In the last post I pointed out why I think using a Spaced Repetition System is a good thing to do, and what SRSs there are around. Now that you’ve set up the program of your choice you’re probably wondering; “now what?“. In this post I’ll try to point out what the possibilities are (and what I think you should do - you’re always free to come up with your own formula (if you do, please share this in the comments)).
First of all, I’m a hardcore user of Anki (without doubt the most popular SRS today). And there’s a good reason I use it. Not only is Damien (the creator of the program) working on it actively, it also has MANY features I use daily. One of main features I use the most is the sound option. It’s just very easy to add audio to an item, which greatly improves your listening comprehension in the long run.
Tip: In the past I used the free FSI course to collect sentences from. To get the audio from the files I’d use Audacity (free software) to select the sentence in question and save it as mp3 file (be sure to download the mp3 codec from the internet - google for it). Then I’d simply type in the sentence in the question field and add the audio for the sentence (or only add the audio so that I had to transcribe the sentence, which makes things more difficult but more fun as well).
In my opinion, the only right way to use an SRS is to only add sentences. Next to that I’m only going for the direction Spanish -> English (Spanish sentence on front, English on the answer side) or Spanish -> Spanish (explanation of the sentence in Spanish on the answer side).
I never go English -> Spanish. Why not? There are simply too many ways of translating an English sentence into Spanish, and in the beginning you’re bound to make mistakes (which is bad, because these errors will ingrain). The goal of doing SRS repetitions is getting comprehensible input, so Spanish -> English will do the trick (and also makes life easier, believe me).
So, why do I only add full sentences? First of all; learning single vocubulary items results in rote-memorizing because there’s no context provided. Second of all; by seeing sentences you’re not only learning new words and expressions but are also learning to use the grammar without even knowing it! Sounds simple, right?
The main problem, however, is that is can be a bit tricky to find good sentences that are both fun and practical (in other words: teaching you both vocabulary and grammar).
You should always keep in mind that it’s not a case of collecting thousands of random sentences. You sure want to have many sentences at some time, but you have to be sure that it are sentences you want to learn and that are useful to you at this moment. Re-read that last sentence and memorize it.
Some ways of collecting sentences are using courses (like the earlier mentioned FSI course) and grammar books. I also recommend using cheap phrase books (in terms of price, mostly the quality is very high) to get sentences.
In a follow-up post I’ll cover some great sources for sentences (one of which is produced by me).
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