Chris Capel wrote:
[ li'o ]
When reading the larger the number of words you don't know or are
unfamiliar with, the more likely you are to lose comprehension. I
used to teach remedial english (particularly to dyslexics) and
learned a few things about language acquisition. When doing
comprehension and reading excercises and someone misreads a word,
often the problem is residual confusion from a previous unfamiliar
word in the sentence (or previous sentence). Vocabulary confusion
seems to compound with the number of novel words encountered, and
retention of novel words is reduced in proportion to this
confusion. The brain sticks to things it doesn't know, waiting for
the clarity of understanding so that it can imprint new knowledge -
when several unknowns pop up at once this process loses clarity and
learning is reduced.
It is becuase of this property of learning that overcommitting with
a flashcard program is counterproductive, but it is also because of
this property that flashcards make a useful contribution to context
based language learning. The familiarity with vocab they provide
reduces reduces the confusion one encounters due to the use of
novel vocab and allows reading retention to be more effective. With
lojban I think this may be particularly useful as many of the gismu
are complex (place structure variations can make a familiar seeming
word suddenly novel again) and many look pretty much the same
(cvccv / ccvcv) so are easy to confuse with other gismu when
unfamiliar.
Anyway I've probably ranted too much about this subject. It's
starting to feel off topic.
pavig