it up, I never forget it.

nest0r Wrote:I do two types of individual word cards: When I encounter interesting words 'in the wild' I make a note of them...

It's a good idea, but in your extemporaneous deck you keep only isolated words? How about if you picked those words and find a suitable sentence for each? I believe that could be a more robust approach. What do you think?

I browsed the article whose link you posted, and felt I didn't know enough to understand it. On the other hand, your post on comprehensive output caught my attention, and it's already on my "To read" folder. By the way, I keep this post of yours to this day (never thanked you for that). Great collection!

Ramses (Spanish-Only.com) Wrote:Why do you think Heisig encourages you to come up with weird stories yourself? Because they help!

I totally agree. The more one gets shocked by the stories/images/sounds, the stronger the memory and (maybe?) the higher the retrievability.

KMDES Wrote:I think alot of people never make it out of the 'English is a crutch' stage. One piece of advice I see time and time again on the forums is "Never stop SRSing the RTK1 kanji.' which of course most people do with the Heisig's English keywords, you can't even find a Japanese keyword deck on the anki shared deck list. So instead of actually dissolving the English keywords, a lot of people are just hammering it further into their brains.

As for isolation, I don't know of very many decks that having but words, which is pretty isolated. You're rarely shown any pictures, sounds, emotions or a lot of other depictions that could be used to help learn or memorize. Of course if you're at the point where you can understand most of anything and can use a J dictionary with ease, then those isolative problems don't really make a difference.

Huh? I feel like you're talking about a different forum. Do you not know about Japanese keywords? Or how the SRS stops showing you the kanji as part of the spacing effect? Or how people who suggest you don't keep doing RTK after finishing, like me, stress that that's because you're encountering the same kanji elsewhere? Are you unfamiliar with sound, pictures, keeping things close to context when doing cards in Anki? The discussions about pictures and what types of words they might work best for, snapshots in subs2srs, Core2k's pictures, the JDIC plugin, audio for sentences, text-to-speech, wrightak's rikaichan plugin which snapshots the site URL and sentences that you can use/discard? That's just scratching the surface of the tools and strategies common to this forum which you seem to be unaware of. Which is ironic and unsettling because you're talking as if informed about a group of straw men learners?

The English keywords, if you don't switch to Japanese keywords which is common here, are temporary bridges to the stories. You're not memorizing the keywords, you're memorizing the kanji. They're there if you need them, but as you do the method you internalize the kanji from the bottom up as icons. I think everyone who's finished RTK knows this by now. I'd be surprised if anyone finished RTK found the English keywords somehow slow or obtrusive, and I'd suggest they did something wrong and are a rarity, easily remedied with custom/jp keywords or doing RTK properly. Shrug.

kainzero Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:I think alot of people never make it out of the 'English is a crutch' stage.

I don't think I need to worry about other people right now. It works for me and it should work for other people.

Quote:As for isolation, I don't know of very many decks that having but words, which is pretty isolated. You're rarely shown any pictures, sounds, emotions or a lot of other depictions that could be used to help learn or memorize. Of course if you're at the point where you can understand most of anything and can use a J dictionary with ease, then those isolative problems don't really make a difference.

You could... you know, make your own decks. If I use sentences from a drama or variety show that I watched or from a manga that I've read, I usually remember the context. I don't necessarily need to see the picture or video to remember where I got it from.

That's what usually ends up happening. I'm rote memorizing KO2001, and when I see a word "in the wild" that I should know based on deck stats, but I can't recall it... after looking it up, I never forget it.

Yeah especially if I take a word from someplace as part of an interest-driven extemporaneous process, I never forget the context.

Nomad Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:I do two types of individual word cards: When I encounter interesting words 'in the wild' I make a note of them...

It's a good idea, but in your extemporaneous deck you keep only isolated words? How about if you picked those words and find a suitable sentence for each? I believe that could be a more robust approach. What do you think?

I browsed the article whose link you posted, and felt I didn't know enough to understand it. On the other hand, your post on comprehensive output caught my attention, and it's already on my "To read" folder. By the way, I keep this post of yours to this day (never thanked you for that). Great collection!

Ramses (Spanish-Only.com) Wrote:Why do you think Heisig encourages you to come up with weird stories yourself? Because they help!

I totally agree. The more one gets shocked by the stories/images/sounds, the stronger the memory and (maybe?) the higher the retrievability.

In my extemporaneous deck, I remember the context so it's not a big deal, but I'm also unsuspending sentences with those words in my Core 6k/KO2001 decks, going back to the subs2srs deck (these two things being part of a larger process over time), and not to mention that amidst this process, during reviews, I'm using Stardict when unsure of words, which contains example sentences in the pop-up definitions. But yes, otherwise I might throw in some example sentences in the card itself, just in case I ever wanted to use them. Wrightak's rikaichan plugin I think streamlines this process quite a bit, though I've never used it.

At this point, in the SRS, what I use sentences for, once past the learning-to-deconstruct stage (via Japanese the Manga Way) and seeing how grammar patterns are used (re: 8555 sentence DoJG shared Anki deck, and in that case just grading those patterns as 'words'), is for video clips of limited length for controlled parsing/listening practice mimicking the context which this stuff naturally appears in (for related tangents on listening skill development see posts in the Why Listening Doesn't Work for Me thread Nukemarine created, or whatever it was called edit: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid66247 and http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid66571), and for multimodal integration in Core/KO2001 decks, using the text and native audio for practicing subvocalization and prosody in conjunction with reading and reinforcing contextualized vocabulary, for the most part, while using the opportunity to mix in some muscle memory (and another tangent, keep in mind muscle memory + radical knowledge is more important for kanji recall than stroke order, muscle memory's always useful to continually practice when feeling iffy).

Sorry for the rambles. ;p

As for 'weird' stories: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid86381

There's some research out there on creativity being spurred by 'strange' stories but I forget links.


Edit: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/9/1125

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4017

Don't mind me, just using this opportunity to go over the various ideas I've developed on the forum. It's hard to remember/explain them once you've internalized them (learning makes itself invisible) so I find it useful to periodically externalize again. And now, those links have already reminded me of other ideas and links. (such as http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid94287 but that ties back in to subvocalization)

Droppin' science!

TaylorSan Wrote:Droppin' science!

You know that's right.

Forgot to go off on tangents related to how English is just a dissolving stitch and the importance of being proactive about context. L1/L2 lexical access, the bilingual brain, resonance, etc.

Guess this is good enough: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid92142

Could've sworn had a bunch of other links on the bilingual brain, hmm. Probably just thinking of all that reading brain stuff, re: HBPK thread. Maybe Dehaene as well: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/.../2207.full

Some of those listening links talk about long term working memory and retrieval structures, I think that's a really useful concept when discussing comprehension.

Bonus, combining retrieval structure and distinctiveness: How does knowledge promote memory? The distinctiveness theory of skilled memory

Mentat actually linked us to a good book a while ago that in fact contains a paper by MacWhinney, called the Handbook of Bilingualism: http://books.google.com/books?id=bBtoRJ2ftOgC

nest0r Wrote:Huh? I feel like you're talking about a different forum. Do you not know about Japanese keywords? Or how the SRS stops showing you the kanji as part of the spacing effect? Or how people who suggest you don't keep doing RTK after finishing, like me, stress that that's because you're encountering the same kanji elsewhere? Are you unfamiliar with sound, pictures, keeping things close to context when doing cards in Anki? The discussions about pictures and what types of words they might work best for, snapshots in subs2srs, Core2k's pictures, the JDIC plugin, audio for sentences, text-to-speech, wrightak's rikaichan plugin which snapshots the site URL and sentences that you can use/discard? That's just scratching the surface of the tools and strategies common to this forum which you seem to be unaware of. Which is ironic and unsettling because you're talking as if informed about a group of straw men learners?

You probably should make that into a proper list with links and such.