Technique: Focus Logbook

Discussion in 'Learning Techniques and Advice' started by zKing, Jul 31, 2014.

  1. zKing

    zKing New Member

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    I've been a long time lurker at HTLAL, but after all the discussions here about Anki vs Goldlists vs Iversen Wordlists, I thought I'd finally make a post about a technique I'm experimenting with instead of those techniques. I've dubbed it a "Focus Logbook".
    Sorry if this is a bit rambling...

    A few points up front:
    - There is nothing new here, in fact it is simple variation on what people have been doing for centuries.
    - It probably isn't for all levels, total novices and very advanced learners will likely get less from it.


    It is quite simple:

    1) Get yourself a nice lined journal

    2) Get some native content, preferably something long and somewhat level appropriate (books, TV series, etc. repeat vocab is good)

    3) Read/Watch Intensively, at each unknown

    a) Lookup the unknown, find the meaning appropriate for this usage.
    b) Carefully HAND write: L2 (+ phonetic, if appropriate) + L1 meaning on one line
    c) Read that word/phrase out loud and "Savor"* it for a few seconds --- FOCUS
    d) If you hit the same unknown (with the same meaning) in the same session (30-60 minutes?) and don't remember it --- go back and "Savor" that existing line you already wrote.
    e) If you hit the same unknown in a later session and don't remember it (> 60 minutes?) write a new line for it again.​

    4) When done with the whole book or series either:
    a) Throw the logbook away and start another one.
    b) Occasionally skim through it for "fun".
    c) If you insist, go through the logbook in reverse order and cherry pick items to put into an SRS / wordlist. Keep your decks small.​

    ----------------

    The good:
    1) People have learned languages in a very similar way for a long time (i.e. look up the word, write the meaning in the margin of the book.)
    2) It is comprehensible input that you are paying attention to.
    3) Low stress / affective filter
    4) Real content == natural SRS, particularly with long content (books, series)
    5) Writing by hand seems to aid memory (probably because it makes you pay attention)
    6) If you forget an "important" word, it will probably come along again. Unimportant words won't matter.
    7) You are ALWAYS seeing stuff in context.
    8) You are ALWAYS (ok, usually?) using interesting content. No time is spent drudging through context-less cards or lists.
    9) You don't have to find seperate time to create cards and other time to review them.

    The bad:
    1) You can't do this in elevator/waiting-in-line time.
    2) Since it doesn't have an electronic output, it is not easy to search, reference or take metrics from the logbook. That said, that isn't the point. (And I strongly believe that typing will greatly reduce the effectiveness.)
    3) Your spaced repetition is tied to actual usage in your materials. If you have specific vocab you want to learn and you don't have materials that use it a lot, this isn't your technique.
    4) Some people dislike the start-stop nature of Intensive reading/watching/listening.


    My critique of Anki:

    The value of "testing" in the Anki sense is three things:
    a) comprehensible input
    b) the "testing" forces you to PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION / CONCENTRATE.
    c) some people find metrics/tracking fun​
    BUT it has the downsides of stress (i.e. "affective filter"), bordem, often a lack of context and often extra time spent on finding / creating the cards vs. reviewing the cards.

    I haven't seen any evidence that "testing" would provide any extra memory benefit OTHER than to force you to pay attention.
    I also assert that many failed Anki reps LACK this:
    I'm sure many Anki users have had that big backlog of due cards with not a lot of time to spend on them. So they do their reps in a bit of a rush. They hit one of those newer/murky cards and stare and struggle with it for 10-15 seconds trying to remember... then finally tap "Show Answer" and the answer flashes on screen. In a small fit of defeat, they say "aw crap, yeah" and nearly instantly tap "Again"... and its on to the next card.

    Notice that they spend only a fraction of a moment with the full data in their head for that card, i.e. this L2 == that L1. And they aren't really FOCUSING on it. And their "affective filter" is probably really high.
    No wonder so many of these cards become leeches.

    That said, if you can stand Anki, when done well I think it is probably very effective if not the most effective way to quickly cram vocabulary in your brain.


    Why do I call it a "Focus Logbook"?
    "Focus" --- This is primary point, to make you really focus on a L1==L2 association for a few seconds.
    "Logbook" --- This is really a running log, I wanted to avoid the word "list" as it implies something like a "to do list" or "task list". Like many other "logs" this logbook can be used as a future reference for specific things or simply never looked at again. It shouldn't be viewed as a mountain of future work to be "finished".


    * What do I mean by "Savor" the word?
    For example, see this Glossika video starting at about 31:40 and notice the small gestures Mike (the guy in glasses) is making as he repeats the phrases.

    I believe there is something very powerful going on when you really "feel" the meaning as you say/hear/see the L2 word.


    I'm going to experiment with this for a while and see how it goes, but I'd love to hear feedback and/or advice.

    Thanks!
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  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Welcome to the forum! Always good to get new perspectives.

    Nothing wrong with this at all. It benefits us all to see new combinations of existing methods, especially when so many of them have not been formally studied academically. Some combinations may work, and some may not, at least for some/most people. This is why I am currently doing an experiment with a hybrid method of Iversen-wordlist up front and Anki later. If we look at medical studies and the conclusions they come to regarding a drug for instance, those conclusions are based on the exact circumstances, exact dosing and dosing intervals. They say nothing much about other combinations (which I have had doctors tell me as well). We should feel free to prescribe "off-label" uses and combinations for ourselves to see what works.

    A lot of methods or learning systems have proven to be effective, but it is often difficult to separate the essential from the marginally useful. Testing new combinations can help sort that out.

    Indeed they have, and this is the traditional way to make one's own comprehensible texts by intensive means first. Kato Lomb recommended this method and believed that what a learner figured out for themselves stuck better than what was learned, or more likely only partially learned, through explicit instructional texts.

    Points 2, 4, 7, 8, 9 I would agree with, though I don't believe that can't be overcome with example sentences in Anki. And my previous and any future study of Mandarin relied and will rely on writing as part of memorizing characters and vocabulary, though for other languages I am not sure it worth the trouble.

    Re 3, i.e. low stress, I suspect many find such intensive work stressful, which is why comprehensible input, i.e. i+1, is based on a minimum number of new words. But with enough intensive work, like Iversen does, eventually subsequent texts have to get easier.


    Have you read up on active recall and the testing effect? It seems fairly non-controversial to me that they are well proven, i.e. that the act of trying to recall a word aids in its long-term memorization.

    There is surely a smaller group of words that for whatever reason, are difficult to learn. This is why Iversen spends more time up front on learning with the help of mnemonic associations and bi-directional learning (i.e. translating). Iversen has said he has about a 15% attrition rate, i.e. words that don't become known with his system, and emk for example actively deletes such words. I agree that after the threshold where mid-frequency vocabulary (2000-9000 word families) gives way to low-frequency vocabulary, that it does not matter. But only after that threshold, which means I am personally willing to spend more time to learn those difficult words.

    There are many ways to deal with this problem, including using Iversen lists up front, filtering a day's missed words and reviewing them again later that day, and simply making note of such words so that more focus can be devoted to them, which in my case is a more thorough review of the example phrases and sentences that I put on cards.

    I don't have leeches for the reasons given above, i.e. I have tweaked the settings so that such cards are tag only and can't be made otherwise by virtue of a high leech threshold.

    Now you're drifting into subjective pseudo-science :). But if you think you "feel" them words and it works for you, then go with the feeling :).

    Edit to add: Is that a cat in your avatar? A cat? On polydog? :eek:
    Last edited: Aug 1, 2014
  3. Bob

    Bob Active Member VIP member

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    Yup sound like a good idea to get a language off the ground. Won't work at more advanced levels because you'll be working on low frequency words. How fast do you think you could get through a course with this?
  4. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    As Peregrinus says, the test effect is pretty much beyond question - testing aids memory, and we know this.

    The real weakness of Anki is one you correctly identified -- you can start to "skim" through and lose your focus. But do we need to completely abandon the electronic medium to address this? I don't think so. Many packages force you to actively answer the questions - DuoLingo for instance. TeachMe! does something very few packages I've seen do: it makes you type the correct answer even after it has displayed it to you, forcing you to focus and notice the correct form, and what you did wrong.
  5. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    I knew there was something else I wanted to comment on...
    The ineffectiveness of many classroom courses comes (in my opinion) from the use of mechanical tasks where you can repeat words words without thinking about their meaning. A "word" is a form associated with a meaning. You clearly can't learn a word if you ignore either form or meaning. If you don't "feel" it, that means you're not engaging with meaning. This does not imply that physical mime is always the answer, though.
  6. zKing

    zKing New Member

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    Thanks everyone for the warm welcome!


    I probably have misstated this. I'm not saying that there isn't a testing effect. I'm just conjecturing that some large part of the reason it exists is that it simply makes people pay more attention / focus on it. That said, I haven't read the actual research, so this isn't much more than a guess.



    I'm not just talking about those hard-to-learn words. I'm just saying I think it is very easy in Anki to get to a point where your eyes glaze over and you aren't really connecting with the meaning of the material beyond a very brief moment of "text blob X == text blob Y". But as I also said, Anki done properly is probably without peer for pure rate of vocab cramming. I see this as a spectrum of "ease/natural context/lower rate of effectiveness - to - hard/artificial/high rate". Probably something like:

    Logbook -> Goldlists -> Wordlists -> Anki

    Left being "easy, but low rate" and right being "harder, but higher rate". And I wouldn't doubt that using more than one of these at different times may be the right way to go. I've done a lot of Anki to get where I am today, but I can't take it for more than one or two months at a time before needing a lengthy break. I could see doing Anki or wordlists to grab those first 1000 words or so to get bootstrapped, and then do Logbooks for a while to expand your vocab on all the easier/high frequency words, perhaps cherry picking a VERY small set of "hard to learn" words into Anki on the side. And as you get more advanced, using Anki to fill in those low frequency items you really want to hang onto. In the end, I want to use the potent but painful weapon (Anki) only when I NEED to. :)


    Hehe, I regret the word "feel", but this is hard to explain. I think the more connection with an item you can make in your head, the better your recall will be. If you SEE it, SAY it, HEAR it, WRITE it and MOVE with it (obviously only works for some words) I think: a) you are really paying attention and b) you've given your brain a lot of different "hooks" to grab onto. Again, I admit 100% that this is all conjecture. But I'm basing it somewhat on some of the research around TPR: There was the one where the kid with the severed right brain / left brain couldn't recall words shown to one side if he couldn't physically move.
    That said, this is far from my field of science.

    I thought someone might comment on that. :) Fixed!
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  7. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I think we agree here, since I do view Anki as a tedious grind, but highly efficient, i.e. the right end of the continuum.

    BTW, regarding terminology, "logbook" would generally be termed as something like "notebook containing personal glossary plus grammar notes" by most of the proponents of the method of years past. And some of them would instead simply make ample margin notes in a text they were working on, rather than use a notebook.

    There are different ways to get to fluency/proficiency, some of them more efficient or fun than others. Very few learners who start the journey to that destination persevere, which is the most important thing. For me personally, I am more likely to persevere in climbing a hill if I go straight up as fast as I can without collapsing, instead of a longer and less strenuous way around to the top. Lots of things could get in the way of my making a slow journey, like life events, wanderlust or lack of motivation from slow progress. But of course I run the risk of underestimating the strain I can bear and of in fact collapsing. Fortunately Anki is like a series of daily walks at a brisk pace up a moderate hill, so I get in better shape and thus slowly become more able to complete the journey. However that is aided by the fact I am mostly inured to tedium by an obsessive nature that has allowed me to perform other such tedious tasks throughout my life.

    In the outside world of formal instruction, the "fun crowd" probably has few if any members who complete intense and tedious courses like DLI (where they have also been filtered for language aptitude), and the "tedium tolerating crowd" probably doesn't have as many members who complete high school and college courses taking years to get only to a modest level of ability, unless compelled to do so (e.g. compulsory European L2 learning). Yet we all manage to come together in a place like this on the internet.
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  8. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Nicely said - welcome to the forum!

    And you never will be unless you try it. That's one of the advantages with learning a difficult language - you really find out what works for you. Maybe you should add production to your experimentation, rather than just different ways to do isolated vocabulary study?

    Cat's are definitely ok too. Up to you.
  9. emk

    emk Member

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    Thank you for an excellent post! Lots of great stuff here.

    Lots of people say this is true for them, and I believe them. But I've lived my life mostly digitally since the mid-80s, and writing things by hand most just annoys me. To me, real knowledge is knowledge that I can store in a database or check into a version control system. These activities have almost a symbolic significance, telling my brain, "Yes, I'm serious about this." For me, writing by hand implies shopping lists and throwaway notes, and my brain doesn't take them very seriously.

    But just in case that's not enough to make me sound like an extremist, try this: Given a choice between typing information I want to learn, and simply copy-pasting that information into Anki, I prefer the latter. I've devoted scores of hours to both activities, and I actually find retyping to be a less efficient use of my time than just pasting and making cloze cards. Cloze cards—especially ridiculously easy cloze cards—can be a remarkably efficient and stress-free way to learn things. Especially if you delete aggressively to prevent leech build-up.

    I've written about this at length elsewhere, but Anki can be pleasant, agreeable and effective. The keys to pulling this off are:
    1. Create cards easily, from interesting materials, and learn words in context. (This is basically equivalent to how you use your notebook, actually.) The goal is to create cards so easily that deleting them is painless.
    2. Create cards that are easy to answer correctly. I like half word clozes with hints.
    3. Learn no more than 5–20 cards per day. Reviews will plateau between 5x and 10x this number, which is a lot once the initial enthusiasm fades.
    4. Delete cards aggressively: If you look at a card and say either "ugh" or "meh", it's gone. If you need to know a word, it will be around again soon enough, and maybe it will be easier to learn next time.
    Anki offers several different advantages, not all of which are obvious:
    1. The testing effect is a real thing.
    2. If you listen to a song twice, you won't learn it. But if the song is on the radio every few days for a month, it will get stuck in your head, even if you don't want it to. I don't know what this is called, but pretty much everybody has noticed it.
    3. Something really strange happens around the 30-day mark: cards that were hard and weird quite often become obvious and and easy. As far as I can tell, there's a process of memory consolidation that typically takes about a month to occur.
    So Anki can be quite pleasant, and if it's used well, it offers several advantages that aren't obvious at first glance. Someday, I ought to write a short book titled "Using Anki Without Driving Yourself Nuts."

    Now, I'm absolutely convinced that your notebook is a great method, in large part because I actually use Anki pretty much like a digital notebook. And course, lots of people prefer writing things down to making cloze cards, and writing things down can be a powerful memory aide.
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  10. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Studies have suggested time and again that this isn't a matte of personal preference, but that the motions involved in writing do indeed trigger better memory. If you genuinely believe yourself to be an exception, offer yourself for testing at your nearest university!

    some of the recent studies into the effects of handwriting on memory say that typing has almost zero effect, so yeah... copy-and-paste as much as you want - you're not losing anything.
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  11. emk

    emk Member

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    This undergraduate thesis actually has a pretty bibliography covering note-taking research: NOTE-TAKING, CONTEXT, AND MEMORY. There's a lot of different things going on: working memory, the difference between the encoding function of note taking (the improvements gained by writing stuff) and the storage function (the improvements gained by reviewing stuff later), and even the cognitive overhead of writing (which can interfere with listening to a lecture). The author actually found a nice case where typing beat handwriting in a student study (which I would love see be re-run under rigorous conditions).

    Given the complexity of these effects, I doubt many conclusions can be drawn from the science. And since none of the key papers were published in open access journals, even getting access to the existing results will be expensive. But if somebody has a research budget (hah), I would be happy to participate in a study that looked at (say) SRS review of clozed snippets versus writing notes by hand.
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  12. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I'm not sure about that. All I know is that when I write, it helps my memory, and reinforces the other skills. Typing is good too, but not as helpful hand writing. So my personal experience supports what in my mind is common sense - the 4 basic skills reinforce each other.
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  13. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Ah, student dissertations... the only form of academic writing which isn't dominated by selective quoting. If only more academics had the rigour and honesty they demand of their students... :-/
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  14. Montmorency

    Montmorency New Member

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    [..]

    It all looks pretty solid, and as you say, I'm sure people have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and that it works, or it can work.

    Writing by hand, if nothing else, slows you down, and as you say, makes you pay more attention, or at least gives you time to pay attention. In addition, there may be something going on at a deeper level, as others have suggested. Perhaps some hand-brain-eye-connections coming into play, and it could be enhanced by saying the word(s)/phrases out loud, hearing yourself saying them, and/or hearing someone else say them at the same time.

    Mankind has been writing for a long time; certainly longer than it has been typing. But Mankind has been speaking for even longer of course, so that might suggest that oral and aural methods, used in the right way, could be even more effective.
  15. Elexi

    Elexi New Member

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    You think so. Spend a few years marking undergraduate dissertations and you would change your mind. :)
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  16. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    It is not easy to put all these methods on a line. I keep a logbook at HTLAL, but it is not a place where I learn things (I report them, and I train writing things), and I have not personally used Anki - but read tons of testimonies from people who use the system. If you look at goldlists versus my use of wordlists then there are two major differencces: timescale and use of associations etc. Actually you could integrate active association techniques in any kind of vocabulary learning, but 'Uncle Davey' specifically warns against them for goldlists (whereas reading words aloud is recommended). In contrast I see active association building as an essential part of my learning even when I don't do worklists. I'm not quite sure what the recommendations are with Anki, and the time I spend on thinking about ways to remember words seem to be directly related to the ease with which I can recall them at a later control. So I would imagine that if you use ready-made Anki decks and just rely on the repetition factor it would take more repetitions to make those words stick.

    So what should we judge the 'strain' in a method by: the conscious effort used at every repetition or the number and time span spent on repetition and/or random encounters? A hard method with a low yield is obviously not worth using, but if the yields are comparable then it may be a temperamental quation whether you prefer short bursts of hard work or a more leisurely walk in the park that lasts a long time.

    I agree that speaking and listening are more immediate ways to let your brain work with language than writing and reading are - but in the same sense that whacking an animal and eating its flesh raw is a more direct way to get something in your stomach than whacking, slicing, cooking and serving on a plate are. To learn anything efficiently it is probably worth trying to combine the two: writing and writing gives some opportunities for intensive, repeated studies which you rarely can obtain with spoken words (at least after your childhood), but things like the ability to grasp something on the fly and retort are better served with speech. And the 'buzz' which I need to get active with a language is hard to obtain from written language because even reading is an activity driven by yourself - listening is something you get from an external source, and it doesn't stop even if you actively try not to listen. Reading stops immediately when you look away from the book or screen.
    Last edited: Aug 28, 2014
  17. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Though I am probably the most ardent advocate of Anki here (though now using the hybrid method of Iversen's lists for initial learning), I would have to say that Anki must be the most stressful method, while also being high yield. This is due simply to the lack of flexibility in being "forced" to review every day. Skipping several days of reviews and returning to find a mountain of them would be like Andy Capp in the famous cartoon coming home tipsy late at night to find his wife waiting in curlers with a rolling pin. I am planning on re-starting Spanish and maybe a little Latin soon, and due to my continuing German study via Anki, I am considering doing Iversen lists only with them due to the flexibility aspect. While losing the main benefit of Anki, i.e. its enforced use of the SRS algorithm tied to the forgetting curve, flexibility is looming larger to me until I have reached my German vocab goals of 20K+. I still will probably actually list those words in Anki that I use in word lists so that it can at a minimum serve as my personal glossary and allow a count of vocabulary. So in effect it would be like a digital logbook to some extent.
  18. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    Never heard it put quite that way, but yes!
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