On Jun 21, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Chris Capel wrote:
On 6/20/06, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:Is it best to recommend flash cards for the learning of vocabulary? [...] My fear is that flashcards are very inefficient compared to some optimal methods of quick, medium-retention learning.And besides techniques that will take much additional effort to complete, are there learning techniques using existing material that make flash cards a waste of time? If so, it would probably be possible to just put together a "lesson plan" using the existing material that people can follow along with. I would imagine it would end up looking a lot like Lojban for Beginners, except with many, many more practice exercises to do.
The big question is how fast to you want to pick up vocabulary. I've never used flash cards for Lojban. However my vocabulary is probably still under 100 gismu after a year or two. But I've also picked up almost that many cmavo and grammatical ideas in the same time. The gismu I know are all words for things I use frequently. Like I went through a period of looking up how to name the things I was eating for lunch that day, and then making sentences in my head describing them using other words I knew.
On the other hand, I've drilled with flash cards often enough for Spanish classes at school. The difference is that they place words in short term memory (at least for me) so that I knew them for a while and then forgot them after a while. My view on memory is that you remember best what you use. So I try to learn rather than memorizing by picking words that I can put together a bunch of sentences for right away, and just adding a few words to my vocabulary at a time.
However, if you want to learn Lojban quickly, daily flash card sessions are the way to go. If you practice regularly with the flash cards, eventually you should learn them instead of just having them memorized. At least, I assume so -- I've never drilled regularly with flash cards.
Which reminds me of a third option -- the way I learned ions and elements in Chemistry. Drill with flash cards for a while until you have them memorized, and them do a bunch of problems which assume you already know all of the material from the cards. If you do the problems regularly and look up things you don't know, that should shift the information from short term into long term memory.
Chris Capel -- "What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?" -- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)
mu'omi'e .aleks.