I’d like to blatantly plug an article from All Japanese All The Time, named “Popping Bubblewrap: Tips for Better SRS Sentence Items“. ‘Why?’, you ask? Because it’s a must-read for everyone who is seriously working with sentences in a SRS program (I hope you are, otherwise you’re missing some wicked progress boost).
Khatzumoto over at AJATT (you might replace Japanese for Spanish if you like) states that SRS sentences shouldn’t be too long. I never added long sentences to Anki, but only because I thought long sentences are no fun to work with (just like he says, but something I never thought of writing about). A normal sentence would contain up to 15 characters.
Now, Spanish is written with the latin alphabet, and it isn’t that one Kanji/Hanzi character represents one word, so I think it’s safe to say that a typical Spanish – English (or any other language) sentence in your SRS should contain about 10 to 12 words.
A question for my readers: do YOU use sentences for your daily learning? If so, how long is a typical sentences in your SRS?
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SRS Practices: Writing Down Your Sentences
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I actually do on a regular basis, I’ve got right now about 500 sentences that I’ve been collecting lately and which are ready to get memorised when I’ll feel up to do it. I’ve already got thousands of sentences in my database.
But, the thing is that my sentences tend to be terribly long, in fact, they are not sentences at all, they are quotes, pieces of scripts from films and thinks like that. I’m not surprised at what you said anyway, SRS is just a tool and I’ve heard of people using it in a wide variety of manners, just what suits them better.
I think it’s very interesting what you said. You said sentences should be short just to quickly add you’ve been doing that without even realising, just because you have more fun that way. Great, but what if it was funnier the other way round?
Of course you always can think in terms of pure efficiency, I also tend to think shorter is more efficient, in this case more efficient in terms of time. Maybe it’s just that I don’t consider effecienty that important. Anyway, have you considered that long sentences can have some advantages too?. For example:
- Redundancy: a expression appears several times, one time by itself and the others as context for others items. That’s more input.
- 100 % retention. I never forget one of those cards, and I mean never. It’s different with other kind of cards which I keep forgeting and I’ve got to star again and see them the next couple of weeks, just boring.
- More text, more opportunities to read aloud every day, something important to someone like me, because I don’t speak in my target language, I rather do the whole thing passively. That way I force myself to practice pronunciation.
- Fun: obviously it’s funnier for me.
Of course, if you like long sentences and they’re not confusing: go for it. But a lot of people don’t like long sentences (including me) because they tend to be confusing, and that’s exactly what takes the fun away.
Going for quotes and script is a great thing, even more if you have a (near) 100% retention. But again; watch out that the sentences aren’t confusing.
What kind of sentences do you like? I mean, where do you get them from? I suppose I could shorten my sentences and keep the same retention but the ones I can’t cope wiht are random sentences from dictionaries or language courses. it’s so boring, and the retention is not the same. I’ve surfed your blog a bit and there are things like “la gasolina es más cara que el gasoil”. Do you really stay motivated with this? It’s amazing
I have a vocabulary book with about 5700 example sentences. So Spanish with it’s Dutch equivalent. I don’t add all sentences, only the ones I like (there is a whole slang chapter in it, so that’s cool anyway) and might find useful.
Further I add sentences from the textbooks I use in college and from books I read for fun (latest one: La conspiración of Dan Brown, which has some excellent parts if you want to get your head around the pasados). But again; I keep it short, even cutting longer sentences into smaller sentences (if I find them difficult to understand).
I forgot to say, I’m not really sure if I’ve understood what a confusing sentence is, I mean, are they confusing because of its length, or because they have bits of grammar far ahead your current level, unknown vocabulary or what? Perhaps is Spanish grammar which is too complicated, Spanish is my native tongue, so I suppose I underestimate its difficulty. Do you have the same feeling of confusing sentences while learning English? (just in case you still did, I think I read you are not an English native speaker)
Well, English is my second (native) language. I don’t speak it like a native, but I never had to learn it as I was raised with the language. So yes, Spanish is the first language I actually have to learn.
So what do I mean with confusing sentences? That can be everything; way too much unknown vocab, grammar that’s way ahead of my current level, etc., etc.
At the moment I don’t think Spanish grammar is too complicated, but there ARE some parts of it that I simply don’t understand that well…
Interesting post! What I found really cool is that I’ve been doing these “SRS sentences” without really knowing that I have.
I’ve been watching Telenovelas to improve my Spanish and have been entering new words and phrases into a flashcard program I have. I enter sentences for two reasons: I feel this sentence, along with the grammar and vocab, are useful, or; I need to keep the word that I’m learning in context in order to know how it’s used.
Personally I’ve found that when I build up a bunch of sentences to memorize, I eventually don’t bother memorizing them as there never occurs a time where I’m like “hey, I feel like learning a hundred sentences”. So I like to keep a tight reign on learning. By this I mean that I’ll watch 10 minutes of the telenovela, create my sentences, try to memorize them, and then proceed by watching that 10 minute segment again once or twice. After that, despite not necessarily having learnt everything perfectly, I move on and don’t look back!
I can’t assure this is the best technique to learn. However I do learn, and I’m keeping it enjoyable (which is my number 1 priority as this is a pastime for me and not (necessarily) a career move or for education purposes.
What kinds of places do you guys get your sentences from?
Wow thesmithtopher, it’s more or less the same I’ve been doing lately. Do you use subtitles to get the sentences? Have you tried to split scenes and add them to the SRS program for listening practice?
Ramses, how does your typical flashcard look? I mean, it seems you use bilingual cards, don’t you?. How do you manage synonyms? It was actually that problem which made me give up the sentences from dictionaries. It can became really annoying as your database grows.
I use bilingual cards, yes, but I’m planning to move on to monolingual cards as soon as I feel confident with the language (and I think that moment is coming very soon).
With synonyms: I do have some, but like you said in your comment it can be tiresome to guess parts. Therefore I add ‘normal’ sentences. But, with monolingual sentences I guess you won’t encounter this problem.