Do you have an exit plan for isolated vocabulary study?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Big_Dog, Jul 17, 2014.

  1. Montmorency

    Montmorency New Member

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    Ah right, that's good. For some reason, I'd got the impression you were mostly reading, apart from the vocabulary work, and it would have been a shame if you hadn't been giving yourself the chance to enjoy all that vocabulary when being spoken by native speakers.

    Well, slow and steady wins the race.
    How long do you think you will run the hybrid experiment?

    One of the things I've had in the back of my mind to try for ages is a purely oral/aural approach to vocabulary learning. I sort of know what I want to achieve but I haven't worked out how to do it yet. What I want to achieve are the sort of benefits that accrue to pure audio approaches like Michel Thomas and SaySomethingIn, but applied more directly to vocabulary building than learning structures. I think it would borrow some of the ideas behind word-lists and Gold List (and who knows: maybe even Anki), but just not use pen and paper, or a computer (except to store the MP3 files as backup for a voice recorder and an MP3 player).
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Probably until I've done about 10 lists of about 60 words each. I both want to have a reasonable sample size from which to tabulate overall data, and also give it a fair chance. I'm pretty sure already that it's a keeper.

    As for ready made sources, there is Vocabulearn, which I reviewed in the Reviews forum, though you would have to spend a lot of time editing to remove known words over time. Cainntear mentioned gradint in another thread, but again I am not willing to put the time in to slice and dice lots of small audio clips from whatever source. Vocabulearn would probably be the easiest source to use for editing lots of small clips since you get to where you can look at the wave representations and know what to edit quickly (I edited out the English from the Deutsch Warum Nicht? course).
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2014
  3. luke

    luke Member VIP member

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    I will let go of Anki when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
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  4. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    No, that's not what I meant, but I do use the limit on decks of languages that I'm only maintaining. The downside is it defeats the algorithm. The upside is it keeps me from spending too much time on low priority decks.

    Thank you for offering to help me fix something that happened 10 years ago, but your reasons were all incorrect. My decks were spinning out of control because I wasn't spending enough time using the language (Japanese). And that was due to spending a high percentage of my study time doing reps on Supermemo. It's a vicious circle. I recommend you spend less that 25% of your time on reps, and do a good deal of production. I learned than an SRS is just a tool, and should be used as a supplement to language learning; it shouldn't be allowed to take over.
    You just got my vote for Anki whore of the year. Eat your heart out, Peregrinus.
  5. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Well that is not the meaning I got from your statement, but I see it now, i.e. it was "spinning out of control" not necessarily in absolute time, but relative to the total time you were able to devote to learning some language.

    Re taking over, consider the following timeframes: 1 day, 1 week, 1 year, forever and ever. Is it necessary to keep Anki down to 25% over all such timeframes? Does "balance" have to apply to both short and long terms? If I allow Anki to "take over" for a year, am I doomed to letting it take over the next year and the one after that? I mean is it more powerful than crack, and will I start looking haggard and my teeth fall out? What if I concentrate on input and Anki to the exclusion of output for a year, will I never be able to activate that knowledge now?

    Are you going to summon luke and I to an Anki intervention thread :)?


    If you could compare our Anki decks, including ones I have manually made for languages I am not yet studying actively, you would see what a poseur he is.
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2014
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  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I have no idea what that means, but I suppose it doesn't matter.

    Is anything really necessary? I suggest it's more efficient to never exceed 25% isolated vocabulary study on a daily basis.
    Did you really mean to say "now"? If so, I don't understand the question. If you meant at the end of that year, sure. It's just a less efficient way of doing things, imo. My opinion is based on what I've read of people doing these things, and my own personal experiences. I say "things" because you are suggesting 2 that I warn against:
    1) spending a high percentage of your time on isolated vocabulary study
    2) delaying production
  7. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    @Big_Dog

    So you think that the balance of 25% for vocab study has to be met each and every day, and not just long term. That was what I wanted to know.

    Can you cite some studies about the deleterious effects of delaying production (other than just the one I am going to cite below)? If so, perhaps you could start a thread on it.


    The researcher I cite most regarding vocabulary, and for whom I have a great deal of respect as to his findings on vocabulary size and such matters is ISP (Paul) Nation. However as to pedagogical suggestions for implementing the results of such studies, I generally feel free to ignore him and all others, since they are primarily for classroom use, and also due to so many failures of pedagogy in practice. Just like economists, rarely do any of these second language teaching pedagogues point in the same direction.

    In his paper (Nation, 2007) The Four Strands, he too stresses a balance, and also says that deliberate learning activities should take no more than 25% of the time, and only 1/3 to 1/4 of that being devoted to vocabulary cards. This means vocabulary cards taking 1/3*1/4 or 1/4*1/4, or 6 to 8% of the time. So you are actually being generous, at least as to formal instruction in classroom settings. He also believes production is important and discusses Swain's output hypothesis, which was a reaction to Krashen's input hypothesis. However as he says, the reason the output hypothesis got traction was due to the failure of the input hypothesis to explain immersion learning. But other studies show immersion to not be such a good method, and Krashen does have a rebuttal, which is that any immersion success is based primarily on input, even when output is part of the learning. So though I don't do so lightly, I again feel free to ignore Nation on production. Also note that if early production is so necessary, then communicative approaches that stress functional production should be very successful, which I have not seen convincing evidence of. And if the evidence for early production is less than convincing, then that means more time for other activities like vocabulary cards.
  8. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    No. This is what I said:
    I could elaborate about what I read and experienced, but I assume you are only interested in studies. I've never seen the study you posted, but thanks for posting it.

    Although there might be a lack of official studies, I think there is plenty of evidence. Do most of the polyglots you admire favor delayed production? Some of mine wait a little while, but I don't think anybody waits a whole year.
  9. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    That assumes anything and everything coming out of the student's mouth is properly classed as "production". The problem with a lot of lessons is the mindless parroting of phrases. How can you learn when you don't fully understand what you're saying? I mean, you can't learn anything about Romance reflexives and/or impersonal passive from constantly asking and answering questions about people's names. You're parroting a form that uses the feature, but you're not really manipulating the feature. And is it really "production" when you are just mimicking someone else's words.
  10. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Maybe a year is long, but I have seen no good evidence that it hurts. While there are examples of of immigrants who despite achieving very good comprehension still after decades cannot speak well at all, those are probably those who both did not try and also needed a little formal instruction and practice, i.e. they are outliers.

    On the other hand:

    (Krashen, 2014) Case Histories and the Comprehension Hypothesis:

  11. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Added to that is the fact that "success" in the communicative approach is determined by the cooperative teacher and fellow students understanding a student's limited, inflexible production. It's all well and good to learn about banking activities and create mock situations using the vocabulary for same, but what happens when the less than cooperative/understanding bank clerk goes off script?
  12. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    If we're including it being less efficient, and making people quit, then I've seen tons of it. But again, not in any official study. Just reading and listening to what people say.
  13. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Less efficient in achieving what? Speaking? I see no reliable evidence of this, i.e. that following a long silent period I could not relatively quickly activate my German, and thus be on par with those who started from day one. The more vocabulary I know the easier it will be for me to express what I want to say in free speech, i.e. non-transactional situations where I don't/can't control the conversation.

    As to quitting, it cuts both ways if based on frustration. One can be frustrated in not using a L2 to speak and write at all, and one can be frustrated in not being able to do it well. The latter applies to me, and I am content to read and listen as no matter how many times I might visit a German speaking country in the future for short periods, reading and listening will constitute the lion's share of my use of German bis ich sterbe.

    If you get a chance, read that Krashen paper I linked to above and let us know what you think.
  14. hrhenry

    hrhenry Member VIP member

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    You deal with it and probably learn a couple things as a result. People will *always* go off script. Better to learn how to deal with the situation than forever plan on "mastering" whatever it is that's off-script.

    R.
    ==
  15. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    I don't have a plan for such an exit, no. A while back on Lang-8, I wrote an entry discussing the possibility of abandoning Anki. One of the repliers wrote something like, "I don't know what Anki is, but whatever you've been doing seems like it's provided good results, so you should stick with it." I think I would like to quit Anki and focus on extensive reading, but I don't feel like I have the time with two young twins at home.
  16. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Unfortunately, there is very little good evidence of anything in the language-learning realm. Like Big-Dog, I would suspect that frustration would be the biggest enemy in a delayed-production class. Krashen would shrug this off as the "affective filter" and say it's the teachers' job to convince them that this is e right way.

    My view is totally different: efficient learning is intrinsically rewarding.
    This relies on your definition of "speak well". The majority of immigrants I've met are clearly non-native, and I'm sure you're not going to define the majority as outliers.

    Yuech... Krashen. A lot of hot air and bluster, and no evidence. And this time he even has the cheek to claim that specially-selected case studies are evidence.

    The story of Gouin is a massive strawman, because Gouin was using a ridiculous method that I certainly wouldn't recommend -- a language is more than just a collection of words.

    The indigenous people cited are really, really immersed. They also (surprise surprise) have no books and schooling anyway.

    Talking of outliers... cerebral palsy and locked-in..? That's really atypical.

    Schliemann's case is largely speculative and subjective... if both sides can claim the study supports them, what use is it really...?

    Lee Kuan Yew... well, I'm not really following Krashen's argument. A guy failed a few times, and we're just supposed to accept that he failed because of Krashen's chisen variable?

    ...

    Anyway, the thing that gets my goat about Krashen is his continued insistence on making this distinction between "acquisition" and "learning", with this rigid assumption that language is different from everything else, and other pedagogic theory is inapplicable to language. The problem here is that all learning theory takes language kearning as it's starting point - chapter 1 of every book on learning theories is about language.
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  17. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    @Cainntear,

    While I don't necessarily buy Krashen's whole system of the input hypothesis, I do buy comprehensible input and the affective filter. As to the validity of using case histories, I think it could be useful to find commonalities in L2 acquisition. As to his possibly cherry-picking the examples, I would suspect that 1) there are not all that many success stories to choose from, 2) for many of which the learners could not give enough detail and thus were inconclusive. The question is whether he ignored negative counter-examples, and if he did, presumably his nay-sayers would be all over that. With Lee Kuan Yew he did have to strain, because Lee used so many different methods that it is hard to isolate any one of them.

    As to acquisition vs. learning, it seems simple enough. Children learn somewhat effortlessly without trying, and thus should adults which = acquisition, while learning = conscious studying. As to language being different or not pedagogically from everything else, I personally don't care as I only care about language. However it seems highly plausible because I doubt children or adults effortlessly acquire abstract concepts like e=mc2 or many mathematical concepts beyond simple operations that can be verified by sight, or anything else that was not the result of repetitive story-telling.
  18. Rodri

    Rodri New Member

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    There's also a virtuous circle: as you spend more time actually using the language, the cards get easier, the failing rate plummet, the intervals grow and you need less time to complete the daily reps, time that you can use to keep the circle spinning. I talked about both situations in my first post and I think I could expand on that now. My take on this is that SRS is of no use in gaining or keeping passive understanding, so for me is all about boosting production: I totally avoid recognition sentences and try to focus only on the things I want to be able to say, making cards in a way that I have to actually come up with an answer, not just reading a sentence, that is, I have to say something and it has to be 100% correct in a phonemic sense (spelling is a different ability). Now the question would be: Is SRS enough for the active part of your language to keep growing? I don't think so, you need lots of input, and a bit of actual production in the language, even if it's just writing. There are probably may reasons for it, but I think two of them are inside SRS itself:

    1) SRS is good is to keep memories of the declarative type, but language is much more than declarative memory
    2) Intervals in the Supermemo algorithm are good to leave memories almost die, which without external reinforcement, would tun most of the words into passive rather than active. I have this experience very often: something comes up in the program after a couple of years, I got it right after some hesitation, which is amazing, but then I can help thinking that there's no way I could've come up with that in an actual conversion. So, it's rather passive, that's fine, but that's why I can do with a bit of redundancy with expressions that I really want to be active: adding a series of cards who are different in some way (context, inflections, ect) but are about the same word.
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2014
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  19. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Totally agree. Using the language enough makes SRS work as advertised, and it's a wonderful thing.

    I wonder what your native language is and what languages you've studied with SRS's, if it's not a secret. I do something for Japanese that's far more out-of-context than anything else I do. I'm working my way through a pre-made sentence deck. It's helped me a lot with reading Japanese, which can be quite difficult due to it's multiple readings of kanji. The cards are one way,
    Front = Japanese sentence
    Back = Recording/Kana/English
    I read the sentence out loud in Japanese, then listen to the recording and repeat, paying special attention to pitch accent. But the main goal is to produce the correct pronunciation for the kanji. Like I said, it's working pretty well, especially considering I'm just maintaining the language, so my time is limited. I think this is going against what you prefer, and to be honest I'm only doing it because my time is limited, but it appears to be "permanently" improving my passive understanding.
  20. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I've read enough Krashen to know I disagree with the topic we're debating. You might be interested in this old HTLAL thread called Only Listen! It starts off as a listening only method discussion, but some of the stuff we talked about here is covered there.

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