So, here’s the thing — SRS can, without a doubt, allow you to memorize reams of data without any meaningful context attached. A language, however, is not just a set of words and phrases to be dumped into your brain, and if that’s how you’re treating it then you’re doing it wrong.
It seems that the first reaction most people have when they read AJATT’s 10,000 Sentences post is “so, dude, where can I score myself those sentences? Can you hook me up?” This completely misses the point by such a wide margin that I’m not even sure we’re talking about the same thing anymore. The sentences — and anything else you shove in your SRS — should be the by-product of massive doses of comprehensible input.
SRS is one part of a healthy study diet. Just like meat, no matter how delicious, can’t replace fruits and vegetables and grains in a real diet, neither can SRS replace reading and listening and speaking in your studies. As JP says, “flashcards train long term recall, which is not a great way to get things into linguistic memory.” This is true, which is why SRS (or anything else involving direct memorization) should be part of a series of activities designed to train your listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Using it by itself just won’t work, or at very least it won’t work with the speed and efficiency that proper balance would bring.
Damn near 100% of my SRS items come from real life material — TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, blogs, conversations with native speakers, etc. (I’m saying almost 100% because, let’s face it, who hasn’t looked up how to say IRBM and put it in their flashcards for posterity — 中程彈道導彈, by the way). When I do my SRS repetitions, I’m constantly encountering material that I recognize, and whose origins I recognize. I’m remembering conversations and newspaper articles. I’m not just studying word lists, I’m consciously repeating learning experiences in my head.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be able to focus on things that you want to lean and build out your vocabulary in that subject area. You should do it through real material, though. Read from Wikipedia, buy a documentary on the subject in your target language, etc. Don’t just dump word lists into your SRS.
Related posts:
- How I study foreign languages
- Interview with Steve Kaufmann
- How to read in a foreign language
- Thoughts on SRS content selection
- What’s grammar got to do with it?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
i remember reading somewhere that there’s evidence that regular memorization of vocab can be helpful, because it’s useful as passive recall. Grammar, on the other hand, is not because you need to build it into your language centers as something automatic.
on the how-to-learn-any-language forums, i’ve seen some interesting posts from Iverson where he basically says that he tries to load up as much passive vocabulary as he can, using his “wordlist” method, and then when he wants to go read actual content then he’ll be able to figure almost all of it out, making his comprehensible input much more wide-ranging and useful.
basically, though, i agree with what you’re saying. All of my sentence SRS cards are much more meaningful when they are from real content, and when i see them i recall the context that they’re from. much better than generic lists of stuff.
I do still use a themed vocab book (Barron’s) to pre-load words, using the example sentences from there. They don’t stick as well, and don’t help as much as naturally encountered examples, but they do definitely help with my reading comprehension.
I can sort of see the benefit in pre-loading words for reading comprehension. I’ve found, personally, though that if I try to do that I will remember them (SRS is good for that!) but they’re a helluva lot more work to get into my brain. I don’t know if the extra work pays off for me at the end through increased reading comprehension or not.
Everything you say in this article is true. When I started with Spanish I bought a book with over 5000 Spanish-Dutch sentences. Most didn’t really stick because they didn’t say me much.
Only when I started taking in large amounts of input most things did stick. My problem, however, is that I’m plain lazy and don’t have the patience to pause a movie/show to add a sentence to my Anki deck. I curently use Chinesepod for the dialogues and theN the sentences and afterwards I get the audio and sentences from the expansion page. This way it’s still not ideal but at least I know where the stuff comes from.
While I’ve never seen how to make SRSing sentences work for me, I’m a big fan of shoving lots of new words into my Anki, at the moment I’m working on finishing the vocab at the intermediate HSK level. It takes a fair amount of time to input, because I hunt around for audio, and example sentences that use the word: these sentences get shown alongside the answer, they’re not part of the test.
I find the recently-learned new words pop out of my mouth in conversation, which is very satisfying. But mainly, I see them when I’m reading. There’s no way I’d do SRS like this unless I was spending lots of time reading (阅读 books, mainly). Because I’m still at a low level of Chinese, most of the words I learn are fairly high-frequency, so I have lots of opportunities to see them come up in texts.
Hi rm,
First, thanks for the comment!
I used to do SRS the same way, and for exactly the same reason — I was reading so much that I figured I got enough exposure that way. What I found, though, was that I still ended up with a bunch of words whose general meanings I knew but whose nuances I was totally oblivious to. By focusing on only sentences, I found that I had whole phrases blurt out, and that tended to be a lot more useful.
I still maintain that getting material from your input, rather than preloading vocabulary, works better, though. I’m sure that you can memorize any arbitrary thing with Anki, including mounds of preloaded vocab, but the less real connection it has with you and your reading/listening the harder it will be. Of course, YMMV
I take your point, and I’m sure if my Chinese gets better then I will reconsider how I deal with new material. But that will have to wait until I’ve got the HSK intermediate vocab list force fed!
I don’t think SRS is that similar to eating a balanced diet when you dig a bit deeper. Obviously humans can’t really pre-eat food to help balance their future diet. For example, some vitamins are used within hours of consuming them. A balanced diet is most valuable when foods are combined at the table. We aren’t able to eat meat a week in advance so as to balance the fruit and vegetables we are eating today.
Up till now SRS has been used mostly for review but it might also fit into a program just as well at the level of preview. Of course that would make things much more complex because you would need to pre-arrange your future input. Any failures to get the SRS right would impact the comprehensibility of the future input.
I wonder how it would feel as a learner to know that everything you would be learning/studying/listening to on a given day should, in theory, be 100% comprehensible thanks to SRS?
Actually as it turns out I have done something like this with children and while I can’t say it is faster I can say that it makes class more fun.