How much time should we spend on flash cards.

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Here is a video summarizing the recent Wikpedia dust up, and some thoughts on how much time to spend on flash cards.

Comments

[Street-Smart Language Learning]

Lend a hand on Steve's Wikipedia page here (or here if you prefer Swedish). The bureaucrats have already rose up against it, so let's see what we can do to persuade them otherwise.

[John]

I happened to get on YouTube and noticed you had posted a video. Thank you for really putting an end to the whole Wikipedia issue. I appreciate the fact that you called some of the things we said to you valid. The only reason I was angered by some of your comments is that you seemed to reject some of those things that, in essence, are just reality, no matter what your opinion is on it. I only said that you could not accept criticism because you never recognized any validity in our points, but thanks to your video, I now know that you did get what we were saying.

So... no hard feelings about the Wikipedia blog entry.

[Steve Kaufmann]

I have no hard feelings, John. Thanks for your active participation on my blog. I want more active participants and I do not ask people to agree with me, nor should they expect me to agree with them.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Thanks street smart. I think I had better stay out of this one or I will just sink it.

[doviende]

great video, Steve. Lately I'm really in agreement with you about flashcards, whereas I thought i wasn't in the past. When i was last working on Chinese, i think i was trying to use more flashcards to substitute for my lack of enjoyable video/audio/book content. Now that i've been working hard at german for the past two months, and really really enjoying many hours of content per day, i can see how flashcards really do just take up maybe 5% of my time. the key for me was successfully gathering lots and lots of video and book content that i enjoyed.

I still highly value the flashcards though, and i think that that 5% of my time is very wisely spent and efficient.

[Friedemann]

Steve,

so far I have only used lingq content in my chinese studies but I have never used lingq's functions. The one function I think is really great is the one that checks the words in a text against your vocab list. I have all my vocabulary saved in one word document. Could I import that list, albeit large, into lingq, and make it my vocab database so that next time I read a new text I can immediately see which words are new and which are not?

Friedemann

[Tim]

Hi Steve,

I experienced problems with Wikipedia when I mentioned a meditation mp3 I had narrated and recorded. A particular school who taught that style of meditation, seemed to think they had a monopoly on it and kept deleting my entries. I gave up in the end.

By the way, I have largely cured my rotator cuff injury by "Deep" icing, rub in for as long as you can stand it and as frequently as you've time. Kills pain and reduces inflammation. This is possibly more remedial than curative. Acupuncture seemed to finally get rid of it.

[teron]

I enjoyed your discussion of flashcards and I am more or less in agreement with you. Personally, I like to use flashcards (and other similar list exercises) for common words that I know I will encounter again. If I have the feeling that the word will be somewhat rare, then I do not spend to much time memorizing it right away and that is really the only way I ever use them.

Even with common words, if I have the time, I will often put the words into a paragraph and learn the paragraph instead. For whatever reason I find that much easier.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Friedemann,

Just import your list of words. If you have not used LingQ's functions, these words will all be highlighted in blue. You can go through them all, clicking on those you do not know, and leaving the rest highlighted in blue. When you are done you just click "I know all" and the remaining words will be added to your known words total. The words you clicked on will appear highlighted in yellow in future.

[Kelli]

I use Anki, so I only spend as much time on my flashcards as the program chooses. So, that would be 'due' cards. If I do them everyday, it's just a few minutes per deck, but if I skip a few days, it might take an hour to catch up on all of my decks. Without Anki, I wouldn't use flash cards because I wouldn't be able to know which ones I need to work on the most. Plus, who wants to deal with 1000s of pieces of paper ;)? As for adding cards, I try to always include a complete sentence, preferably directly from native content, for context.

[chris/blindside70]

I do more or less the same as Kelli, although I don't mind loose flash cards either. I create lingqs but I don't use the flash card program, it's the least important part of the websites and also the most hard to use.

But even if I miss a few days on Anki I won't necessarily sit down for an hour and catch up. I might just lower my new words per day until I'm able to catch up.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Tim,

What do you mean by Deep icing? Thanks.

[John]

Steve,

This question may be a little unrelated, but in LingQ, is there a way to make the language of your page "Other" or something like that. I'm trying to study a language that LingQ doesn't offer and I figured if I could import things to LingQ in that language and just use the program in that way, it might work. Is that possible?

Thanks,
John

[Friedemann]

Steve,

I'd like to come back to your Russian word-count. I have no idea how many words I know in English (would you or lingq have an idea?), but I do know that for a novice learner 50,000 words sounds very intimidating indeed. When I learned Norwegian, French and Spanish I always had hand written vocab lists in large folders (classeurs in French, don't know the word in English, scary huh?) and I normally stopped writing down words after some 4500 entries, and I felt largely comfortable with that arsenal of words. How does one measure one's vocabulary and do we really need that many words in a foreign language?

Regarding my studies then and comparing them with my Chinese efforts now I suspect that I always underestimated my vocabulary in these European languages because you have so many words that come for free, like "solidarity" and "information" and the likes which you mostly know in all of these languages without having to memorize them. In Chinese unfortunately there is little for free.

Friedemann

[Steve Kaufmann]

John, We have plans to set up a "neutral" language slot to allow anyone to start any language. It is not a big deal, but it is just one more thing to do. And everything is more work than you think. With every language there will be problems and people complaining. So we are waiting.

We also want to enable a group of editors for each language with well defined access to the Library for that language so that Mark and I do not have to do everything.

So I cannot tell you when we will implement this. In the meantime you can use another language slot that you do not need, assuming that Babylon supports that language. But problem is you will lose your saved LingQs or have to start again when we open up for your language.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Friedemann,

LingQ will count the words that you learn, or that you claim as Known. If you were to import a list of the most frequent 2,000 words in English, all of which you know, and just click on "I Know All" you will add them to your Known list. Then take the top 5,000 and just pick out the ones you do not know and update the rest.

Start reading some difficult content on LingQ (from the library or imported) and the system will point out the ones you have not met before, many of which you may also know. Soon the system will get more and more accurate in telling you how many words you know. You can do the same in Spanish or any other language.

The number of words is greater in Russian than in English because Russian is inflected. Even with my 50,000 words I still come across many words I do not know, as well as some words I have saved and not yet learned.

Chinese is a little different because we are dealing with characters and composite words. Chinese gives you few free words, but the formation of the vocabulary is very logical, using characters so that you can often figure out the meaning of compound verbs from the characters, and they are easier to remember. You also do not have to worry about cases, tenses, parts of speech etc. that exist in some other languages.

[chris/blindside70]

Yeah with Russian you basically have to divide your known words by 3 or 4 since pretty much everything is declined/inflected except adverbs...

Jerks...

[Sebastian]

Even more...

Verbs: for example: infinitive + 6 conjugation forms (present) + 4 forms of the past + the same for all reflexive-forms with ся + imperative forms + 16 different participles forms...and so on...
Adjectives and Substantives:6 casus which can be different for male, female, neutral forms in singualar and plural
Pronoms:6 cases

Of course you will not meet all forms of the same word (especially the verbs). But nevertheless I think that you should divide your words by 6 or 7.

[chris/blindside70]

I say 3 or 4 only because some conjugations are the same spelling also in Russian are the reflexive forms attached to the root word? My comment on Russian was mostly from my experience with other Slavic languages (Czech and Polish which have the reflexive as a separate word) which I want to finsh learning before I start in on Russian.

But you're right about the participle forms, didn't even think about those...

[Steve Kaufmann]

The known words total at LingQ is only an indicator of progress and one should not read too much into it. I think there is a tendency to overestimate the effect of inflections, or the different forms of words in a language, on word count. I think it was Paul Nation who determined that the relationship between words (or tokens as the linguists like to call them) and word families was 1:1.6 in English. So 8000 English words at LingQ was like 5000 word families. I would have thought that the difference was greater.

I often have trouble recognizing different forms of Russian words, so for that and many other reasons I like the way we count the words at LingQ.

[Ilya L.]

Steve, you wrote: "So 8000 English words at LingQ was like 5000 word families. I would have thought that the difference was greater."

I believe your impression - that the difference to be expected is greater than 1.6 = 8/5 - is correct. It all depends on what we mean by "words at LingQ".

If the "words at LingQ" were selected RANDOMLY from all the fourteen tables collected by P. Nation (with 1000 word-families and more than 1000 words in each table) - then yes, the ratio of English "words at LingQ" to the number of the corresponding word-families would be 1.6.

However, a typical English text (say a narration) is far from being a random selection from those fourteen tables. The text will be DOMINATED by the words from THE FIRST table. In that first table, the ratio of the words to the word-families seems to be 4-6 or more, anyway far from 1.6. Recall that roughly 95% of the words from the non-adopted English texts and even a higher percentage from the graded texts will fall just into that first table of P.Nation.

So, if we mean by "words at LingQ" some text that we read at LingQ, than we read 4-6 times more of different words than there are word-families in the text. Only if by "words at LingQ" you mean a list of the words an experienced learner would save, the list which will be dominated by relatively rare words usually found in the larger-numbered tables of P.Nation, then - yes - the estimate 1.6 will be applicable.

It is of course far off the original topic of this thread, but it might have relevance to the design of LingQ.

[NB]

I've tried flashcards time and again, and just find them so boring. I suppose I get more out of making them rather than actual usage. I've also tried Memorylifter and a few others and just can't seem to continue consistently.

I often wonder polyglots from hundreds of years ago used flash cards. Somehow, I can't picture Marco Polo hanging around some house in China flipping through a stack of cards for hours on end.