Re: [mnemosyne-proj-users] http://www.flashcardexchange.com/

[Peter Bienstman]

Feel free to add a feature request to our uservoice forum. That way,
people can vote for it, so that I can see how popular the request is.

Cheers,

Peter

On 03/05/2013 10:38 AM, m.wun...@gmail.com wrote:
> would be great to be able to learn the flashcards form http://www.flashcardexchange.com/ with you apps!
>

[Vit]

  On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 4:38:07 AM UTC-5, m.wun...@gmail.com wrote:

would be great to be able to learn the flashcards form http://www.flashcardexchange.com/ with you apps!

-------------
  Just sharing info:
NONE of the 6 flashcards programs I tried  has cards worth studying with;  people who made them have no idea of the guidelines outlined by memory gurus and Supermemo.
  Also, Gwern Branwern -- among other users-- strongly recommends to avoid someone else' cards.
    Good day.

[Scott Youngman]

Agreed; you learn much more by making your own cards.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2013 1:27:46 PM UTC-7, Vit wrote:

... Also, Gwern Branwern -- among other users-- strongly recommends to avoid someone else' cards.

[Scott Youngman]

Perhaps I should explain my point. Making your own cards requires you to think about the content and design, and to focus on the information which is most relevant to what you want to learn. By writing the card you also begin to learn even before drilling it. Neither of those benefits comes with a card deck made by someone.

I can think of at least two situations where a pre-made card deck is beneficial. One is for a set body of facts and you know you want to learn all of them, for example the countries of Europe. In that case, everything the deck's author has made is relevant to you. A second is from something like a textbook you are studying, for example vocabulary by chapter from a foreign language text.

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:55 AM,  m.wunderli wrote:

> collaborativ flashcard set are the only thing that is worth it.

[Oisín]

On 7 March 2013 16:15, Scott Youngman <syo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Perhaps I should explain my point. Making your own cards requires you to think about the content and design, and to focus on the information which is most relevant to what you want to learn. By writing the card you also begin to learn even before drilling it. Neither of those benefits comes with a card deck made by someone.

I can think of at least two situations where a pre-made card deck is beneficial. One is for a set body of facts and you know you want to learn all of them, for example the countries of Europe. In that case, everything the deck's author has made is relevant to you. A second is from something like a textbook you are studying, for example vocabulary by chapter from a foreign language text.

Although the idea is very widespread that creating your own cards is more beneficial, I'm not sure to what degree it is, nor how (or whether) this has been measured.

I'd agree that for many situations with a set body of facts, it is much _easier_ for the student to progress since they don't have to spend so much time researching and creating the material. In my case, the effort of creating Chinese cards and struggling to minimise ambiguity and maximise accuracy was very tiresome and took up a very large portion of my study time.

Another situation where I think premade decks are helpful is in sentence mining where you work through a massive number of translated sentences in recognition mode. For example, there are Tatoeba collections with over 10,000 sentences pairs. Obviously you save a lot of time by not having to re-invent your own wheels here.

(although speaking of sentence recognition, I just found this: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/10000-sentences-is-dead-long-live-mcds).

Oisín

 

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:55 AM,  m.wunderli wrote:

> collaborativ flashcard set are the only thing that is worth it.

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[Scott Youngman]

Good point, Oisin. I think some of Supermemo's "20 rules" are relevant
to the value of making one's own cards, for example "Do not learn if
you do not understand." http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm

Other considerations would include:
- What is the quality of the pre-made deck? (Some of them are poorly done).

- How long will it take to search and evaluate to find a good and relevant deck?

- What are the technical challenges to making your own cards? (For
example, using a pre-made geography deck complete with nice maps saved
me a lot of time finding, clipping, and inserting the maps myself).

- What is the motivational and learning value of a pre-made deck with
500 potentially low-relevance cards versus 50 self-made cards focused
on facts you specifically need or want to learn?

- How much does thinking about and writing your own card contribute to
the overall learning process?

- What is the nature of the material you want to memorize? A wordlist
from chapter one of your German textbook is clearly defined and
directly relevant, so a pre-made deck would be very useful. Pre-made
cards for chapter one of your human anatomy textbook, complete with
pictures, would be even more useful because it would be harder to
create yourself. But 100 random facts about German history, not tied
specifically to anything you are reading or studying, is less helpful
for practical learning no matter how good the deck is.

[Vit]

, m.wun...@gmail.com wrote:

  Collaborative flashcard sets are the only thing that is worth it.

----------Vit:
  I checked  one Tatoeba collection { as Oisin pointed out};
3 out of 10 were seriously flawed - as shown below.

My train left at six and arrived at ten.
Мой поезд выходит в шесть и прибывает туда в десять.  {grammar error}.

 Only ten people showed up for the party.
На вечеринке показалось всего десять человек.  Wrong word and wrong sentence structure.

 It would be good to call us on Saturday.
Было бы хорошо позвонить нам в воскресенье. It is a literal trans'n;  wrong sentence structure; absolutely unusable.

SO, if you learn thes set - you are in trouble. 
But equally important point ( to make cards ) is:
Using some one's  sentences is an extra hurdle for me - I MUST use my own phrases bcs  that is what pops up in my head { when I stumble during conversation}.
   There are 3 posts where people lament "I could not recall the WORD in real life.  Reasons:
1.Dont memorize a naked word - use collocations.
2.Collocations must be  from your native Active vocabulary.
3.Use PAO -the technique of memory champions.
------
 As a side note, flipping Front-Back card {to learn language} is bad idea 30% {my stats} of the time.  Because :-) the translation on the Back is terse & worded to suit the Front word.
  You have to write a new card to learn how to say 'this' in forein lang; and, again, it must be structured to be 100% 'natural' to you.
Good day.

[Oisín]

That's true; it often requires some careful manipulation of the fields to flip cards, because often information is mixed into the wrong field. For example, in Chinese, pinyin (phonetic) readings will often end up on the front side of a card, which reveals the answer, so either some kind of large scale search and replace is needed (difficult if you're not a programmer), or more careful and specific use of the fields in the first place (impossible unless you were the deck author).

Regarding the Tatoeba collections, indeed there were some bizarre errors in the Chinese deck, which can be discouraging when starting out as a beginner. Later on, you start to recognise such errors and ignore them since you're operating in recognition mode anyway.
A common problem is that, for example, the English side will have a very specific meaning and the Chinese side has a more general translation. When you flip a card like this, the translation doesn't really make sense in the opposite direction. Or sometimes one side has multiple translations...

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