Do you take notes?

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lingzz_langzz
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Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Wed Jun 30, 2021 12:16 pm

If the answer is NO, pleas explain how you study, how you retain information.

I’ve been always studying taking notes but I see it’s just a waste of time if I never review them and care more about aesthetics than actually usage of those.

I think I associate writing itself with taking notes and it blocks me from finding out my way to stop taking them and learn other way.

Thanks a lot!
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby luke » Wed Jun 30, 2021 1:22 pm

My notes tend to be about where I am on the path, rather than notes about the language.

E.G., I'm on unit 19 of FSI, I'm on chapter 1 book 2 of Don Quixote, 10% of my Anki deck is mature.

For me, these notes help with, "where was I"? What is my rate of progress?

Other notes tend to be vocabulary that I write in paper books on the page I encountered the word.

I think more extensive notes would be helpful for building mental tables that are often summarized in books. (verb endings, etc).

Some say that notes are helpful even if the note-taker doesn't refer back to them.

When I was in school, I used notes to prepare for exams. Summaries of the most salient points or equations.

With books, if it's something I really want to get the most out of, I also note insights. Sometimes I will write a very brief summary of what happens in a chapter.

Overall, I think my progress would be helped if I took better notes. They're a way to organize thoughts.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby jeffers » Wed Jun 30, 2021 1:37 pm

Good question. I have gone in and out of the note taking habit. Initially I had the very traditional view: notes must be taken and must be reviewed for learning to take place. However, I never enjoyed this and sometimes I simply didn't study because I didn't want to take notes. So I think most of my language study over time has been without taking notes.

Note taking can serve many purposes, but I think the most important is improving your focus while you are learning, whether or not you review the notes later. So currently that is what I'm doing with Kwiziq for French, whenever I make a mistake on a quiz I read through and take notes on the topic as a way to improve. I've looked back on some of my notes, but that's not the main purpose. So far it's working quite well for me.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:05 pm

A good question, and the answer is NO. During my whole education, I found that note taking was mostly just a waste of time in my case, with the result being ugly, hard to learn from, and not worth the effort, while the process was often distracting (more focus on note taking than on the lecture/book lesson/anything). Sometimes, it was more like an automatic mode, like a connection between ears and hands, without much thinking and understanding happening in between.

I know this is just anecdotical, but the quality of notes never seems to correlate much with how well the person learns the content (very often, the classmates with the nicest notes were far from the brightest or most knowledgeable ones. And I find the content of the brain more important than the content of the notes). But if I remember well, even research shows that note taking is not too great as far as efficiency goes,because making notes and rereading them doesn't require active recall. The valuable part (active recall) is done only by some people, and it can be done just as well with your own notes, someone else's or a ready made resource.

Now I prefer to just buy (or find for free) better ready made resources. I do write, I find both typing and writing by hand to be very important and useful in language learning. But right now, my German notebook is just a space, where I can write for example difficult sentences from my exercises. The focus is on the action, on saving correct stuff to my brain as I write and say it. Not on the result. I'll rather review from the textbook or with SRS.

Stopping the attempts to make my own notes for review got me rid of a huge burden, truth be told.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:10 pm

luke wrote:For me, these notes help with, "where was I"? What is my rate of progress?


I love this idea, I should give it a try!

luke wrote:I think more extensive notes would be helpful for building mental tables that are often summarized in books. (verb endings, etc).


I see what you mean. I actually don't call it taking notes. For me it would be preparing your own materials and its goal is to be reviewed but it has like a final form. And taking notes for me is like a never ending thing.

jeffers wrote:However, I never enjoyed this and sometimes I simply didn't study because I didn't want to take notes. So I think most of my language study over time has been without taking notes.


I think this is really happening to me now. Like when I think about the time I want to rewrite something from the book, it just kills my motivation.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:20 pm

Cavesa wrote:Now I prefer to just buy (or find for free) better ready made resources. I do write, I find both typing and writing by hand to be very important and useful in language learning. But right now, my German notebook is just a space, where I can write for example difficult sentences from my exercises. The focus is on the action, on saving correct stuff to my brain as I write and say it. Not on the result. I'll rather review from the textbook or with SRS.

Stopping the attempts to make my own notes for review got me rid of a huge burden, truth be told.


The problem appears when you have a language that's rare or that doesn't have any materials. Then you kinda need to do the materials yourself. Which is not notes taking but still.

I wish I could get rid of those notes as well haha
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:27 pm

lingzz_langzz wrote:The problem appears when you have a language that's rare or that doesn't have any materials. Then you kinda need to do the materials yourself. Which is not notes taking but still.

I wish I could get rid of those notes as well haha


You're absolutely right. For tips on awesome notes for review, I'd recommend Iversen's blog and learning guide. His green sheets are legendary. But I see on your profile that you've already discovered that! And I guess your own note taking techniques are very good, as you've achieved solid level in so many languages!

If I had to make my own review notes just because of a lack of anything practical on the market, I would probably do it. But it would simply be a lot of suffering and a huge time sink :-D But yes, it might be necessary. In what languages have you encountered this problem so far?
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Wed Jun 30, 2021 3:08 pm

Cavesa wrote:
lingzz_langzz wrote:The problem appears when you have a language that's rare or that doesn't have any materials. Then you kinda need to do the materials yourself. Which is not notes taking but still.

I wish I could get rid of those notes as well haha


You're absolutely right. For tips on awesome notes for review, I'd recommend Iversen's blog and learning guide. His green sheets are legendary. But I see on your profile that you've already discovered that! And I guess your own note taking techniques are very good, as you've achieved solid level in so many languages!

If I had to make my own review notes just because of a lack of anything practical on the market, I would probably do it. But it would simply be a lot of suffering and a huge time sink :-D But yes, it might be necessary. In what languages have you encountered this problem so far?



You mean Iversen's log, right? I think I don't know anything about those green sheets! :shock:

Not sure if my techniques are that good, I just might have been motivated enough to not to let those note taking thing demotivate me :D :D

And for the languages, basically Arabic dialects (I'm learning Levantine now) and Basque to some extend but you can get a good textbook for Basque still. I'm not going to mention languages like Aragonese because they are so similar to what I know that it's much easier to avoid taking notes actually (I did that with Italian). Which leads me to think... maybe notes are useful only at the very beginning when you don't understand ANYTHING but once you start, you can just build up on top of that?
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jun 30, 2021 3:26 pm

I personally do not take notes regardless of the format of available resources. I have studied languages with relatively poor resources such as Inuktitut and Xhosa as well as dead languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek. For learning resources that don't have built-in spaced repetition I generally rely on a review schedule to cement what I have learned, and when I'm advanced enough I try to expose myself to native materials such as children's books and the news. That helps to reinforce things too. If there's a subreddit that has material in the target language I usually sign up for that as soon as I start learning the language, just to get used to seeing it.

Here's a great quote from Barry Farber's book How to Learn Any Language about the "Multiple Track Attack":
Charles Berlitz says that saying a word or phrase aloud ten to twenty times is more effective a learning technique than merely reading the same item fifty to one hundred times. Likewise, seeing a word or phrase in your grammar book fifty times does not secure it in your memory as effectively as seeing it two or three times and then coming across that same word or phrase by surprise in a newspaper or magazine or hearing it on a cassette or in a radio broadcast or a movie or in conversation with a native speaker.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby lingzz_langzz » Wed Jun 30, 2021 3:48 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I personally do not take notes regardless of the format of available resources. I have studied languages with relatively poor resources such as Inuktitut and Xhosa as well as dead languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek. For learning resources that don't have built-in spaced repetition I generally rely on a review schedule to cement what I have learned, and when I'm advanced enough I try to expose myself to native materials such as children's books and the news. That helps to reinforce things too. If there's a subreddit that has material in the target language I usually sign up for that as soon as I start learning the language, just to get used to seeing it.

Here's a great quote from Barry Farber's book How to Learn Any Language about the "Multiple Track Attack":
Charles Berlitz says that saying a word or phrase aloud ten to twenty times is more effective a learning technique than merely reading the same item fifty to one hundred times. Likewise, seeing a word or phrase in your grammar book fifty times does not secure it in your memory as effectively as seeing it two or three times and then coming across that same word or phrase by surprise in a newspaper or magazine or hearing it on a cassette or in a radio broadcast or a movie or in conversation with a native speaker.


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!
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