Do you take notes?

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Deinonysus
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:30 pm

lingzz_langzz wrote:Thanks for the quote!
And as for those rare languages, did you then create your own resources? How did you manage to not take notes? I think I didn't quite get that part, sorry!

I relied on reviews to make sure lessons sunk in, and I didn't mention this but I used Anki to memorize the vocabulary as well as any inflected forms, and in addition I will often write out inflection tables in MS Notepad over and over until I can do it quickly without thinking (I don't save it for posterity so I'd say that's more of an exercise than note taking).

For example, Inuktitut nouns have eight different case endings, they also inflect for singular, dual, or plural number, and if they have a possessor they also inflect for the person and number of the possessor, so for instance the word for "his hands" in the sentence "he washed his hands" would take one ending if he were washing his own hands, or another ending if he were washing, say, his son's hands. So long story short, there are a lot of noun endings to memorize.

The reason I also put vocabulary into Anki is that I don't want to have to mentally go down a list to recognize an ending, I want to be able to retrieve it independently. But I think it is also good to write out tables to see how things relate to reach other.

By the way, Levantine Arabic has very good resources. Not sure if you might already be aware of and using some of these, but Pimsleur has a 90-lesson Eastern Arabic course, there's a very extensive DLI Syrian Arabic course (which is free), and I saw a thread about a very interesting Assimil-style course for Palestinian Arabic: viewtopic.php?t=16228.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby rdearman » Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:45 pm

When I am at work, I am always taking notes!

So awhile back I started taking them in Italian, or French. So no, I don't take notes for the purposes of study, but I do take notes for the purpose of practice. BTW, this is also very useful when you don't want your colleagues to be going through your notebook and finding things like: "Another idiotic suggestion from Dan about yet another boring project meeting. We all agreed to ignore this request." :evil:
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:09 pm

Almost six years ago:
jeff_lindqvist wrote:Words and phrases go into Anki (usually copied from digital handouts, PDF lessons, websites etc.). I use spiral bound notebooks and regular A4 sheets for scriptorium. For my "classroom" languages, I've generally scribbled on the handouts or in glue pads - often without ever reviewing anything. Only once (!) have I entered every single word into a Google document. During my latest language course one month ago, I didn't take any notes at all.


And later, the same year (in another thread):
jeff_lindqvist wrote:During my latest immersion trip I didn't even take notes, because I was pretty sure that I'd never review them anyway. 8-)
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingua » Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:10 pm

As a rule I don't take notes. But I do write all answers to exercises on paper and not in the book in case I want to do them again in the future or to keep the book clean for the next person when I eventually donate it. I think the actual writing is good practice but the truth is that I throw them in the recycle bin as soon as I've corrected them.

As far as taking grammar notes I don't see the point since the information will still be in the book and far more readable than my big fat sloppy handwriting. When I took Italian classes I did take notes and reviewed them because it was useful for exams. I kept them for a long time but eventually got rid of them since I grew an extensive library of Italian grammar and exercise books.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby gsbod » Wed Jun 30, 2021 9:27 pm

If I'm taking the textbook + Anki approach (which is a pretty standard approach for me when I want to study in a reasonably intensive, structured way) then I'll make vocabulary lists as I go along which I then use to create the Anki cards in batches. I don't tend to make other notes on grammar and usage, unless I am trying to systematise something in a way that makes better sense to me than the way it's set out in the textbook (e.g. by comparing usage to another language I'm familiar with). But I do tend to write out the answers to exercises in full, and never in the book.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Language patzer » Thu Jul 01, 2021 5:39 am

I also don't take notes, although it was the thing to do at school. I write down a lot of things while I am learning, such as vocabulary, exercises of all kinds, and then throw away the notebooks as they have no more use.

Maybe if I ever learn a very unfamiliar language, maybe then I will need to create a cheat sheet, but not for french and german.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Thu Jul 01, 2021 6:52 am

Deinonysus wrote:
lingzz_langzz wrote:Thanks for the quote!
And as for those rare languages, did you then create your own resources? How did you manage to not take notes? I think I didn't quite get that part, sorry!

I relied on reviews to make sure lessons sunk in, and I didn't mention this but I used Anki to memorize the vocabulary as well as any inflected forms, and in addition I will often write out inflection tables in MS Notepad over and over until I can do it quickly without thinking (I don't save it for posterity so I'd say that's more of an exercise than note taking).

For example, Inuktitut nouns have eight different case endings, they also inflect for singular, dual, or plural number, and if they have a possessor they also inflect for the person and number of the possessor, so for instance the word for "his hands" in the sentence "he washed his hands" would take one ending if he were washing his own hands, or another ending if he were washing, say, his son's hands. So long story short, there are a lot of noun endings to memorize.

The reason I also put vocabulary into Anki is that I don't want to have to mentally go down a list to recognize an ending, I want to be able to retrieve it independently. But I think it is also good to write out tables to see how things relate to reach other.

By the way, Levantine Arabic has very good resources. Not sure if you might already be aware of and using some of these, but Pimsleur has a 90-lesson Eastern Arabic course, there's a very extensive DLI Syrian Arabic course (which is free), and I saw a thread about a very interesting Assimil-style course for Palestinian Arabic: viewtopic.php?t=16228.


Something I noticed is that writing things down is not the same as taking notes. Like you said, you can do an excercise, but that's not taking notes. So doing this or preparing your own materials ONCE to review them MANY TIMES it's a totally different story I would say.

Well, I know there are resources for Syrian but I'm more specifically learning Lebanese. I'm not really sure when it's the time to start using resources for all of them but I wouldn't like to mix them too much so I'm trying to stick to one dialect for now. But that's kinda off topic.

lingua wrote:As far as taking grammar notes I don't see the point since the information will still be in the book and far more readable than my big fat sloppy handwriting. When I took Italian classes I did take notes and reviewed them because it was useful for exams. I kept them for a long time but eventually got rid of them since I grew an extensive library of Italian grammar and exercise books.


I noticed that even for Arabic I indeed do not take notes for grammar. Maybe I wrote down some general rules in a really small notebook but nothing else. I feel like I take notes to just have a sense of progressing with the languages. :?:
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby thelazyoxymoron » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:14 pm

I've had a love/hate relationship with note taking since my college days. After trying out every possible method under the sun, I've settled on the following method which seems to work more-or-less for me. This nicely supplements my plan to Ankify everything in my life.

thelazyoxymoron wrote:Anki has become indispensable to me, not only for language learning but for almost every other thing in my life that I want to remember (eternally grateful to Michael Nielsen for this article!)


A (digital) notebook is my dumping ground. I've realized that even though the process of note taking excites me, I rarely, if ever, go through them and review them. It just ends up being a pretty show piece, if I'm using paper to write down notes. Over time I've realized that all I need to focus on while studying is to dump those things which I found interesting into a handy notebook (that's where digital tools come in). It doesn't have to be perfect, as it's more of a playground for myself than a finished product for others.

The next part of the process - having finished with the study session, I go through these dirty notes and figure out if there's something crucial that I'd want to remember for a long time. I polish such notes into appropriate anki cards and then "forget about it" and let Anki do the work.

I try to follow this process with everything that I do in my life - be it studying languages, reading books, writing code etc. I found that having a single application (Anki) take care of everything greatly reduces the friction and in turn, allows me to focus on consuming and understanding content rather than worrying about how to efficiently remember the crucial parts.

Sidenote: If anybody's interested, here are a list of resources that I use to keep the above printing press running. All of these are open-source: Anki (obviously), Joplin (note taking), Hypothesis (highlight any web content), Promnesia (extended mind), HPI (has an amazing list of features, but I mostly use it to export hypothesis highlights)
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:43 pm

thelazyoxymoron wrote:A (digital) notebook is my dumping ground. I've realized that even though the process of note taking excites me, I rarely, if ever, go through them and review them. It just ends up being a pretty show piece, if I'm using paper to write down notes. Over time I've realized that all I need to focus on while studying is to dump those things which I found interesting into a handy notebook (that's where digital tools come in). It doesn't have to be perfect, as it's more of a playground for myself than a finished product for others.

The next part of the process - having finished with the study session, I go through these dirty notes and figure out if there's something crucial that I'd want to remember for a long time. I polish such notes into appropriate anki cards and then "forget about it" and let Anki do the work.

I try to follow this process with everything that I do in my life - be it studying languages, reading books, writing code etc. I found that having a single application (Anki) take care of everything greatly reduces the friction and in turn, allows me to focus on consuming and understanding content rather than worrying about how to efficiently remember the crucial parts.


I'm a little bit like this as well! I enjoy writing, especially in a foreign script but reviewing it and wasting time in rewriting things that don't help - it's a huge NOPE.

I really like this process, I will try it out myself!!
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Caromarlyse » Fri Jul 02, 2021 10:22 am

For language learning, in the sense of conjugations, when to use each tense, etc, no. It would be a waste of time for me. I agree with what others have said about the attractiveness of notes not being much of an indication as to how useful they are. I do create sheets of questions and answers, so I can go through and test myself repeatedly on things I am struggling with - this mainly is grammar, but of course it helps to solidify whatever vocabulary is tied up in the exercises. I suppose the modern way is to do this on a flashcard app, but I much prefer paper. The sheet I use to write out the answers gets thrown away/recycled each time. I also prepare crib sheets for lessons, of things I know I am still forgetting all the time and want to remember, and maybe with some words or phrases I want to practise using. I tend to keep these sheets, and even though they end up being a mess, I find I often remember that I had scribbled something useful at the top centre of a page in blue (for example), and can then refer back. I don't otherwise review them though.

In relation to taking notes of some kind of spoken presentation, I think it's a very useful skill, both because you are forced to listen actively and because you have to summarise/parse the content in your mind in real time - for that second reason, I think you get much more out of taking notes rather than relying on a recording. I think it's also a good language learning practice, as it's quite tricky to listen, understand, and rephrase in note form in a TL.

Edit: I should also add that I end up with notes from classes, in an electronic document, and those I annotate and do review regularly!
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