Retrieval: Free recall, cued recall, and recognition

[Kraut]

from the Glossika newsletter

Retrieval: Free recall, cued recall, and recognition | MCAT | Khan Academy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhyk2bRTguI

The basic idea is that it takes less effort to acknowledge information than it does to pull it out of a hat. In order of increasing difficulty:

Recognition — The capital of New York is Albany.

Cued recall — What’s the capital of Argentina? Bue…

Free recall — What’s the capital of Lebanon?


In other words:


The Spanish word for bronchitis, which I currently have, is bronquitis. When you see that Spanish word, bells ring in your brain and you connect this floating bit of new information to grounded bits of old information… even if you don’t speak Spanish!


When you go the other direction, things aren’t as simple. You’ve only got one piece of information, not two. You start with bronchitis and then have to stumble through the dark trying to remember where you filed away bronquitis.


— What this means for your language training —


Immediately, we’re faced with a dilemma: for the same amount of effort, we can either (a) recognize many more words but be able to recall fewer, or (b) recall slightly more words but recognize fewer on the whole.

If your main goal is consuming content, option (a) gets you there faster

If your main goal is conversing, option (b) will likely mean less frustration early on


And forevermore, we’ll be sparring with a few questions:

Do I need conscious access to this {item} now? Eventually?

Is it good enough to just recognize this {item}?

Can I safely ignore this {item}?


In Week 2 I suggested that you talk to yourself as an intermediary step toward your first “real” conversation. This is part of that. Each time you use a word, you’re leaving a little breadcrumb behind that will make it easier to find later.


Next week we’ll look more at why words in foreign languages feel like ghosts, whereas those in our native languages feel concrete and three-dimensional — and what we can do about that.


Oh, and most importantly? If you find yourself forgetting words you “know”, there’s nothing wrong with you or your memory. All it means is that you need to put in a few more reps. You’ll get there.

[Cainntear]

from the Glossika newsletter

Retrieval: Free recall, cued recall, and recognition | MCAT | Khan Academy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhyk2bRTguI

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The basic idea is that it takes less effort to acknowledge information than it does to pull it out of a hat.
...
The Spanish word for bronchitis, which I currently have, is bronquitis. When you see that Spanish word, bells ring in your brain and you connect this floating bit of new information to grounded bits of old information… even if you don’t speak Spanish!

This is weird. Why have they chosen to use the example of a totally transparent word that is utterly trivial to comprehend? And it sidesteps the issue of false friends totally -- for an example closely related to "bronquitis", see "constipado"!

There's a difference between knowing you've seen the word before and knowing what it means, and quite often it's the context as much as the past experience that tells you what it actually means.

When you go the other direction, things aren’t as simple. You’ve only got one piece of information, not two. You start with bronchitis and then have to stumble through the dark trying to remember where you filed away bronquitis.

But isn't that a better thing? You have to condition yourself to see the two things as one, not two.

The way I see it, productive practice forces you to "know" it (savoir, saber) and not to simply "know" it (connaitre, conocer).

I personally think that it's very easy to kid yourself on about how much you know when talking about receptive skills, but it's only the productive ones that make you face the hard truth.
I therefore disagree with the idea that the choice is between knowing lots of words for listening and knowing a smaller number of words for speaking, because as you get deeper and deeper into a language, you'll have bigger gaps between hearing new words, and repetitions of the new words.
You'll then be encountering sentences with more and more words that you're kind of fuzzy on the meaning of, and that will just make more and more uncertainty.

[Iversen]

Not even recognition:
Recognition — The capital of New York is Albany.
Cued recall — What’s the capital of Argentina? Bue…
Free recall — What’s the capital of Lebanon?

I have never trusted multiple choice tests, precisely because they only test recognition. When I first bought and studied a Serbian dictionary I could guess roughly a third of the words, but at that point I didn't KNOW more than a handful. The rest was guesswork, based on loanwords and similaritites with words in other languages - including Danish! OK, then you have a place to start, but you shouldn't think you are an ace.

Cued recall - well, slighty more relevant. See below.

Free recall: what you need to use a language actively, but hard to quantify, I just know that I can produce most of my words in Danish and far fewer in my weaker languages, even when I know thousands of words according to my dictionary based wordcounts. So in my weak languages I not only know fewer words, but I have also more trouble to recall the few I ought to know.

So the challenge is to invent settings where you need to use some words you definitely have seen (or heard) - and cued recall is enough there. I know that there are pedagogical materials with sentences missing one word. OK, relevant but not my cup of tea. I prefer real texts which I have chosen myself, and my faulty memory will automatically supply the holes.When I think in weak languages it's often as some kind of translation ecercise mixed with a dicussion of something I just have read. And hey, then there are cues in my immediate surroundings which help me to remember elements from dormant passive vocabulary. Free recall would be harder, but not better since it will limit to things I already know quite well. In contrast cued recall draws on things that are in the grey zone between active and passive, and those are the words you are most likely to pull into your active vocabulary.

Totally free recall will present itself at your doorstep when you are ready.