Reineke's SLA Notebook

[reineke]

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[reineke]

One of the first expressions I heard watching Nación Z an eternity or so ago was "rueda pinchada". I didn't have to look it up. After some 220 hours of listening I heard it again.



I am currently watching/reading Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese (Corto Maltés in Spanish). Comics are good for children and language learners. I will soon dust off Hermann's Jeremiah and Jodorowsky's Metabarones.

[reineke]

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[tastyonions]

That doesn't actually seem too daunting, provided sufficient patience and consistency. 1000 word families per year amounts to just a few each day. But then, it will take a couple decades and it might be tougher if you are juggling a dozen languages rather than learning one or two.

[reineke]

"A five-year-old child's typical verbal output is between ten thousand (10,000) to fifteen thousand (15,000) words per day of grammatically correct language. " Speaking of word families, here are a couple examples:

word-family.jpg

word_family-2.jpg

A concrete noun such as "axe" is easy to remember. You can of course get axed from a job and someone may "axe" you a question.

You will *never* learn 3 word families per day unless you're working with specific word lists (which may be an idea to try). Your learning process may be spread out over the course of several months or even years for some word families. On average though, you may learn the equivalent of three word families per day.

[reineke]

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[reineke]

Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions

"The key to learning a new motor skill - such as playing the piano or mastering a new sport - isn't necessarily how many hours you spend practising, but the way you practise, according to new research. Scientists have found that by subtly varying your training, you can keep your brain more active throughout the learning process, and halve the time it takes to get up to scratch.

The research goes somewhat against the old assumption that simply repeating a motor skill over and over again - for example, practising scales on the piano or playing the same level on your game over and over again - was the best way to master it. Instead, it turns out there might be a quicker (and more enjoyable) way to level up.

"What we found is if you practise a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practising the exact same thing multiple times in a row," said lead researcher Pablo Celnik, from Johns Hopkins University.

When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeat practice sessions may help people master the skill faster than practicing the task in precisely the same way, Johns Hopkins researchers report."

“Our results are important because little was known before about how reconsolidation works in relation to motor skill development. This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger motor skill gains because of reconsolidation...”

"Current studies by Celnik’s team, still underway and not yet published, suggest that changing a practice session too much, like playing badminton in between tennis bouts, brings no significant benefit to motor learning."

Although there's benefit in mixing things up with your practise, Celnik said the key was adjusting things subtly
"If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation. The modification between sessions needs to be subtle,"

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/want_to_learn_a_new_skill_faster_change_up_your_practice_sessions

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[reineke]

Flash cards. OK, I have committed 6 of these to Bedlam - my long-term memory. Wait, now it's 3.

I don't like wading through a bunch of poor dictionary items I already know. That's a bad kind of overlearning. Some of the words I encountered on Memrise:

Pedir - ask. How is it different from preguntar? I heard both of these words on TV. They were repeated in different grammatical forms and in different contexts: pedir ayuda, pedir perdón.

http://www.spanishdict.com/topics/show/79

antes - before. No grammatical description. I learned this word very quickly through TV programs. You can also easily pick it up in grammar books.

poco - little, few. The flashcard makes no grammatical distinction between adjective or adverb. I can see how things can go wrong here for an English speaker. A learner can iron out the details through language use but I prefer to see actual examples such as: poco a poco, poca gente, ...habla poco...

conseguir - get; obtain. I knew this word already. I also know the following synonyms: alcanzar, lograr, obtener. Two of these synonyms (lograr, alcanzar) I learned recently through TV programs. More importantly, I have been exposed to all these words in different contexts. ¡Finalmente lo logramos! ¡Por fin lo logré! Por fin logré... Yay! High five!

A concrete noun like "gusano" (worm) is a good word to learn through flashcards. Anything that can easily be accompanied by a picture will work well as a flashcard. Grammatical particles, conjunctions, adverbs etc. don't make great flashcards.

Finally, the best flashcards are the ones you make yourself, preferably with example sentences, images, audio. Of course this takes time and you are still studying language in isolation. If you load too many items that take long to review, you're flipping through another bloated Rosetta Stone.

When I see a word in another language I expect it to come glued to other words... I expect these words to carry a meaning that needs to be deciphered in relation to other words and sentences and not by applying a prelearned, generic translation.

[PaleoPaul]

I couldn't agree more with what you say in the last few sentences. I have been using Memrise for about 3 months (just made Memonist!) and I find it great for extending my vocabulary but terrible for teaching me, for example, the conjugation of ser and estar in the future or preterite tense. I thought maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention when I was going through those sections but I think it's just a poor way to learn that stuff. Even while answering the questions I really felt like I needed the verb conjugations written down on paper in front of me to properly absorb it.
I think it's an awesome tool for a absolute newbie to quickly score a pretty good amount of vocab. I've finished the A1 Spanish course and I'm about 1/4 of the way through A2 Spanish. Not sure if I will start another course or if I will transition to other learning tools.

Cheers
Paul