Article over at Wired:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/eve...-learning/

Interview with Robert Bjork at UCLA. The article is pretty sparse on content, but its nice light reading on studying and learning that maybe some people might be able to take a few tidbits from.

Two interesting points to take from this article:
1. Use SRS - that one most of people here wouldn't argue with
2. Interleaving - that one seems more for a discussion

Quote:Instead of making an appreciable leap forward with your reading(*) ability after a session of focused practice, interleaving forces you to make nearly imperceptible steps forward with many skills. But over time, the sum of these small steps is much greater than the sum of the leaps you would have taken if you'd spent the same amount of time mastering each skill in its turn.

(*) In the original article, it was "serving".

I think people are already doing a lot of interleaving techniques - aside from focusing on RTK at the start to the possible exclusion of other elements (although not everyone does, and personally, I -listened- to plenty of Japanese while going through RTK.)

Anyway, shadowing japanese subtitled videos or doing Listening-Reading(which despite the name usually includes shadowing, I think?) are ways in which people are simultaneously layering reading / listening / mimicry (not quite 'production' but a step in that direction.) Someone on the learn-any-language forum in one of those interminable L-R threads was saying they had done listening-reading-shadowing-transcribing simultaneously! :o

I tend to do more ... conventional interleaving (is that a term?!).... watch a show for awhile, pause it and do some anki reviews, watch some more show, go read some text, listen to some music, study a grammar point, etc. I might give L-R a try though. I really don't do any production though. Anyway, I certainly find that mixing up multiple facets of the language in the same day is very helpful and obviously some people find it useful to layer as many types of practice as possible into the same session.

I was rather poking at the AJATT where you have this "silent" period and you listen to an incomprehensible audio whilst keep reading and reading. Then, after 2 years of doing that, you realise that you kind of know what you are reading about (that's because, you never actually studied grammar...) but you can't speak, write, listen.

Inny Jan Wrote:I was rather poking at the AJATT where you have this "silent" period and you listen to an incomprehensible audio whilst keep reading and reading. Then, after 2 years of doing that, you realise that you kind of know what you are reading about (that's because, you never actually studied grammar...) but you can't speak, write, listen.

I think the people who don't get at least half way within 2 years are probably not doing much to get far in the language. What AJATT recommends is useful and effective but you have to gear it towards your own situation. Writing itself will take long no matter what method you do but reading and listening shouldn't take anymore than 2 years (to get to that 95% mark). Speaking is another battle but can be drastically reduced with a solid understanding of reading and listening in the language. Then again, everyone learns differently and progress can vary. So it comes down to doing what you can.

Inny Jan Wrote:I was rather poking at the AJATT where you have this "silent" period and you listen to an incomprehensible audio whilst keep reading and reading. Then, after 2 years of doing that, you realise that you kind of know what you are reading about (that's because, you never actually studied grammar...) but you can't speak, write, listen.

Well, I think that's a bit of an unfair criticism; many people following an AJATT style of learning go through either Genki or Tae Kim or both, and almost everyone doing an AJATT style of learning spends some fair time watching japanese-subtitled videos to line up listening and reading comprehension.

I do think that anyone considering an A_ATT style of input-based learning for any language should go and read antimoon which is much clearer about how and when to start going about production and doesn't hand-wave it away. Khatz links to them a few times, of course, they're an acknowledged source of some of his (better, IMO) ideas.

Also, if we're not personally attacking Khatz which would be a waste of time and get the thread locked, many people following an immersion/input style of learning do go ahead and SRS sentences from textbooks and/or the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (along with actually, you know, reading through the text of choice.)

In any case, input-based learning shouldn't, IMO, disdain grammar study so much as prefer a light study of simple, descriptive grammar rules and a more intense study of pattern sentences as the main way of absorbing grammar.

Inny Jan Wrote:Two interesting points to take from this article:
1. Use SRS - that one most of people here wouldn't argue with
2. Interleaving - that one seems more for a discussion

They didn't specifically mention SRS. They just said that regular study (or practice) is key to remembering. It certainly doesn't have to be SRS. The study of a language requires a lot more skills than just knowing vocabulary and it's all those skills you need to be using regularly. And there is no need to worry about spacing things out -- there are so many words and so many grammatical issues to learn that using the language as much as you can will still cause many things to be spaced out naturally.

Basically, study regularly, never fear tackling more complex grammar or vocabulary and even if you don't get it perfectly, just keep moving ahead and come back to it later, and use the language regularly and dare to express more complicated things that you thought possible.

AlexandreC Wrote:They didn't specifically mention SRS. They just said that regular study (or practice) is key to remembering. It certainly doesn't have to be SRS.

From the article:

Wired Wrote:Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds.” You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.

Those are the fundamentals of SRS.

Although I think that your advice is pretty sound... the article does mention SRS =)

kainzero Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:They didn't specifically mention SRS. They just said that regular study (or practice) is key to remembering. It certainly doesn't have to be SRS.

From the article:

Wired Wrote:Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds.” You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.

Those are the fundamentals of SRS.

Although I think that your advice is pretty sound... the article does mention SRS =)

My bad -- I had understood SRS as Spaced Sepetition SOFTWARE. Turns out the S stands for System... In any case, as I said, it doesn't have to be a system per se. Any student seeking regular exposition and production will do this naturally.