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25/4/13 22:59I have at long last worked through my backlog of Chinese flashcards!
And the experience has forced me to rethink the way I do flashcards.
Normally, what I do is sentence mining based on what All Japanese All the Time used to advocate: I take sentences from a book or manga or song or TV show and make them the flash card. (Not paper flash cards; I use Anki.) The "answer" is the correct romanization (including correct tones!) and an understanding of the meaning of the sentence. (Not to memorize a specific translation, but to be able to read the sentence and know what it means.)
I do it this way because I like to have more context. I wanted to have a system where I could catch new vocabulary and keep practicing it till it stuck, rather than having it drift off down the road.
But what I've actually found is that I can't get anything to long-term memory that way. Once in a while, yes; if the word is especially memorable. But more often if I remember something long-term it's because I hit it from a couple of different directions: Chicken eggs are 雞蛋 and egg nog is 蛋酒 and cake is 蛋糕, and having seen those, they reinforce 蛋=egg and they reinforce each other, too. So I've been thinking more and more that if you're going to do flash cards, their purpose is really going to be to keep new vocabulary fresh for a while, until you start to accumulate those connections that will let you move something into your long-term memory.
And the implications of this are:
1) I need to read more without sentence mining, either without a dictionary or with some amount of dictionary lookup.
2) I need to be more choosy about what sentences I choose to make flash cards out of, because really, I only want the words that are useful and common enough that I'll see them again fairly soon. "Quiescence" is a word I look up and move on; "Owl" is a word I keep. I sort of felt that I'd sufficiently accounted for this by choosing sentences from children's books, but really, children just have outstanding vocabularies in their native languages.
You can think about vocabulary as a circle, and put all the super common words -- this, that, a, the, and, or, but -- in the center, and less common words closer to the edges. (This isn't sufficient, because really there are a hundred different circles depending on topic and genre, although they share the same center.) And ideally, you're looking for the words that are right around the words you already know, or just a little bit further out. The words that are way further out... at this stage of my learning, I can't possibly read fast enough that I'm going to encounter them again soon.
Trouble is, if there's been any good word-frequency analyses done on Chinese, they don't seem to be available for free on the web (character-frequency, yes...), but I can probably do it in a kind of ad hoc way, only adding words the second time I see them, or adding words that I know I'm just on the edge of learning. And then, hopefully, less time doing flash cards = more time reading?
We'll see.
(I did stop in Flushing this weekend, to get a couple of books -- got a Chinese-translated The Secret Garden! -- and translated manga. Yikes, I really am starting to have a book storage problem...)
And the experience has forced me to rethink the way I do flashcards.
Normally, what I do is sentence mining based on what All Japanese All the Time used to advocate: I take sentences from a book or manga or song or TV show and make them the flash card. (Not paper flash cards; I use Anki.) The "answer" is the correct romanization (including correct tones!) and an understanding of the meaning of the sentence. (Not to memorize a specific translation, but to be able to read the sentence and know what it means.)
I do it this way because I like to have more context. I wanted to have a system where I could catch new vocabulary and keep practicing it till it stuck, rather than having it drift off down the road.
But what I've actually found is that I can't get anything to long-term memory that way. Once in a while, yes; if the word is especially memorable. But more often if I remember something long-term it's because I hit it from a couple of different directions: Chicken eggs are 雞蛋 and egg nog is 蛋酒 and cake is 蛋糕, and having seen those, they reinforce 蛋=egg and they reinforce each other, too. So I've been thinking more and more that if you're going to do flash cards, their purpose is really going to be to keep new vocabulary fresh for a while, until you start to accumulate those connections that will let you move something into your long-term memory.
And the implications of this are:
1) I need to read more without sentence mining, either without a dictionary or with some amount of dictionary lookup.
2) I need to be more choosy about what sentences I choose to make flash cards out of, because really, I only want the words that are useful and common enough that I'll see them again fairly soon. "Quiescence" is a word I look up and move on; "Owl" is a word I keep. I sort of felt that I'd sufficiently accounted for this by choosing sentences from children's books, but really, children just have outstanding vocabularies in their native languages.
You can think about vocabulary as a circle, and put all the super common words -- this, that, a, the, and, or, but -- in the center, and less common words closer to the edges. (This isn't sufficient, because really there are a hundred different circles depending on topic and genre, although they share the same center.) And ideally, you're looking for the words that are right around the words you already know, or just a little bit further out. The words that are way further out... at this stage of my learning, I can't possibly read fast enough that I'm going to encounter them again soon.
Trouble is, if there's been any good word-frequency analyses done on Chinese, they don't seem to be available for free on the web (character-frequency, yes...), but I can probably do it in a kind of ad hoc way, only adding words the second time I see them, or adding words that I know I'm just on the edge of learning. And then, hopefully, less time doing flash cards = more time reading?
We'll see.
(I did stop in Flushing this weekend, to get a couple of books -- got a Chinese-translated The Secret Garden! -- and translated manga. Yikes, I really am starting to have a book storage problem...)