It has been a while since I talked about the wonderful Spaced Repetition System. It’s not that I don’t like them anymore, it’s just because everything seems to be written about it, leaving little for me to tell.
Today’s subject is something probably many talked about before me, and they probably did it better as well. But I don’t care, not all of you know those people and if you do; a little bit of repetition won’t hurt you.
So, collecting sentences for your SRS. Personally, I often feel no sentence is good enough for my deck, leaving me with little to no new sentences. Khatzumoto of AJATT seems to want to add just about everything there is to add. He thinks that many are like him, but I tend to think many are like me (I guess we’re both a bit narcistic, hehe). Either way, both flavours are possible.
Khatzumoto’s “problem” is at least less grave; he adds too much and then deletes a bunch, but in the end he has quite some sentences left. I add a little and delete. Result: my deck isn’t growing and sometimes even gets smaller. My problem, like I said: I think most sentences just don’t have “it”.
To me, a sentence that has “it” has the following qualities:
- Input + 1 (just one or two new words or a new grammar point).
- Is clear without further explanation.
- Isn’t dry/dull.
- Contains real language.
- Is useful for me.
That means that I often don’t collect sentences from books I’m reading. It can be a perfect sentence regarding the input + 1 principle, but is dry as hell at the same time. On the other hand it can be a really funny sentence, but with too many unknown/difficult words. So do I add it to my deck? No. Should I do it? Probably, yes.
That’s why I love dictionaries so much. They contain sentences of the right size, aren’t heavy with difficult words in their examples and are even funny at times.
So what I do when I see a new word (I’m past adding sentences for the sake of learning a new grammatical structure) is looking if the original context is okay. If not, I’ll look for a good example sentence in a dictionary. Chances are that the sentence from the dictionary is often way better than the original sentence.
Still, I recommend you using the original sentence when you can. Why? Simply because it’ll help you remember the word/concept/whatever better, simply because you know the broader context (chapter, book, story, song) and thus have an emotional connection with that context. Do you have an emotional connection with your dictionary sentences? Often not.
Photo by jetheriot
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Why sentences are so damn important
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I haven't used my SRS in a long time. Whenever I'm inputting cards I always feel like I'd be spending my time better watching TV Shows or reading something new. SRS helped me a bunch the 2-3 years I was doing it though!!
I quit using my SRS for Spanish some months ago because I switched to French and because I'm already fluent in Spanish.
Still, I've been thinking about picking it up again to get a larger vocabulary (very important, as I'll attend college in Spain next year).
I've been thinking of starting up an SRS for Spanish since I'm new at it, but I haven't yet. Still focusing on audio input. That's pretty cool that you'll be going to college in Spain. How long will you be studying there? And what are you going to study?
I'll be studying there for 6 months. Don't know exactly what classes I'll take, but I'll at least take a class 'Spanish for foreigners' to see how they teach Spanish in Spain (not to get better at Spanish
).
Maybe history or linguistics?
: D
I often added the sentences from my textbook which I use in the Uni, or from the articles in those newspaper like elpais or 20minutos. : )
But when i realised that there're often more than 2 new words each sentence, I started using examples from WordReference and FreeDictionary : D
I think the reason Katzumoto finds it so easy to add new sentences is because of how distinct Japanese is from English. Kanji and Kana are exciting; the Latin alphabet is old news. I think the fact that everything in Spanish starts looking familiar after a while (even new material) makes SRSing a real pain.
Yeah, I think you're right. When I was doing my short (but sweet) Mandarin experiment I loved the Hanzi. Latin alphabet? Neh…
French on the other hand is pretty cool, although it uses the Latin alphabet. They use many accents, some of which you'll never see in English or Spanish.
I would think about continuing to SRS Spanish in the background, even though you are fluent. Even a few minutes a day would be a good idea; with all your focus on French for a couple of years, you don't want your Spanish to regress after all that work do you?
Once I consider my Japanese to be far enough, I'm going to switch to French and I intend to continue my Japanese SRS file throughout (although I have a different problem than you- remembering the Kanji, which absolutely will start disappearing without reinforcement).
You're right. It isn't that the 'feeling' for the language disappears, because that will just grow because of input, but words and expressions I don't use/hear a lot will. So yeah, I'll start it up again (although I'll make a new deck to only work on vocabulary).
So, you mentioned on your twitter that 60% of your readers are from the United States. Why is that surprising? There are a lot of us… and we spend a LOT of time on the internet, haha. And, like in many other countries, we are required to take foreign language in school. Those who continue on to university are then required to take more foreign language, and then those who want to participate in the international professional world are pretty determined to become fluent in another language. Spanish, in particular, is popular because of the number of monolingual spanish-speakers here, so people of all education levels are interested in becoming fluent in order to be able to communicate with that growing population both professionally and casually.
If you're interested.. here's a snippet from Wikipedia..
"Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 34 million people aged 5 or older.[1] There are also 45 million Hispanics who speak Spanish as a first and second language [6] and there are 6 million Spanish students [7], making it the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking community, only after Mexico and ahead of Spain, Colombia and Argentina.[8] Roughly half of all U.S. Spanish speakers also speak English "very well", based on the self-assessment Census question respondents."
"A Simmons Market Research survey recorded that 19 percent of the U.S.'s Hispanic population speak only Spanish, 9.0 percent speak only English, 55 percent have limited English proficiency, and 17 percent are fully English-Spanish bilingual."
I have a few questions about SRS systems.
1) What are the most important features to have in an SRS system?
2) Why is Anki the best in your view?
3) I have saved 30,000 words and phrases in my Russian studies over a three and a half year period. I started refreshing my German last week and in one week have saved over 800 words and phrases, (just 189 yesterday), while reading content of interest that I am also listening to. Can you keep up with this volume of items in an SRS system?
4) We have a light version of an SRS system at LingQ. What would have to be added to it to make it attractive to the SRS aficionados?
5) How much time per day does the average Anki user spend on the system? What percentage of total language study time is spent on this activity?
I guess you want to improve LingQ, so I'll answer your questions in a way you can apply it to LingQ.
1) For me it's the option to easily add audio, images and text to it, enabling me to edit the layout and to add and delete certain fields.
For example, for my French deck I have four fields: audio, French, English and additional notes. Now, if I'm at a stage I don't need the English translation anymore, I can just add another field with the name "Explanation in French", disable the English field in the cards that come up (but it won't delete the English, in case I still want it in the future) so that I can focus on French only. So that's really important for me.
2) The things I mentioned are all possible with Anki, and it backs up your stuff (except for audio and images, unfortunately).
3) Yes, that's possible. You need to get the hang of it and always need to keep your SRS open in case you find something you want to add, but it's possible. Now, I've used LingQ in the past, and I agree: it's super easy to add things. Still, I don't like the fact it only takes over part of a sentence and not the whole sentence.
4) For me you'd need to add audio and image support. Some other people might want to have all the cool stats other SRSs have (not me though, I just want to learn and have a system with which I can add and delete fields myself).
5) A very small amount of time. I'd say 15 – 20 minutes per day to review items and then several short sessions throughout the day (all depends how heavy you are on adding new stuff, which would add to the amount of time you need to review). And I think at least 30 minutes per day to add stuff.
I'll answer too. I just started using Lingq for Spanish so I want to jump in.
1) same as Ramses – audio, imagines, customization of card layout and HTML styling of text (I color code words)
2) I like Anki because it has all the features in 1 and I can use it offline. It also let's you tweak reviews (I like to mix new cards with the due cards, and then do all missed cards at the end). And it has time-boxing built in. Plus its fast, and you can sync your decks online. Stats and graphs are cool too.
3) Yes
4) The thing I don't like about the Lingq SRS system is that it quizzes you on saved words and not sentences. I feel like drilling flashcards on individual words is a waste of time unless you are a total beginner. So I occasionally do flashcards for Spanish (total beginner) on lingq, but never do them for Japanese (advanced). I think I would find the Lingq SRS more useful if I could add my own cards/sentences to it directly. Then I could make lingqs from my own cards. It would be really nice to import an Anki deck into there and be able to lingq up all the words in my cards.
5) I spend about 30 minutes a day SRSing Japanese, usually in 5-10 minute blocks throughout the day. I read Japanese books/magazines and watch Japanese TV about 4-5 hours a day. I interact with Japanese people at my workplace. So about 10% or less of my language time is SRS time.
Ramses, thanks for the detailed reply That is very helpful. I do agree with the comment here that for learning strange writing systems, and especially Hanzi or Kanji, some form of SRS is extremely useful, especially at the beginning.
My problem is that I only have 45-60 minutes a day to spend on language learning and just find the listening and reading easier and more enjoyable. Most of my time is spent listening while doing other tasks. Even with audio SRS, find listening to words and phrases out of context very difficult to focus on. I need some meaning, a meaningful context.
But that is just me. We will be refining our Flash Card system at LingQ and your comments are greatly appreciated.
Yeah, I'm also a busy guy so I normally just take in like you do (although, SRSing is just another way to take in). There's no way I spend more than 60 minutes per day on my SRS deck.
Using an SRS isn't a replacement, it's a supplement to not forget things. However, the beauty of it is that you can adjust it to your needs, adding audio and images. An SRS should never be a replacement for real, meaningful, input.
Adding sentences to your SRS that come from books you read and things you listen to is superb. However, like I pointed out in this article, it's not always ideal to get that particular sentence. That's why I use dictionaries and an SRS; it's great to have a choice and not being limited to just the context you saw it in.
Everything is very open with a precise explanation of the challenges.
It was definitely informative. Your website is very useful.
Many thanks for sharing!