Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

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elAmericanoTranquilo
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Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby elAmericanoTranquilo » Sat Jan 21, 2023 6:29 pm

I've just made it through lesson 100 of Assimil Spanish with Ease, though with a caveat: While I listened to the audio for every lesson multiple times (and studied all of the grammar notes), I didn't make it a goal to commit each lesson to memory, and I didn't listen as repetitively as many here seem to do.

I do feel that I got a lot out of the course, nonetheless, but I'm wondering if I should explicitly try to memorize the material as I go through the second wave? I was also reading here about how people use FSI, and several people said they listen to the FSI dialogues repeatedly over a course of multiple days, with the goal of committing the material to memory.

Do you all think that fully memorizing audio for short dialogues is an essential technique that is well worth the time? How does it pay off for you? e.g. does it plant some useful phrases into your brain that you can later retrieve automatically in conversation?

If you find memorizing dialogs to be valuable or essential, what is your practice strategy in terms of frequency, repetition, listening, reading, and reciting from memory? Do you test yourself to verify that you've adequately memorized the material before moving on?
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby iguanamon » Sat Jan 21, 2023 7:19 pm

There is a big difference between the two courses. FSI Spanish Basic is about drilling grammar and language concepts so the become automatic. Assimil is about teaching grammar and language concepts through dialog.

In my opinion, I don't think memorizing the Assimil dialogs is worth the time and effort involved. Once you are finished with the course... move on! Move on to reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Moving on means you are keeping the momentum going. You'll be consolidating the knowledge you have learned and building upon it... which is the point of the course.

The course doesn't teach you the language. You teach yourself the language by learning to use it. The course gives you a foundation. You must build on that foundation yourself. Doing so allows you to make the language stronger within you. Keep with the course and you lose that momentum. It's one of the common mistakes I've seen many learners make here. Move on! Spanish lives in the real world.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jan 21, 2023 10:42 pm

I don't think consciously 'memorising' any dialogues is meant to be the point. More that the repeated listening makes it habitual.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby luke » Sun Jan 22, 2023 12:45 am

elAmericanoTranquilo wrote:I was also reading here about how people use FSI, and several people said they listen to the FSI dialogues repeatedly over a course of multiple days, with the goal of committing the material to memory.

Do you all think that fully memorizing audio for short dialogues is an essential technique that is well worth the time? How does it pay off for you? e.g. does it plant some useful phrases into your brain that you can later retrieve automatically in conversation?

If you find memorizing dialogs to be valuable or essential, what is your practice strategy in terms of frequency, repetition, listening, reading, and reciting from memory? Do you test yourself to verify that you've adequately memorized the material before moving on?

In FSI Basic Spanish, the dialogues are a core part of each unit. Sentences from them are used as a word-for-word basis for other drills in the unit. That's one big part of their value.

Another value of the dialogue in FSI Basic Spanish is that they tell an extended story. You get to know the characters, their relationships, some cultural differences, etc. With aspects of the language like formality, the extended story is helpful. There's coherence.

I view language learning as a long term project. Naturally, repetition and time come into play. They are helpful for memory.

With respect to dialogues, I generally set mini-goals or levels of mastery. These develop over time. Here are example mini-goals.

I can understand the dialogue.
I can read it.
I can say it accurately after the prompts.
I understand globally what is happening, how sentences fit in with each other as well as the continuing narrative.
I've got it memorized for the moment.
I can say the dialogue days or weeks later on my own (memorized).
I can write it out from memory.

Not saying that I do all of these things, but this sort of layered approach lets you learn something and move on. Later, you can come back and get better. You can repeat that and get even better. Eventually, the drills are easy and saying the right thing become automatic. This later "automatic" isn't from memorizing, but rather from lots of experience with the grammatical patterns and vocabulary in many different ways.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby elAmericanoTranquilo » Sun Jan 22, 2023 1:04 am

Le Baron wrote:I don't think consciously 'memorising' any dialogues is meant to be the point. More that the repeated listening makes it habitual.

Interesting, could you elaborate on the distinction? Do you mean that memorization may be a side effect of repeated listening, but it's not the end goal?

Do you agree with the advice to use extreme repetition as described by Alexander Arguelles (on HTLAL) and Bernd Sebastian Kamps (in The Word Brain)?

Alexander Arguelles wrote:When I have done them all, I then write or type out the target language lessons in their entirety, sometimes several times. In other words, I thoroughly internalize the contents of both books and tapes. I know that I am "done" when I can successfully "play" the advanced lessons through my brain while I am taking a shower. Depending on the difficulty of the lesson, I might have to listen to the tapes hundreds of times, and likewise repeatedly review the book.

The Word Brain wrote:As expected, even with the text in front of your eyes, comprehension of the audio sources is not always immediate. In these cases, take single sentences or even single words, put them in an audio loop and listen to them 5, 10, or 15 times. Some audio devices come with a convenient button to define the beginning and the end of the loop. Using this sledgehammer method cracks every sentence within minutes. More importantly, don’t feel uncomfortable if you listen to your audio sources for the 54th time.

The Word Brain wrote:Repeating the lessons of your language manuals will take you some weeks. Again, don’t feel uncomfortable repeating a language CD for the 14th time. Thereafter, use the same procedure – listening to and reproducing speech with a one- second interval – with sentences from other sources such as podcasts, audio books, or TV.
Last edited by elAmericanoTranquilo on Sun Jan 22, 2023 1:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby elAmericanoTranquilo » Sun Jan 22, 2023 1:19 am

luke wrote:With respect to dialogues, I generally set mini-goals or levels of mastery. These develop over time. Here are example mini-goals.

I can understand the dialogue.
I can read it.
I can say it accurately after the prompts.
I understand globally what is happening, how sentences fit in with each other as well as the continuing narrative.
I've got it memorized for the moment.
I can say the dialogue days or weeks later on my own (memorized).
I can write it out from memory.

Not saying that I do all of these things, but this sort of layered approach lets you learn something and move on. Later, you can come back and get better. You can repeat that and get even better. Eventually, the drills are easy and saying the right thing become automatic. This later "automatic" isn't from memorizing, but rather from lots of experience with the grammatical patterns and vocabulary in many different ways.
This is very helpful, thank you. I think I will be taking on the challenge of FSI (or Platiquemos) next, as it sounds like it makes sense to follow iguanamon's advice to not get stuck too long on the same materials. I also think new materials will be good for my motivation, and as he said, keeping up the momentum.

For FSI, it sounds like part of the value of heavy repetition of the dialogs is that they prepare you for the drills, and then working through the drills successfully develops your ability to respond automatically. I'm really curious to go through this process, which is why I've been thinking about what kind of targets and schedule I should set for myself for the repetition of each FSI dialog. Your mini-goal framework could be really useful in terms of defining the targets.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Jan 22, 2023 2:26 am

elAmericanoTranquilo wrote:Do you mean that memorization may be a side effect of repeated listening, but it's not the end goal?

Yes.

Another timely thread really, chiming with recent thoughts. In two ways because not that long ago I was actually using the aioLingua book+audio for Spanish. I'm not against listening to audio repeatedly, but I think their particular view might be overkill. Chopping it it up and having it on some crazed loop. I see the point made and they do say to do the same with other audio beyond their own, but their audio dialogue is so unutterably boring, with the same three actors playing multiple characters, that after a while it just fades away into the background. Maybe that's the point?

That's the question I kept asking myself: is it meant to be like that, so that you feel like it's not even there and you know it back-to-front and upside-down, or is it fading into the background like litter bins and bus stops in a street which you only notice when you need one?

I've listened to audio repeatedly. I mean something like 3-4 (sometimes 5) hours a day. Then the same the next day and the next... Since I don't think any of this is an exact science I don't know that anyone can make very accurate remarks about whether that is good or the 'right' or most 'efficient' thing to do (the very word 'efficiency' tends to make people giddy these days). There's much chit-chat in this vein though. Bernd Sebastian Kamps is one of the 'do not speak!' crowd, who claims you end up with a better accent. I don't believe that. It seems like voodoo which ignores the disconnect between listening to speech and reproducing it. Appealing to those who hate the idea of years rather than months or weeks, and improving over time, and those who want to come out the other end almost perfect with no embarrassing speaking pains. It's Krashenism. But okay that's a side issue.

A second question I ask myself is: am I just learning this particular script? Because you can go through stuff and get to know it, but are you just learning the ridges of that particular terrain? I went through the dialogue audio of two old BBC courses - Por Aqui and Digami! - lots of street conversations etc, but even though I knew what was coming up next and could even say it, knowing all those dialogues, more-or-less, didn't feel like it was translating to being able to parse a great deal of new Spanish from the daily radio. So I wonder if it reaches a point where you just have to let it go and start afresh on intensely listening to something else, until it becomes somewhat blunted again and and then onto something else. Perhaps even before you can predict all the upcoming exchanges.

I'll add, that I think there's more value to be had out of dialogues where effort has been made to investigation their contents in-between listening (reading the transcripts, explication by course writers, looking up the locutions, collocations, idioms etc.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Jan 22, 2023 2:11 pm

elAmericanoTranquilo wrote:
Le Baron wrote:I don't think consciously 'memorising' any dialogues is meant to be the point. More that the repeated listening makes it habitual.

Interesting, could you elaborate on the distinction? Do you mean that memorization may be a side effect of repeated listening, but it's not the end goal?

Do you agree with the advice to use extreme repetition as described by Alexander Arguelles (on HTLAL) and Bernd Sebastian Kamps (in The Word Brain)?

Alexander Arguelles wrote:When I have done them all, I then write or type out the target language lessons in their entirety, sometimes several times. In other words, I thoroughly internalize the contents of both books and tapes. I know that I am "done" when I can successfully "play" the advanced lessons through my brain while I am taking a shower. Depending on the difficulty of the lesson, I might have to listen to the tapes hundreds of times, and likewise repeatedly review the book.


These are my thoughts (not LeBaron's).

I never got the impression that Arguelles shadows a single lesson over and over, but rather that he absorbs content gradually through various steps of shadowing (possibly the entire course or say, one side of a cassette). It's still breadth first and depth later. Not perfecting each sentence, one at a time (nothing wrong with that, though).

Although I can't reproduce, say, an Assimil dialog today, I could do it so-so some years ago when I was shadowing the content. But I don't really call that memorizing. It felt more like I was learning to retell a story, and that is also how I learn music. (I still don't say that I memorize music - that's something else.) Each phrase made sense and lead to the next one.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Mon Jan 23, 2023 4:02 am

There was a time, not *that* long ago, when it wasn’t easy to obtain nice clear audio for your target language. At that time I think there was an argument for wringing every last drop of value out of your Assimil audio. But nowadays we swim in high quality input, especially for a mega-language like Spanish. I would move on to learner podcasts or audio books for a familiar novel. (Harry Potter, perhaps?) You need to keep listening, you don’t need to keep listening to Assimil.
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Re: Memorizing audio - optional, valuable, or essential?

Postby Odair » Mon Jan 23, 2023 2:44 pm

I'd say it's harmful. I definitely do not want language-lesson-language strongly imprinted to my brain.
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