Postby Dylan95 » Tue Jan 30, 2018 6:43 pm
A note on vocabulary learning...
I recently made the switch from Quizlet to Anki. For the past year and a half I used Quizlet for all of my vocabulary learning. I had a paid subscription which provided me with access to the SRS function. Quizlet is a great resource, but I have to say, after about a month of using Anki solidly (I started using Anki around the beginning of the new year), I prefer Anki on account of one reason. While Quizlet has an SRS function, its daily goals are very vague. Some days I would review hundreds of cards, sometimes none. Something about Anki's organization scheme has made me much more on top of my daily drills. The one thing major con for me is that Anki doesn't automatically include audio files. I know it's possible to add them, but I'm not sure how efficient it is. If anyone knows, feel free to write me here!
The way I have been using SRS to learn vocab over the past year has been quite efficient, but there is one thing I regret. Usually I add vocab to my SRS card base as they come up. Books are pretty cheap in Russia, so I've been buying a bunch of them, underlining all of the words I don't know, and adding them in. I also add in words that I don't recognize, or poorly recognize as they come up in my daily life. This has been very effective.
The one problem with this method is that I feel like I've somewhat missed out on learning word families instead of lone verbs, adjectives, and nouns. Russian adjectives, verbs, and nouns usually come from common roots and if you know one, you can generally infer how to say the other, but it doesn't always work out perfectly. I feel like if I added entire word families into each card rather than separately over time, that would be potentially more efficient. This is probably the case for any language of course, and I'll definitely try it out once I start digging into Turkish more seriously.
Also..While I have been using SRS/flashcards heavily for the past year and a half, I've found that a change in my methodology that I made about a year ago has really improved my efficiency of learning. In the past when I studied SRS, I would simply translate each card aloud before flipping them (assuming I wasn't in the library or on the bus). Over the past year I've forced myself to not only write down the word as I say it, basically Professor Arguelles' scriptorium method, but I usually make example sentences using the vocab words every time I study my cards. This has allowed me not only to remember the meanings of words more efficiently, but also to use them more effectively. For example when the word "жадничать" comes up, I usually say something along the lines of "Максим всегда жадничает кальян, which means "Maksim always hogs the hookah." This is super easy for me to remember because I have a friend Maksim, who does exactly that.
In other news, I recently tried out a bunch of ТРКИ Russian language B2 and C1 practice tests, both in my own textbooks and online, and I've gotten more than 90% of the questions right on the grammar/lexical sections. (They are multiple choice questions, but very difficult). I don't need to take this exam by any means, and this is only one of many sections, but its nice to have something keep up my morale. I love studying Russian, but slow progress really gets to me!
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