Krashen and "Krashenite"

[Beli Tsar]

Despite all of the alleged Krashen and Kaufmann hate around here, this thread is slowly convincing me that the two Steves are right about vocabulary flashcards and SRS decks being unnecessary. Kaufmann makes the obvious point: frequency vocab decks are pointless because, by definition, you will see those words frequently in your immersion, so why bother?

Have you read Paul Nation's work on how many times you need to see a word in order to remember it? e.g. here: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/323110104.pdf It's a lot; flashcards jumpstart the process dramatically. The whole point of them, and of a frequency list, is that it makes texts understandable and readable a lot faster. As discussed already, you learn vocab a lot better if you already know 95% of words, at least (98-99% if you are doing genuine extensive reading), not to mention how slow it is to work through a text when you know less than that. Why not jumpstart the process with the efficiencies of flashcards?

Kauffman talks about truly enormous levels of repetition with his mini-stories to get those high-frequency words (among other things) in during the early stages. We don't all have the patience for that; cutting the repetitions by 3/4 or more and doing a couple of minutes of SRS a day would get similar results.

The difference between starting a new language with and without flashcards is, in my experience at least, like night and day. Sure, you can battle through and will pick up frequent words naturally; but flashcards make the process so much easier, simply because your exposures are close together and simplified. The result of good flashcard use is, in the end, that you can do more reading earlier , and thereby in the end pick up more words. Why slow down that process?

[Saim]

Avoiding explicit vocabulary study can work, but as a method it is less and less reliable the fewer hours you spend on the language per day and the less vocabulary overlap there is with languages you already know well.

When you're a beginner, it'll be challenging to learn even frequent words through pure input because essentially nothing is what Krashen's paradigm would call "i+1", unless the language is somewhat intelligible with ones you already know. Not to mention the fact that it's psychologically difficult to spend several hours in the language when you understand very little.

When you get more advanced and need to learn less frequent words, in my experience the words don't occur frequently enough for retention unless you're spending upwards of 3 hours with the language, and that's for "easy" languages.

Kauffman talks about truly enormous levels of repetition with his mini-stories to get those high-frequency words (among other things) in during the early stages. We don't all have the patience for that; cutting the repetitions by 3/4 or more and doing a couple of minutes of SRS a day would get similar results.

Not to mention that seeing a word in varied contexts improves retention. If you see it in your notes or a word document you've copied it to, then found another example sentence somewhere, then seen it on a flashcard you've made, your retention will be better than comparable (3 in this case) repetitions from reading the same story, and for less time and mental energy to boot.

Choosing which vocabulary to study also improves retention. For example, you can make a list of all the new vocab in the story, then pick some of those words to turn into flashcards. Again, this would give better retention than three "raw" repetitions of the same text without any intervention.

In an interview I can no longer find (edit: it's here at 20:00), Krashen himself admitted to failing to acquire basic Chinese through storytelling classes. He justified this by saying that he just "wasn't ready" to graduate to other material and then his teacher decided to drag him through the same stories again. I can't imagine any comparably experienced language learner "failing" such a course if they applied even minimal note-taking and Anki-ing. I'm convinced anyone on this forum who knows how to study would run circles around him in a similar environment.

[leosmith]

Despite all of the alleged Krashen and Kaufmann hate around here

I'm pretty sure it's not "alleged".

[TopDog_IK]

Despite all of the alleged Krashen and Kaufmann hate around here, this thread is slowly convincing me that the two Steves are right about vocabulary flashcards and SRS decks being unnecessary. Kaufmann makes the obvious point: frequency vocab decks are pointless because, by definition, you will see those words frequently in your immersion, so why bother?

You should look into a mental fallacy known as confirmation bias.

Wait a second. I'm actually changing my position here. Previously I assumed that frequency based vocabulary SRS decks were helpful, but now I'm less certain of that. Isn't that the opposite of confirmation bias?

[rdearman]

Despite all of the alleged Krashen and Kaufmann hate around here, this thread is slowly convincing me that the two Steves are right about vocabulary flashcards and SRS decks being unnecessary. Kaufmann makes the obvious point: frequency vocab decks are pointless because, by definition, you will see those words frequently in your immersion, so why bother?

You should look into a mental fallacy known as confirmation bias.

Wait a second. I'm actually changing my position here. Previously I assumed that frequency based vocabulary SRS decks were helpful, but now I'm less certain of that. Isn't that the opposite of confirmation bias?

Humm... I must have misremembered your position.

[ryanheise]

Kauffman talks about truly enormous levels of repetition with his mini-stories to get those high-frequency words (among other things) in during the early stages. We don't all have the patience for that; cutting the repetitions by 3/4 or more and doing a couple of minutes of SRS a day would get similar results.

The difference between starting a new language with and without flashcards is, in my experience at least, like night and day. Sure, you can battle through and will pick up frequent words naturally; but flashcards make the process so much easier, simply because your exposures are close together and simplified. The result of good flashcard use is, in the end, that you can do more reading earlier , and thereby in the end pick up more words. Why slow down that process?

Everybody's different.

Some people may be able to breeze through their daily SRS queue in 2 minutes, while other people may struggle to recall each card without the added context you get when just engaging directly with the story. And I'm not just referring to putting a word into a sentence, but also putting that sentence into a story, where the whole context of the plot and the relationships between the characters can help to jog your memory. Creating flashcards rich in context can also be a time consuming endeavour, and can also result in the reviews taking longer (which may not be good if you don't enjoy the activity in the first place), so unless you are using a pre-made deck, you could be spending significantly more time preparing the flashcards than reviewing them, which for some people may feel tedious and unenjoyable when compared to just directly engaging with the story. If SRS is working well for you, that's great! Although to each their own.

It is also almost certainly the case that you do not actually need flashcards for the most frequent words. If you consume 10,000 words of input in a day (e.g. listening to a 1 hour audio book, or reading 3 chapters of a novel, or perhaps a 20 minute audio / 1 chapter of a novel but 3 times over again), you will hear the top 100 most frequent words at least 10 times each day, and you'll hear the top 2000 most frequent words at least once each day. There must be a point on that scale above which you ARE getting enough repetitions of a word naturally, and you can save SRS for the words below that point. Graded content would boost those numbers further.

Finally, there is a very simple answer to the question "Why slow down that process?":

SPEED is not the only goal, or even the main goal, for everyone. For example, I enjoy taking the scenic route to the grocery store, even though it may take me longer to get to the destination. People should make an individual choice that will help them fulfill their own goals, and one of those goals may be to enjoy the journey.

[leosmith]

Some people may be able to breeze through their daily SRS queue in 2 minutes, while other people may struggle

Although I agree with your statement that "everyone is different", difficulty may also depend on how they do their reviews. For me, one L1 to L2 rep is more effective than dozens of L2 to L1 reps, but they take longer. So I put in less words, but other (less experienced?) learners may be trying to do as many L1 to L2 reps as their gurus, without knowing that the gurus are only doing L2 to L1. Another possibility is that the gurus are learning "easy" languages, and the learner is learning a "hard" language.

[Kraut]

And I'm not just referring to putting a word into a sentence, but also putting that sentence into a story, where the whole context of the plot and the relationships between the characters can help to jog your memory.

The above remark seems very important to me.

After I have learnt my translated texts (semi-colloquial ministories) by heart, I start repeating them after 2, 3 months or longer and bring them up to a hundred per cent again. First I try to remember the plot by picturing the constellations. If the text has completely gone I refresh the story by reading through the German translation first.

I also do a second way of repetition. I have chunked the text and click through it randomly scrolling around in the text. When I find for instance the chunk "sentada en la ventana" I bring up the rest of the sentence from memory: "Rita que es la dueña se pasa el dia sentada en la ventana vigilando quien entra y sale."
By refocussing on a single chunk I want to make it more available in memory for other new contexts.

-

https://www.tripadvisor.co/Hotel_Review ... f_Cad.html
-------
The chunked text:

Mejor dormir en el coche,
si no encuentras otro sitio
que pasar una noche alli.
Es como la pelicula de Psicosis.
Rita que es la dueña
se pasa el dia
sentada en la ventana
vigilando quien entra y sale.
Te cobra la habitacion por adelantado
y con pago en efectivo.
No te da recibo ni justificante.
Cuando llamas para reservar
te mete una bola para cobrarte mas:
'Que si la habitacion del palomar...
que si'
la tal o cual .
El caso es
cobrarte 10 o 15 euros mas
de lo que anuncia....
---------------------------
Spanish is very easy for me, being a teacher of French. If the language was for instance Lithuanian, which is completely "opaque", I would have to do flashcards with audio.

[anitarrc]

Maybe brains ARE different!
I have not done any flashcards, vocabulary books or such like for more than 40 years. I remember downloading ANKI on my android because folks in my portuguese Whatsapp group were so excited about it.
Well, I decided it was extremely boring and deleted it after a week.

How come I achieved 95% (Spanish) and 93% (Portuguese) in the Leipzig test if you can't learn vocabulary without anki or other out of context repetitions.

Admittedly, Russian is more difficult. Hence Masha the new flatmate now talks Russian to me about household things and introduces new words all the time. Now, I can see the kitchen context and remember . At work, I see only software manuals or similar things in Russian so I seriously lacked so far the everyday vocabulary.

We will see how it develops.

[språker]

Not sure if this has already been discussed, but I’ve thought about the “fossilised errors” and how they might be ironed out. If external correction would be the only possibility, wouldn’t it be very hard to reach a high level in a second (or native) language? Can it be that massive input not only will strengthen the synapses connected to the correct/most used way of expressing something, but also (relatively) suppress those connected with the wrong or less used patterns in a language? This given that the language learners' input mostly consists of native content, and not mostly of his or her own output.

In the example of the adult learner with fossilised errors, it could just be that the process of replacing some patterns is just very slow, and that some things in the language takes extra effort to overcome, and that deliberate study/corrections are just a quicker way?

Learning a very close language (e.g. Danish for a native Swede) would be very hard, given that the starting point is a lot of fossilised native words and expressions?