Any way of turning passive vocabulary into passive vocabulary?

[IronMike]

To answer the question the OP actually wanted to ask...

One big problem I always noticed with my linguists is the way they studied their flashcards: L2 to English. Almost exclusively. That was fine for the DLPT L & R. I would take their stack of cards away from them and flip them. Then quiz them English to L2.* Much harder, but once you can do a stack in that direction, the words stick.

This of course is not the only thing you should do. As others say above, you gotta use your productive skills if you want your L2's vocabulary to enter into your active vocab.

*Edit: Of course I mean, L1 to L2.

[Lisa]

My experience agrees with @IronMike: I need to do the english-to-L2 anki cards if I want to actually really know a word, otherwise I sort of know the shape (and what definitions exist in my deck) and I'm good at guessing. I tried studying just L2->english, but it wasn't effective.

For simple, obvious words, concrete nouns like animals and body parts and basic adjective like colors, I think learning both ways by Anki has made them active, not passive (for me, at least). But there's nothing like meeting a word in reading or listening to make it solidify in your head, and hard or abstract things need a lot of encounters.

@SamT, I wish I'd known how separate these skills are when I started on Spanish couple of years back, I learned to read, and thought speaking would magically come along for the ride; it was an unpleasant surprise...

[Kraut]

I have turned my MP3 Glossika material into an anki deck.

It shows the written English sentence and I am trying to recall the chinese sentence. The answer card has the chinese sentence and the audio (repeats the spoken sentence about eight times) and I try to repeat it. It was pretty difficult - I have done about 500 sentences


Would having the spoken English sentence instead of the written sentence as the prompt would be useful??

I think so, listening and speaking are engrained in our biological heritage, while reading and writing are an "invention" that derive from our capacity of face recognition, Dehaene and others have shown this. I do record my translations into German and practice my texts via consecutive (oral) back-translation.

[Flickserve]

I have turned my MP3 Glossika material into an anki deck.

It shows the written English sentence and I am trying to recall the chinese sentence. The answer card has the chinese sentence and the audio (repeats the spoken sentence about eight times) and I try to repeat it. It was pretty difficult - I have done about 500 sentences


Would having the spoken English sentence instead of the written sentence as the prompt would be useful??

I think so, listening and speaking are engrained in our biological heritage, while reading and writing are an "invention" that derive from our capacity of face recognition, Dehaene and others have shown this. I do record my translations into German and practice my texts via consecutive (oral) back-translation.

Thanks for the reply. I do get a bit bored of the daily reviews just reading the English and trying to translate.

I will add the English voice in. Perhaps having a mixture of voice and written prompts to translate into L2 will be more interesting.