from Reddit: "Resources that you should(usually) avoid like the plague(and why)"

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from Reddit: "Resources that you should(usually) avoid like the plague(and why)"

Postby Kraut » Thu Jul 22, 2021 7:11 pm

https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ing_guide/
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

/.../


RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

/../
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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Last edited by Kraut on Mon Aug 02, 2021 4:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby Sumisu » Fri Jul 23, 2021 12:24 am

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.


This can be solved by creating your own cards. This is boring and tedious but it absolutely works. You can put whatever you want on the cards. Sentences, paragraphs, whatever. You can have five different cards that have five different nuances of the same word. I like to make cards with complete sentences from native material that I have read. I too find cards with just a single word on them to be of little value.

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.


The problem with this is that at the early and intermediate levels, one cannot read enough for it to function as a SRS. One would need to consume a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction on a daily basis, seeing tens of thousands of words over and over. Anki is a kind of shortcut in the early stages that pushes a bunch of words into your brain so that you can read more comfortably. I think that for reading alone to function as an SRS would only work for an advanced learner, or someone who is immersed in the target language 24 hours a day. That said, I think you need both SRS and extensive reading. These are complimentary activities.

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.


Again, this isn't going to work if you only have a couple of hours a day (or less!) to read, at least prior to reaching an advanced level. You'll just never come across enough words, given that you can't read quickly enough, and you can't possibly consume the variety of material you would need to consume. If you can somehow recreate your L1 environment sure this will work, but that's not possible for the vast majority of us.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby Lemus » Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:07 am

There is a weird divide being drawn between reading and SRS. It feels like a straw man argument to assume "Mr. Anki Dude" intends on never reading anything in his target language.

I get words for Anki from reading and then I use Anki so that when I encounter the word again in my reading then it sticks more easily. I would never view the two things are being entirely divorced from each other. Perhaps some people are a little too reliant on the SRS and not spending enough time reading words in context, but I've never come across someone claiming putting words out of context into an SRS was a path to fluency in itself (I make no comment on the AJATT sentence approach, which is something else entirely).
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby iguanamon » Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:51 am

One thing I've learned in over a decade on HTLAL and LLORG, is there are no absolutes in self language-learning. The word "self" is by definition, highly individual. I can say that I have never used Anki to learn a language. I don't need it. I started gradually introducing native material early on, starting small and working my way up. With Haitian Creole, I started out with reading 140 character tweets from VOA Kreyòl. I knew while I was self-learning my DLI Basic Course, that I wasn't ready to read books yet. Each DLI lesson contained a short dialog and a short reading. For my tweets, I used a dictionary when I needed to decipher something I didn't understand. I'd then maybe see a word I'd looked up in my DLI lessons or hear it in my Pimsleur lesson. Later, I made a parallel text HC/EN of a fictional rain drop's journey to the Everglades. The translation was human made, 17 pages. It was a struggle at first,. I had to look up a lot of words that I couldn't guess, even after looking at the original English text. As the pages went on, the text became easier to read, til finally I finished it and my unknown words had almost disappeared.

I then moved on to the "Book of Genesis" in the Bible. Simple language, even if somewhat weighted towards, ancestry, parentage and sheep herding. I made a parallel text and made my way, using the dictionary when I wanted to or had to. I had finished Pimsleur and DLI. I was maybe intermediate by then.

The first book I read was a translation of "Robinson Crusoe"- "Woben Lakwa". It was mind numblingly hard to read at first. The dictionary was my constant companion. The first third of the book was really difficult. Things started getting easier when I was halfway though the book. It became significantly easier after I got to 2/3 of the book finished. I continued reading whatever I could- short news articles, short articles I found online.

My point in going into this detail is not to disparage SRS, but to show that one doesn't have to be an advanced learner to be able to learn from reading. One does have to accept that it will be a struggle, that it will be frustrating, and that sometimes it can be so frustrating as to make the learner want to quit. Persevering through that frustration was what took me from a guy who'd finished a couple of courses, to someone who could read and understand most of what I read with something approaching ease.

I am not here to criticize SRS. I have seen many learners put it to effective and efficient use. If it works for a learner, who am I to say they shouldn't use it?! I just wanted to offer that SRS is not an essential tool for self language-learning. In fact, a learner can most definitely learn a language (or three) without it.

There are ways to make reading easier and less frustrating by using parallel texts... and a dictionary where wanted. The point of this reading is to make reading easier so that, at some point, a parallel text is not needed at all. "Fun" and not "suffering" work well for some learners. Me, I need to make my own connections by "suffering" and being "uncomfortable" at times while learning. Doing this helps me to learn. It may make me want to quit sometimes, but I don't quit because I know it works for me. I can't prove this with endless SLA papers, research or statistics. I am not advocating that everyone follow my approach. Learners should do what makes them happy and what works for them. If that means an hour of SRS a day, so be it. More power to you! I've seen learners here use SRS to their advantage. It's just not for me... and that's ok! There are no absolutes in self language-learning... nor should there be. It's all about the self. Like the sport of golf, we're not playing against each other. We are playing against the course- the target language.

Of course there are extremes. This whole thread is posting a false dichotomy. Reading does not preclude using SRS. Using SRS does not preclude reading. It's thinking that SRS is the only tool and thinking that reading is the only tool that usually make for a learner scratching their head to try and figure out where they went wrong.

So to answer the OP's post, I do not believe there are resources a learner should avoid. A learner can gain knowledge even from a "bad" resource, as long as it has the genuine language within it. Eventually a learner learns how to learn, for theirself... and that's really the best resource of all.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby sirgregory » Fri Jul 23, 2021 2:44 am

He also says to avoid most of the common apps and programs.

MOST language learning apps/programs by major companies - Major ones include apps like Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas Method….

When you calculate the number of words you would learn by completing the courses on these apps/programs, it is usually equivalent to reaching a CEFR A2 level…. For the time (and sometimes money) invested, it’s a rip off. You could probably do that in about 2-7 days’ time of easy study that’s really not very time-intensive or difficult. And you want to spend months and possibly pay money for something you could do on your own in a few days?

A2 in 2 days of "easy study"?
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby sfuqua » Fri Jul 23, 2021 3:24 am

Wow, after 45 years of learning foreign languages, a graduate degree in the field, and success in learning a few, I am much less sure of the best way to learn a language than the original writer of the language learning guide is. I am quite sure that some of the things said in the original post are over simplified. Some are questionable, I'm sorry to say.
I am glad that the writer of the original language learning guide has had some success with their approach to language learning. :D

There are many other approaches.

I kind of like anki as a part of a comprehensive approach :D In earlier years, before marriage and children and gray hair and wrinkles, I also liked flirting (or at least trying to flirt) with native speakers.
There are many ways to approach language learning.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby Axon » Fri Jul 23, 2021 4:51 am

sirgregory wrote:He also says to avoid most of the common apps and programs.

MOST language learning apps/programs by major companies - Major ones include apps like Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas Method….

When you calculate the number of words you would learn by completing the courses on these apps/programs, it is usually equivalent to reaching a CEFR A2 level…. For the time (and sometimes money) invested, it’s a rip off. You could probably do that in about 2-7 days’ time of easy study that’s really not very time-intensive or difficult. And you want to spend months and possibly pay money for something you could do on your own in a few days?

A2 in 2 days of "easy study"?


If you knew Afrikaans, German, and English, you might have a fighting chance at scraping a pass on an A2 test in Dutch with two days to focus on core differences. Outside of that, though ... this person may not know A2 that well.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby kanewai » Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:38 am

I'm very negative on most SRS programs, but I'd never say avoid them like the plague. I think they are grossly overused, but they have a role.

These articles are super frustrating; they take "what worked for me once" and turn it into "rules for everybody."

It's cool the author is excited about having learned Spanish. It's cool they wants to share their experiences. I don't like many of their rules at all.

edit: switched to gender neutral language.
Last edited by kanewai on Sat Jul 24, 2021 1:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby Adrianslont » Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:29 am

kanewai wrote:These articles are super frustrating; they take "what worked for me once" and turn it into "rules for everybody."

It's cool the author is excited about having learned Spanish. It's cool she wants to share her experiences. I don't like many of her rules at all.


My feelings, too. I don’t like people dressing up their personal experience as universal truth.

The author does often mention that he is giving a personal opinion but then goes on to express it or something else as a universal truth.

I actually enjoy reading about people’s personal experience but it goes down better with me when I know a) the author has had success with it and b) they focus on what worked for them rather than c) dump on other approaches and experiences when they clearly have not used them substantially.

I skimmed through the very long full guide and, for the record, I agree with some of it and disagree with other bits.

BTW the author is a guy.
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Re: RESOURCES THAT YOU SHOULD (usually) AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE (and why)

Postby rdearman » Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:53 am

You don't need SRS to learn vocabulary and you don't need a washing machine to clean clothes. But they make it a lot easier.

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