Resonance and learning

In my previous post I explained that I am more partial to listening and reading, rather then working with SRS (spaced repetition systems). When I do review vocabulary, I prefer to control what I review. I either look at words and phrases from recently studied content, or I look at my high frequency vocabulary, or I look at lists tagged for certain grammatical issues, or I search by root words or components, or I just go at my list of words alphabetically, at random.

On the other hand I know that many people swear by SRS systems, and we certainly want to enable people to use their favourite SRS systems with LingQ. It is on our list.

 I guess the important thing is to do things that we like to do. The more time we spend with the language, the better we will learn. The more we like what we are doing, the more we will do it.

I do find that when I am doing a form of study or review which I like, then there is resonance from the activity. I feel that I am learning. This is a difficult concept to explain. I can look at declensions tables or grammar rules or lists of words, read them, review them, but there is little resonance. There is little left in my brain after I finish. When I next look at the declension table I feel as if I am starting from the beginning again.

 I found the same when I used language books that only offered phrases and sentences without context. I listened over and over, but not much would stick. When there is an interesting context, there is more resonance. Two weeks of listening to Rubem Alves talk about education (and studying the transcripts) in Portuguese was worth more than one month of listening to Random House Living Language Portuguese.

Comments

[Roberta]

In my opinion, you have named the major key to language learning material! The language learner must be interested in material, which is meaningful to him/her in order to retain the knowledge and then use it in a natural way. It is for this reason that most language learners fail to learn well.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Roberta,

I could not agree more.

[Mike]

thanks for writing about this topic! I had never heard of this before, but enjoyed using the Pimsleur system and it seems like this is the exact foundation of his program. Thanks to you I took a look and found Anki, which is exactly what I've been looking for (but didn't know it).

[Sarah]

Government documents now available on AudioBooks. Keep up with Obama's fast moving government! To download the latest government documents on audio, visit www.ativioaudio.com.