[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[lojban] Re: flashcards?
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.
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.