Do you take notes?

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yossarian
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby yossarian » Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:06 pm

tarvos wrote:I think the question is also "take notes when doing what exactly?"


Good question. I think you could probably divide notes into two categories, proactive and reactive. Proactive notes are made when you're reading a textbook and learn a new bit of grammar you weren't aware of before, reactive notes when you try to use the language and have your mistakes corrected - even if this is just correcting your own understanding of a sentence you've read by looking up something in the textbook, you still have the experience of searching for that answer.

I would argue that reactive notes are lot more useful, since you have an experience associated with the concept you're trying to learn which is sure to help you remember it better.
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Uncle Roger
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Uncle Roger » Fri Apr 27, 2018 2:42 pm

Yes. I've lifted tens of rules and examples from grammar books and chucked them into my Anki decks.

Paper is completely useless for me by now, I don't even believe in the mechanical aspect of writing down things, but I must say the language I'm focusing on has a very good correlation between phonemes and graphemes.
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zKing
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby zKing » Sat Apr 28, 2018 7:20 am

Iversen wrote:LunaMoonsilver has a good point: she tends to skim unless she takes notes, and so do I for the the same reason: I also am lazy unless I do something physical to counteract that tendency. This is also one of my main reasons for copying the texts I use for intensive study instead of just reading them.


I totally agree!
I've just recently realized that I'm a very fidgety language learner: I need to have something to do when doing "input", particularly when I'm supposed to be listening. If not, my mind will wander or I'll fallback to just reading the text too much if I'm LRing.

Taking notes scratches that itch, but I also need to be careful that my notes don't then turn into another distracting side project of formatting and collecting cards/lists and so on. Honestly in most cases if I just throw them away after I'm OK with that. I try to avoid collecting too much stuff that will suck me into flashcard/list study instead of interacting with real content.
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Bunnychu » Wed May 02, 2018 5:42 am

I definitely take more notes than I should have. I'm not even a strong intermediate level in Korean and I think I have 3 full notebooks. Writing makes me unwind ^.^. On some level I do think it helps me memorize words and grammar points but I think I went a bit overboard. This makes me rethink my whole approach. :?
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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Iversen » Wed May 02, 2018 3:54 pm

Is it really possible to take too many notes? Yes and no.

If you deliberately do an extensive activity your main objective should be to keep the momentum, and disturbances should be kept at a very low level. You may have to look a word up to understand a passage in a text, and that may be worth the price - though if you don't immediately find something useful it would probably be better to leave the passage behind you in the darkness and keep on reading. The same can be said about taking notes: if you can jot a word or two down without losing the continuity in your reading it is OK. Writing a long essay lures you away from the real purpose of reading the text (or listening to a film or whatever else you are doing).

On the contrary: if you have chosen to work intensively on a passive activity like reading or listening then your goal is to learn as much as possible from it, and then you have to accept to make the necessary stops. Or if you have planned to write an essay or do a talk in front of a paying audience then you will probably try to keep the number of errors as low as possible and the stylistic level as close to heaven as possible - and then you would probably do the kind of preparation that results in a heap of notes.

Another question: what do you do with your notes? And here I'll just refer to what I do with my old wordlists: I throw them away.

I may do one or two repetition rounds, but after that I don't want to continue wallowing around in the same old words. Either I have learnt them or for some reason I failed to do so, and in both cases my time will be better spent on making a new list with new words. The only exception to this attitude to notes is that I do keep notes I intend to use for a specific purpose, like a speech at a polyglot gathering. Those I gather in a special catalogue on my 'puter, and I guard them as zealously as Smaug the dragon guarded the hidden treasure in the Tolkien's Hobbit.

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Re: Do you take notes?

Postby Sayquoi » Wed May 02, 2018 11:04 pm

I play videogames in French and whenever I spot a new word I write it down with it's translation. Helps it stick in my mind knowing I've seen it before. After about a year of doing this I've only ran into about 500 of them. Honestly most of them are just weird adjectives or locutions.
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