AllSubNoDub wrote:A common thing I see with people using SRS sentence cards is someone putting in a sentence with 1 unknown, then reading the sentence for comprehension. If you understand the sentence, then you pass the card. I've tried this too, but sometimes the sentence has so much context that it just gives the answer away. You end up only recognizing the word in that context.
Today I pulled the context sentence from the actual context. It's made the word is easier to remember, which is my goal.
If the author uses a word many times in various ways, it seems even an "easy hook" into the word's meaning might be helpful in other contexts.
I used this on a few words this morning. It helped to have an electronic parallel text which told me:
1) Is this a hapax legomenon (used only once), or does the author use it multiple times in a variety of ways?
2) Of the multiple uses, which sentence fragment is the most outstanding?
During the "search and update Anki" mission, I found two of the words I looked from an abridged, simplified text (El Quijote from Anaya publishing) were only used once in the original 1000+ page original Don Quijote. The interesting thing was that in a graded reader (2000 words), they used up some of the word count on these low frequency words. No matter.
Matorral (thicket) is easier to remember by using the actual context, rather than just an example sentence from a dictionary.
saliese de aquellos matorrales (to come out of those thickets). That's from the original, rather the the graded reader, although the graded reader is what brought it to my attention.
I will watch when I re-read the abridged graded reader down the road if they use
matorral more than once. (just curious)
In the context of "challenge", the "look it up in the original", etc, added some additional mental framework to that word.
Not saying it's a good general strategy, but for those words that resist sticking, finding alternative "card backs" helps me move them into "learning" instead of "leeched".
I'm not disputing the general notion, "if it was hard, that was good for you". Your tips are helpful. Another one I use, since I have multiple decks, is "don't answer that card, switch to another deck and it will be shown to you again (and randomly) when you return to the original deck". When I come back, sometimes the word is remembered by some background process our brain kicks off to find it.
One could actually use that as a strategy even if one had only a single deck. Just split it in two and whenever a word is hard, switch to the other deck. Back and forth.