RyanSmallwood wrote:Beli Tsar wrote:Why do I need context to understand how to use the word 'elephant' or 'book' or 'screwdriver'?
For me context learning isn't just about picking up nuances of word use, it also helps me remember them more easily. Usually when I see a word in a few sentences and remember I've seen it in other sentences, is when it feels like my brain goes "oh this is useful, let's hold onto this". I can repeatedly listen to a word in isolation or a whole sentence, but it takes much more effort to get to "stick", although there are other ways of making those memories stronger. Of course this is partly speculation on my part, but my guess is that your brain needs to connect words to a other things you already know to not just throw it out as some random sound you heard.
Absolutely agreed, and I do the same thing - not with every word, but with the words that don't stick easily. But equally I've found that for me there's a danger with more transparent languages of over-engineering cards, spending too much time finding sentences for words that actually aren't, individually at least, that hard. And it takes much, much longer to review sentences cards, time that could be spent reading an actual book, so it's worth doing a bit of cost-benefit analysis on them. That's really what I was trying to get across - that though there are many, many caveats to be aware of, there actually is a place in language learning for just learning lists of words and glosses.
RyanSmallwood wrote:I've noticed when studying distant languages with little familiar vocabulary and new grammatical features, studying sentences made up mostly of proper nouns makes it a lot easier for the language to start taking root for me. Part of this is obviously by making the sentences more comprehensible, but I also think that taking words I already know the meaning of and seeing them used in the new language really solidifies the other features as conveyors of meaning for me. Even if I have a 100% word for word breakdown, general meaning, and grammar explanations of a sentence in an opaque language, it will take a lot more effort to absorb without familiar words thrown in.
Again totally agreed; I've learned to appreciate sentences more and more over time for this reason; and if I ever learn Chinese or Japanese I anticipate a lot of sentence cards! There's a reason that AJATT/Refold/etc. emerged, with such a focus on sentences, learning languages that are so distant from English. There are also other important reasons for sentence cards - they are really great for driving home grammar points. But if you are learning languages that come more easily than these, there's a real place for simpler, less time-consuming techniques.