Flashcards and language learning

[Peter Bienstman]

Hi,

Not sure if this is interesting to anybody, but I thought I'd share how my methods for language learning have evolved over the years.

As you can image, I spent quite a lot of time doing flashcards, amassing more than 30k of them over more than a decade. However, when I started hitting 300 daily reps, I realised this was not sustainable anymore. So, that's why two years ago, in Mnemosyne 2.8, I added a feature to stop showing cards once they had a certain number of successive successful reviews.

That helped getting my workload under control, but after a while I started to realise that if you're doing a lot of flashcards, you're getting really good at... doing flashcards... I didn't really feel like the flashcards improved my actual language abilities a lot. This was even when using sentence cards, because I would often remember what a sentence meant simply by reading the first few words. So, reading the rest of the sentence had no more benefit.

Rather then using fixed sentences, I then started experimenting with having different sentences for a word each time. I initially thought of doing this inside Mnemosyne, but the interface was not a good fit for this, and grading became kind of meaningless anyway with this approach. So now I have a bunch of scripts which pull words from a list, using a finite and fixed sequence of intervals, and then collect sentences from the web (mostly from Reverso Context, but I even experimented with using ChatGPT for this). I originally generated an epub ebook from them, but now they are collected in a webpage, so that I still have the benefit of using browser-based dictionaries, sound files, shuffling word lists, etc.

Anyway, over the last year or so, I felt that spending 15 minutes doing this generated far greater dividends than doing flashcards for 15 minutes. In hindsight, this should have been obvious: if you want to get good at something, you should practice exactly that, and not something that's tangentially related to this...

Cheers,

Peter

[Oisín Mac Fhearaí]

Hi Peter,

I've also moved away from trying to memorise vocab etc with flashcards, and noticed the same issue you did with sentence cards (not really understanding the sentence itself, but just remembering it from previous study... in the same way I'll often remember the exact starting tone of the next song in a playlist or CD, but if you asked me to sing it on the street I might not be able to... something about the context of the task). I watched some talks by Stephen Krashen and others who suggested that drilling vocabulary and (especially) grammar rules is primarily a declarative memory task, whereas understanding spoken and written language is primarily a procedural memory task (aka implicit memory), and by focusing too much on the declarative retrieval task you could somehow obstruct or impair procedural learning. I'm not so sure that practicing the declarative memory task of retrieving "atomic" vocabulary facts is actually *detrimental* to the procedural skill of automatically understanding others' speech and constructing your own, but after a few years of studying thousands of Chinese character and sentence flashcards, I realised that even a very basic conversation was extremely difficult and awkward, and that I'd been wasting a lot of my time as you said -- getting good at answering flashcards rather than understanding language.

At that point I started to move toward just watching TV in the target language and having conversations. I still find flashcards handy for getting started with "basic fact" information, but mostly for other topics rather than language learning.

Thanks for sharing your insights on this.

Oisín

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[MAX BAX]

Hoi Peter,

This is probably exactly what I am looking for.

I just started to use Mnemosyne for learning French and noticed that just single words felt empty. (copy and paste lists of words)

Lots of question marks would pop up in my head, where exactly can i use this word???

So I thought about adding a few more words just to make it make more sense. (lot of work)

Plus I looked for lists of short phrases.

Today I read more of the documentation and saw the 'sentence' option.

That's also good. (even more than a lot of work?)

But I would love to see and read more of what you described.

Is it possible that we can see it or even use it?

Greetings.

[Peter Bienstman]

Hi,

The scripts are very tailored to my own personal use case, so it would
be a lot of work to make them accessible to anyone, without requiring
programming experience by the user, I'm afraid...

BTW, small personal update: I recently started learning a new
language, and at this level, I do feel again some advantage of going
back to flashcards. The 'ideal method', as far as it even exists, also
very heavily depends on your language level.

Cheers,

Peter

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[MAX BAX]

I'm also looking into literal translations.

Phrases (and words) translated to the English meaning without literal word for word translation is confusing.

I prefer to "get into the French way of thinking".

Au revoir=Goodbye? 

Nope, it's something like "At(till?) see again"...

Most lessons don't seem to add the literal translations.

Anyone any tips?

Ciao, Max

[Nick Cross]

This is an old conversation about language learning, but I feel that my French has gone up a level in the last 12 months because of 2 tweaks.

I used a pretty good system that works for me for the last 15 years.  I have the English word (my native language) on one side with 3 French sentences (target language) with gaps on the Front side.  If I am having difficulties, then I will add pictures form Google Images to the flashcard.  I may include synonyms too.  On the back, I have the French word (target language), the international phonetic alphabet symbols to help with pronunciation, and the complete French sentences.  I may include additional notes.

Here is an example:

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FRONT:

to escape winter (to have a break from winter)

1) Chaque année, ils partent dans le Sud pour ...

2) Elle rêve de ... et de passer quelques semaines au soleil.

3) Nous avons décidé de ... en partant aux Caraïbes.

SYN: le froid, partir au soleil

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BACK:

fuir l'hiver

{fɥ.ir} {i/vɛr}

1) Chaque année, ils partent dans le Sud pour fuir l'hiver.

2) Elle rêve de fuir l'hiver et de passer quelques semaines au soleil.

3) Nous avons décidé de fuir l'hiver en partant aux Caraïbes.

Note: "l'hiver" -- "le" is necessary

Note: "échapper à" sounds less natural,

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TWO CHANGES

1) The biggest change is that my teacher and my administrative assistant allow me to record our conversations on my iPhone.  I then run the audio through Happy Scribe to get a transcription.  Afterwards, I go through the transcript and find the areas where I have run into difficulties expressing my ideas.

Personalizing the content of the Mnemosyne cards has been a huge help.  It is highly motivating (my insights and what I want to say) and also work related (with my administrative assistant). 

2) The other big change is that ChatGPT can give me sentences for the flashcards very quickly.

Here is the prompt that I used to start a new "chat" when I wanted to learn the word for "maggot" in French.  (Don't ask!)

----------------------

Could you give me 5-10 example sentences to help me understand the French word "asticot"? All French sentences must always include correct accents, straight apostrophes ('), and English translations. Please include a cheat sheet with comparisons to similar words. Please identify any common learner mistakes.

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After this point, I will use these kinds of prompts to generate useful sentences:

- Could you give me 10-15 example sentences to help me understand the difference between "deuil" and "chagrin"?   

- Could you give me 10-15 example sentences to help me understand the difference between "rationnel" and "analytique" when describing people?

Thanks