After about 2 weeks, I thought it might be time for another short update
SpanishI've been doing spanish (almost) daily for the past week aiming for a lesson of Assimil per 1 or 2 days. This goes well so far, however, I got bored by my review method (listening and shadowing to the previous 4-5 lessons). I adjusted it to do the following scheme:
Before starting lesson N I review lesson (N-1)=R1, (R1-6)=R2, (R2-18)=R3 and (R3-24)=R4.
What this means (example): I probably do lesson 20. Then I review lessons R1-R4 (which means Review 1-4). These would be lessons 19 (N-1=20-1) and 13 (19-6=R1-6). The next lesson would be 13-18=-5 which obviously does not exist.
That way I won't do so many reviews for the first lessons. I also have some kind of spaced repetition in it. And I put the numbers, so that when I start lesson 50, I review lessons 49, 43, 25 and 1. Lesson 1 would be revised as the second wave.
It might look a bit confusing at first, but it's just typing into a calculator, so it does not take that much time at all. I am curious how this is going to work. So far I'd review a lesson about 4-5 times in a row and then don't come back to it. It made me kind of learn the dialogue by heart, but probably not that long-lasting. For the repetition method I think I'll stick to listening and comprehension of what's said and then shadowing. The production of target language comes in the second wave anyway.
I also borrowed the Gramática basica del estudiante de espanol and just flipped through the pages. I like it so far and defenitely use it for my next grammar focus, which I tend to do now for each lesson where there is some concept I can review. Assimil often has too less grammar for my taste. I won't learn rules by heart, and I yet have to experiment with some ways like drills, cloze cards, just reading and input etc. for optaining a good grammar, but I still want to read about the grammatical concepts in a bit more detail.
The grammar book is completely in spanish, so I'm probably needing a bit time to understand everything, but it's worth a shot. If I like that book I might consider buying it. I still have to figure out which grammar book I want to actually buy for myself.
First thoughts about Vocab & Grammar flashcards 'method' from my previous postI've been indeed writing out new words and sentences from Assimil and put them into anki and really enjoy that so far (though I sometimes forget to check anki daily for reviews, but that's not a big problem yet).
Since each lesson is rather short, the cards are not many in numbers. That way I don't have many reviews anyway, but that's basically rather good than bad in my opinion. I prefer doing the cards myself. I have a huge mix of different types of cards.
- I use one-word plus translation cards for some words.
- I also do cards with a picture in front and then what is visible in the picture on the back (actually even before I discovered the method of Gabe wyner who also does this), for example I have a card with a red traffic light picture and on the back the sentence "El semáforo está en rojo". I'd be correct with just el semaforo, but having the sentence also shows me that it's 'en rojo' and not just rojo.
- I also do cloze deletions. Previously I didn't like them. Thought it was too easy, maybe it still ist and I need to make better ones or review them after a longer time frame. Here I sometimes do several cards per sentence or just one concept. I like to test gender, translation plus correct verb forms and other grammatical stuff.
- I also have sentence cards plus translation.
Most of the single words and sentence cards I do have in both direction, but I also experimented with deleting cards that I knew. Though I might change that to just clicking the easy button and if I still know it after a few months or even a year when it pops up again, then I might delete it. I don't have a storage problem on my pc and if the card shows up after a year, then it doesn't bother me as well. And reviewing it after a year and still knowing it would not cause much damage like 'overlearning'.
Apart from deleting I though of just changing the sentence, so I don't just learn it by heart in the first few days and never really look at the words, but rather at the 'sound and melody' of the sentence. However, that would cause slight problems concerning multiple clozes of one sentence as well as the review value of the card. Have to think about how to tackle that.
I am still working on my system here, maybe implement some ideas from Gabe Wyner (I currently read his book and watched a piece of his course as it was broadcasted for free yesterday. i really liked some of his concepts). Maybe some day I will be so convinced of my own system that I share a nice overview, though it would probably not be anything new, just maybe a mix of some old stuff. Until then I keep coming back and comment on certain things in my log in this vocab and grammar section.
OtherLike I said I've been reading fluent forever at the moment and though it's not completely new, it's somehow quite great. I was very inspired by Wyners video course, but as I could not watch it fully as it was broadcasted free, I decided to read the book as it was available in my library. What I like is the 'backup' of my thought of doing more than one card on the same vocab. In the past I would think that this is a waste of time, but actually if you reinforce a word through different cards with different ways of recall, and probably just need to review that card far less, that would not be that much of a waste..
Also the idea of making your own cards with audio, pictures etc might be much work, and probably not worth it for everything, but it's defenitely worth for some. In the past I had the idea of doing audio, pictures etc. for every single thing. I didn't like the work for that as well. But doing this for just some cards, or probably just search for the pictures and sounds (which I often do anyway) for words that interest me that could be very helpful to actually remember the concept of the word.
The use of a monolingual dictionary to tell you the subtleties of different synonyms also never really occurred to me, but it somehow makes sense. This makes me want to obtain one for my languages.
The concept that has impressed me the most, was that of using pictures for things like grammar. E.g. feminine words melt away, masculine ones explode. You then make a story around it and probably remember these pictures and then assign the gender. It was fascinating how well that worked in the video course even if it was not my own story.. Sure this is not for everyone, but maybe I am a visible study type and never really mentioned it
I am looking forward to read that book
I am also starting to dabble in Japanese again, since some people in my sports team are japanese and it would be nice at least to know what they are talking about