[lojban] Re: flashcards?

["Chris Capel" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 6/26/06, Paul Vigo <paulvigo@gmail.com> wrote:
> Chris Capel wrote:
> > That's debatable. As I said earlier, a good flashcard program will
> > earn you only about 15% additional retention on top of the 80%
> > retention you have for new words introduced amidst a full context.
> > (I.e. only about 1 of every 200-400 words is unfamiliar. Retention
> > probably starts dropping when there are more unfamiliar words than
> > that.) And it does take a lot of time to use. Is the 15% you gain more
> > valuable than more time doing additional reading? Or grammar
> > exercises? Or only reviewing trouble words? Or something else?
>
> This is the whole point, if you are only getting 15% retention then you
> have overcommitted with your flashcard program.

At first I thought this was a misreading, but now I think it's a bit
more likely you meant to say "If you're only gaining 15% retention,
you're putting too many easy words into the program. You should only
put harder to remember words in there".

The trouble with this approach, I think, is that it's impossible to
tell how much trouble you're going to have with any individual word in
the future. If you forget it the first time, you might remember it the
next time, and if not, the time after that. By the time you notice
it'd be a good candidate for a flash card program, it's just as likely
(or even a little more) to be remembered without flashcards as
completely new words would be. Forgetting a word three times doesn't
mean you're more likely to forget it the fourth time than to remember
it. And yes, there will be a few words you forget four times. But only
about 10-20% the number that you forget three times. So entering a
word that you've forgotten three times will gain you, at most, one
remembered word on the fourth encounter per five entered. And that's
still pretty hard to justify, I think.

> 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.

I think the best way to avoid this is to pace yourself more slowly,
and review old texts a few times until you're adequately comfortable
with them, rather than introducing external things like flash card
programs into the mix.

And, as I've said before, I'm not entirely confident in this
judgement. I think, though, that if a flash card program would be at
all useful, it would be in the kind of supplementary capacity you're
talking about, and if the costs of entering new words were very low.

Here's an idea. Another web application. This one contains
repositories of lojban texts, graded by difficulty. The plain texts
are parsed and decorated with javascript so that you can mouse-over
particular words to see glosses of them, or click to add the word to a
online flashcard-style review.

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)


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