Learning from difficult worksheets?

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CarlyD
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Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby CarlyD » Sat Feb 04, 2023 6:38 pm

I'm doing two courses that have multiple worksheets per lesson. Most are straight-forward, fill in the correct pronoun, etc. but I'm also seeing worksheets where the request is simple, but the sentence itself is beyond me. I spend time looking up several words in the dictionary, then a crazy amount of time trying to find the verb using the conjugated one in the sentence.

Last night I was presented with past participle (German) that started gel--. I looked at every verb starting with "l" in the verb book, then the dictionary. A long time later, it turned out to be a present tense verb that started with gel--.

Am I learning anything from this? Part of me thinks that every contact with the language is good, the other part says that I'm wasting time that could be used learning something I could immediately use.

Opinions?
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby Picaboo » Sat Feb 04, 2023 7:32 pm

My opinion is that much of that time is not language learning. In the end, through all that trouble, you may have a very memorable fact about language. However, that is not time spent actually processing the language in the ways the brain needs to become adept with it. Spend more time "doing" and less time "thinking" (or worse "looking up") is likely the best moto.

I've heard people recommend 20% of your time being spent with this sort of thing. Personally, I would say only do that sort of stuff when curiosity drives it. That said, in general, workbooks are a proven method.
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 04, 2023 8:03 pm

Maybe you remember the first word that causes you a load of trouble better than something that just flipped past you, but then the next ? and the next ??? As the benefit of having battled against all odds to find something is spread over more and more words the effect on each one must diminish - and in the end you'll just have spent your time searching rather than learning. The theory that only hardwon knowledge is remembered is simply wrong.

Yesterday I studied Irish using Potter in translation plus the original plus a dictionary - and even with a translation in front of me I had to look some things up. But luckily I have a dictionary that is user friendly enough to point me in the right direction with irregular words, and I have also learnt the main changes that can occur at the beginning of Celtic words - like for instance that if you see a h as the second letter in a word then it is mostly NOT written like that in the dictionary because it is all a question of inflection. So if you see "duilleog bháite" (water lily) then the second word is found under "báite" (soaked) in the dictionary, not *bhaite (the exceptions from this are mostly function words of different kinds). And if you look for "tiocfaidh" then the dictionary redirects you to the irregular verb "tar" that mostly means something like 'come' (but there is a lot of unpredictable fixed expressions with it). Without those hints it would be impossible to use the dictionary, and I wouldn't even bother to spend my time trying to learn the language (and mostly I don't bother for other reasons). It also took me a while to figure out that "шёл" in Russian was the past tense of "идти" (to walk, go), and again it was only because I have decent dictionaries that I didn't just skip the word or make a wild guess. Examples like that abound, and without good dictionaries you would have to learn by osmosis or be a genius.

Quite generally I don't think you learn more by trying to solve riddles or spend oceans of time trying to find things in your dictionaries - and that's why I recommend the use of bilingual texts for intensive study purposes. And textbooks where the translations are hidden in the back of the book or missing totally should simply be thrown out - they are based on antiquated and worthless pedagogical ideas. You learn by getting information, not by searching for it. Spend your rebus solving aspirations on rebusses...
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby Lisa » Tue Feb 07, 2023 2:39 am

I don't think more time spent looking things up really helps you learn. Flipping pages and thinking about the alphabet takes a fair bit of mental energy that I can't spare. Verb forms are a particularly good reason to lookup online. Linguee, or example, is often helpful in suggesting the root form.

I find dual language too tempting, I need to be pushed a little harder before I go for the english...
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:35 am

Just in case it is useful: You can look up verbs quite easily at verbix.com.
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby Beli Tsar » Tue Feb 07, 2023 1:45 pm

Is this kind of thing of limited usefulness if you just do the worksheet once and then forget it, but useful if you revisit it?

Looking things up etc. isn't that useful in itself, but if you go over the sentences quickly a couple more times - e.g. the next day & the day after - does it sometimes have the potential to move things from very difficult to manageable? The second time round, hopefully you don't really have to look much up, because it's still fresh; the third time round, reading it is relatively natural. And it likely reawakens the memory of whatever it is you had to look up.
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Re: Learning from difficult worksheets?

Postby CarlyD » Fri Feb 10, 2023 5:21 am

Beli Tsar wrote:Is this kind of thing of limited usefulness if you just do the worksheet once and then forget it, but useful if you revisit it?

Looking things up etc. isn't that useful in itself, but if you go over the sentences quickly a couple more times - e.g. the next day & the day after - does it sometimes have the potential to move things from very difficult to manageable? The second time round, hopefully you don't really have to look much up, because it's still fresh; the third time round, reading it is relatively natural. And it likely reawakens the memory of whatever it is you had to look up.

Sometime that works, and I have no problem with that. Some teachers will introduce words like that and then use them multiple times.

I just looked at the worksheet for a lesson on inseparable verbs. The exercise was a list of 50 verbs I'd never seen before and a line to list the English translation. I can't see exactly how that would magically teach me 50 new verbs. That's the kind of exercise I think I'm going to start skipping.
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