By: Kellon Olusola (pseudonym Josedech MS4)
Last updated: Saturday, July 17, 2021, 11:00am EST
An Introductory Manual of Effective and Efficient Strategies in Language Learning
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RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)
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More apps I cannot recommend include apps with a spaced repetition system: Anki, Memrise, Quizlet, etc.
Why? I would hope that by now, after reading this guide, you would understand why I disdain SRS so much, but let me expound yet again: SRS gives you a set of cards to review. Reviewing those same cards again and again can be very rapidly exhausting for your brain, and it removes some naturalness from the study process. Also, because it’s a limited number of cards, you do not get to see ALL the varying contexts in which you can see a given word used. So, you might have a word X on a card, but your card (in order to not be overwhelming) should only include maybe one thing to definition with one example sentence, perhaps. You need NUMEROUS sentences to get a full picture of that word. So, you’re wasting time with that one aspect of the word. It’s literally like focusing on ⅕ of a word repeatedly. And the lack of sufficient integration into real material makes the SRS learning content much less relevant to your brain, making you EVEN MORE liable to forget. You might be able to recall the word as you learned it from your SRS system, but it does not help you in all contexts. You need to see the word in real life. You can absorb the same words much faster through reading real material without a care in the world for memorizing a single thing. Furthermore, reading is its own SRS, and it’s a very natural form of SRS that actually sticks and is genuinely tolerable and even enjoyable. (In my very humble super biased opinion, Anki is not tolerable for more than a few minutes, and even if you tolerate it for one day, consistent use of Anki is unlikely because it’s BORING AS EVER and literally mind-numbing and unnecessarily exhausting for insufficient benefit. Even when people like it, they still often don’t do it consistently.) As you read more material, you become able to read yet more things. No, you will not be able to recall every word you learned in a piece of text like you might if you used Anki cards, but when you speak, the words that you ran into while reading (which you thought you forgot since you only read them once) will tend to show up in your mind when you most need them — because when we speak our mother tongues, that’s how things work. We do not memorize vocabulary, but rather, we have a familiarity with a lot of vocabulary, and the words we need tend to appear in our brains when we most need them. So you’ll be more functionally useful (and less bored and exhausted) than Mr. Anki Dude over there! Your brain is a linguistic genius— it learned your L1 without your help. Let your brain do what it naturally does best with language. Let it do the retrieving for you. And when it can’t retrieve, relax, take a deep breath, and just use a dictionary or an electronic translator to help you learn what you’re seeing in its real life context.
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