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[lojban] Re: flashcards?
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. You should only be
entering words you have encountered or wish to learn _right_now_ which
means that after a couple of drills they'll get dropped into the long
term repeat pile. Anything in your flashcard system should be something
you are trying to learn outside of the system. If you are truly picking
it up from external context it will disappear from that system soon enough.
Maybe a month down the track when you see it pop up again and REALLY
look at it you might decide you don't know it as well as you would like
to think you do - do you really know the full place structure of that
gismu or do you just use the most obvious places and forget about the rest.
The benefit of systems like this (contrary to the advertising of
supermemo and the like) is not that you could use them in isolation,
which is a rediculous way to try and learn anything, but that they offer
a different focus. Many beginners with these systems (and some old
hands) make the mistake of overcommitting cards to the system in the
hope that they'll learn them through endlessly drilling the cards. This
is not a good way to learn. Flashcard systems should be viewed more like
an informal dynamic quiz that you set yourself. You quickly find out how
well you know things you have been trying to learn and what needs more
work. This is something which happens naturally as well, but it's hard
to know if you're simply avoiding or just not encountering them - for
some reason i can never remember gismu catra, because i just don't think
about killing in the course of a standard day, but i notice this because
i get drilled on it.
No doubt, if you want to learn a big list of words, and you don't want
to read a text that introduces them naturally and in context, a flash
card method is great. But if you need to be reading that text anyway,
then is the flash card a waste of time?
Reading text works a charm, and the only things that should be in your
flashcard system are the words you keep encountering that you have to
look up. A big list of words in your flashcard system (unless they are
mostly words you have committed previously and know well) is a really
bad way of learning. Never go above about 20 new words at a time, and
wait till most of them have disappeared before committing many more.
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
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