Overlearning FSI or doing FSI and DLI

[sfuqua]

The audiolingual FSI and DLI courses were originally intended to be studied to the point of overlearning. Would it be better to overlearn one course or to do two courses?

[Speakeasy]

We've Been There, We've Done That
There are two "camps": those who appreciate the benefits of the audio-lingual method (or, at the very least, the audio-lingual materials) and those who decry its deficiencies. I cannot see how throwing more kindling onto the smoldering embers of this debate will change anyone's position. Still, ...

Why Not Have Your Cake and Eat It?
Why not overlearn both the FSI and the DLI courses?

Overlearning – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlearning

Audio-lingual method – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-lingual_method

Overlearning for Independent Learners
As many members have commented in previous discussion threads, although we can be assured that the FSI and DLI courses were quite intensive, we do not really know how the FSI/DLI audio-lingual materials were used in actual practice. In any event, it is unlikely that an independent learner, short of becoming a hermit during a 6-month period, could recreate the conditions in which over-learning occurred. A few years ago, in the desire to recreate similar conditions, I tried “burning through” the dialogues and sentence-pattern drills of the FSI, DLI, and Assimil first-level and second-level courses for German. As I am retired, I had the luxury of setting my own pace, which I established at around 6 hours of practice per day. I appreciate that this level of concentration does not seem like much in comparison to the 24 hours per day that are theoretically available. Nevertheless, I found the pace difficult to sustain. Although I did experience improvement in my ability to juggle the materials, I cannot say with confidence that the benefits that I derived were worth the sustained mental and physical effort. A six-month sojourn in Germany would have been immeasurably more pleasant.

Final Thoughts
I am not convinced that “overlearning” the dialogues and sentence-pattern drills of any set of audio-lingual materials is necessary to deriving a great deal of benefit from them. I suspect that “developing a level of comfort” with such materials would be a more optimal use of one’s time and energy and, from my perspective, this extends to the Assimil courses, the Glossika files, and just about anything else in the genre.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Difficult to say, it probably depends on how well you know your stuff when you consider it "good enough". If I were to use both FSI and DLI, I'd find a way to review what "should be" reviewed. Dialogues, preferably other dialogues but with similar content, or grammar exercises on the same topic.

You don't want to work with content to the point where you know it by heart. By then, you also know the drills by heart. If I listen to the same lesson* more than once (in a relatively short time span), I have less of a problem giving a correct answer the second time - not because I know the grammar/vocabulary better, but because I may (now) remember the very answer from the previous listen...

* During my Pimsleur days (2006/2007), I sometimes listened to a lesson twice, with the above result.

[Xmmm]

I would like to see some estimates from the experts. What is the "rate of exchange" between one hour of drilling with Glossika/FSI and one hour of live conversation?

In my own limited experience, 50 hours on Italki had a miraculous effect to the point where I became able to talk for an hour in the TL ... with frequent hesitation, with circumlocutions, with plenty of mistakes -- and yet live, comprehensible, not canned output but totally free-form speech.

Whereas 50 hours of Glossika had the effect of automatizing a few patterns.

My own guess is that 1 hour of live conversation = 10 hours of drilling, particularly in sfuqua's case where he already has a high level of receptive skill (in Spanish at least).

I'm personally souring on drills and wondering if I'm just not trying to avoid the hassles of doing Italki. In fact, I plan to reactivate Italki in 2018 ...

[Cainntear]

I agree with jeff_lindqvist.

If I look at a list of words or drills too often, I just end up memorising the list. At that point I end up just reeling off the memorised list without thinking about the meaning.

It's the same sort of memorisation that singers can use to memorise songs in languages they don't speak, which doesn't lead to meaningful learning.

Some people can do more reps without the tasks becoming meaningless than other people can. I personally can't repeat at all within several days without my head starting to memorise the lists.

[iguanamon]

There's no "magic bullet" in language-learning.. at least not one that I've found. Despite the value I place on the DLI Basic Courses I have done they aren't the magic bullet. The drills are designed to help make the patterns automatic. What really makes them automatic is using them in speech and writing, for me, in my experience. I've done two DLI Basic courses, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. I finished them both. They have served their purpose. They gave me a good foundation. The rest is up to me to provide.

I think if I were in sfuqua's place, instead of " over-learning" I would finish FSI Basic Spanish, since there's only 25% left to go. That's very doable. I would also start writing in Spanish and/or talking to actual Spanish-speakers on a regular basis. This is what cements the concepts in my mind.

I would do the DLI Basic French, skipping over what I've already covered and jumping in where I would feel comfortable. I have looked at the DLI French Basic Course. It seems to be very similar to the two other DLI courses I did. That's what I did with the Portuguese Basic Course. I jumped in at Volume 4. As much as I valued the DLI Basic course, as thorough and dense as it is, it still isn't enough on its own.

I was around at HTLAL when the OP "over-learned" Assimil Spanish with Ease". So, if I were him, I'd ask myself if that was worth it before I'd undertake doing the same thing again with different courses.

[tarvos]

This is like trying to learn chess from YouTube videos memorizing lines without ever sitting down to play over-the-board yourself.

[sfuqua]

Oh, don't worry everybody. I just think that there is some cool stuff in these courses that I would like to learn. I'm going to "explore" them, not memorize them. I'll shadow them with the book once and without the book once, and then go read or watch native speaker input.
I always figured that, except for maybe the very early stages, the audio-lingual courses were only useful if you lack opportunities to practice with real people.
I certainly remember my results with Assimil; if i ever need to tell someone about Baldomero's problems, I'll be well prepared.

[s_allard]

Let me first apologize for coming late to the party. Maybe all has been said and done. I was intrigued by this idea of overlearning - something that I had never heard of - and how it can be applied to language learning. I also have to thank the OP for leading me - indirectly - to the FSI learning materials for German. Although much of the material is quaint and outdated, I did find a lot of it useful.

To come back to this business of overlearning, my understanding from poking around the Net is that this is the concept of continuing to learn or at least practice a new skill for a certain time even after having arrived at a level of mastery. Simple enough and it seems to be effective in certain areas. But what about languages?

With reference to the FSI materials in particular that were designed in the 1960's and meant for the classroom, am I to believe that overlearning here refers to continued memorization of the contents beyond a certain level that is considered satisfactory? Here is what one observer says:

Accelerate Progress
Overlearning takes you past the point of awareness, beyond recognition, into the thoughtless automatic recall necessary for fluent speech. When you string out your practice, you will find yourself dangling over a precipice on a shoestring! You want, rather, to build up your skill and control of a narrower range of really useful and flexible phrases and patterns.

It is better to learn well a smaller range of materials or structures than to learn poorly a wider range that you have to struggle with every time you try to recall something. It helps to accelerate progress for the learner to practice a lot through repetition, then go use that same bit a lot in real usage situations. What you use sticks with you.
http://orvillejenkins.com/techniques/overlearntech.html

I certainly can't argue with this. This is exactly what I have been advocating for years and now applying to my study of German.

But I have a beef with calling this overlearning. Why "over"? To me it's just plain common sense. And frankly I don't understand how one can overlearn a language if learning a language means learning to use the language. Let's say I learn German to B2 level. That's my proficiency level. I am at B2. How can I overlearn this? I certainly would want to maintain my proficiency level through various activities. I may even keep studying to attain C1 or higher but I don't see how I can overlearn a language skill that I have mastered.

I wonder if we are perhaps mixing up overlearning with overstudying. In this case I'm going over the same material because I want to memorize it more completely. But I'm not really learning anything new. I'm repeating until the target material becomes second-nature.

But that's exactly what we want. If I use Audacity to shadow some dialogue that I repeat at different speeds until I'm satisfied, should I add some more repetitions as overlearning? As the author quoted above says, I have to use what I have learned. If that doesn't work well, then I have to study more.

As others have pointed out here, the real issue is learning to use the language. Studying and overlearning for themselves seem very inefficient to me.

[reineke]

"Overlearning refers to the continued training of a skill after performance improvement has plateaued. Whether overlearning is beneficial is a question in our daily lives that has never been clearly answered. Here we report a new important role: overlearning in humans abruptly changes neurochemical processing, to hyperstabilize and protect trained perceptual learning from subsequent new learning. Usually, learning immediately after training is so unstable that it can be disrupted by subsequent new learning until after passive stabilization occurs hours later. However, overlearning so rapidly and strongly stabilizes the learning state that it not only becomes resilient against, but also disrupts, subsequent new learning. "

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4490


The Power of Overlearning

"When you want to learn something new, you practice. Once you get the hang of it, you can hopefully do what you learned—whether it’s parallel parking or standing backflips—on the next day, and the next. If not, you fall back to stage one and practice some more.
But your brain may have a shortcut that helps you lock in learning. Instead of practicing until you’re decent at something and then taking a siesta, practicing just a little longer could be the fast track to solidifying a skill. “Overlearning” is the process of rehearsing a skill even after you no longer improve. Even though you seem to have already learned the skill, you continue to practice at that same level of difficulty. A recent study suggests that this extra practice could be a handy way to lock in your hard-earned skills.
In the experiment, participants were asked to look at a screen and say when they saw a stripe pattern. Then two images were flashed one after the other. The images were noisy, like static on an old TV, and only one contained a hard-to-see stripe pattern. It took about twenty minutes of practice for people to usually recognize the image with stripes in it. The participants then continued to practice for another twenty minutes for the overlearning portion...

Next, the participants took a break before spending another twenty minutes learning a similar “competitor” task where the stripes were oriented at a new angle. Under normal circumstances, this second task would compete with the first and actually overwrite that skill, meaning people should now be able to detect the second pattern but no longer see the first. The researchers wanted to see if overlearning could prevent the first skill from disappearing.
The next day, researchers tested the participants to see which stripe patterns they could still detect. Remarkably, those participants who spent an extra twenty minutes practicing with the first pattern could not only perform the overlearned task, but they could not perform the second task. Somehow, extending their practice had crystallized the first task and blocked out competing learning afterwards. As researcher Kazuhisa Shibata says, overlearning made the first skill “resilient.”

Practicing something new seems to activate a period of learning (and unlearning) as the balance of neurotransmitters changes in the brain. Researcher Takeo Watanabe explains that overlearning can cut that period short. “In a sense, it makes the hot brain cool down.”
Overlearning is probably helpful for quick motor sequences as in basketball or ballet. For other things we typically commit to memory, like languages or facts, overlearning has not been rigorously tested. Watanabe notes that these functions tend to use less specialized information processing in the brain. Compared with vision or motion, there is more of the competition effect when learning two similar things. Watanabe speculates that overlearning might work even better here. “I think there are more cases of interference in higher cognitive memory,” he said, and “overlearning may be more effective.”
Years of research point to sleep as essential for entrenching memories. A study used sleep to cement motor learning in much the same way that overlearning was used to enhance visual learning. People who took a midday nap could produce similar results to overtraining, at least when measured on the following day—someone asked to tap fingers to thumb quickly in a given order was able to avoid overwriting that skill with a different sequence if they napped for ninety minutes in between training sessions. Unfortunately, most people cannot take a ninety minute nap every time they learn something important. However, sleep may better preserve memory after overlearning, so the two might act as a useful combination.

But what about when we don’t want to overlearn? In real life, we sometimes want to learn more than one similar task. In that case, we’d prefer avoiding the competition between skills altogether, so we can retain all of them. The researchers found that participants could be trained to detect both stripe patterns, but this process required more time.

Even when we do want to overlearn, we cannot overdo the training or we may actually reverse our gains. There is more to discover about where in our lives overlearning is relevant, and how much is actually helpful.

Still, when we want to learn something well and learn it fast, this scientific finding tells us to not underestimate the value of pushing on with practice when it seems unnecessary. “Overlearning is not useless,” says Shibata. Gesturing to the back of his head, where visual learning takes place, he says, “Although there is no further improvement, something happens.” Whether you are are picking up an obscure language like Esperanto or learning to spot Waldo with your kids, overlearning might preserve the skills you really need."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... rlearning/