Postby Saim » 2018-06-17, 15:01
I've decided that for now I'll only use Anki to make cards with example sentences from glosbe and such. I won't try to memorise them (too much effort for limited gains), only training recognition, but I will record myself saying all the sentences in the target language. The point of this is to artificially increase the amount of times I'll see certain words and constructions as a supplement to extensive input, as well as seeing new words in several different contexts, namely the context I originally come across them in and sentences from dictionaries, either example sentences or things taken out of bilingual corpora like in glosbe, linguee or bab.la (I also had the idea of plugging in sentences from grammar books). Memorising isolated vocabulary does work but I don't find it much fun and it's not that efficient.
I will do this for some of my more advanced languages (Serbian, Polish, Urdu, Hungarian) as well as two that I would like to see a lot of progress in over the next year (German, Russian). Unfortunately the Urdu corpus on glosbe doesn't seem to be very good (a lot of it seems to be from the Urdu translation of the Bible and the Qur'an, which is not a register I necessarily need to get so used to), and I can't find any good monolingual Urdu dictionaries with example sentences on the internet, so I've also added some sentences directly from articles I've read (I'm advanced enough that I can more-or-less trust my own translation).
I'm going to abandon Hebrew for the time being, because even though I love the language and I have a really strong base in it, I've noticed that any time I spend on Hebrew inevitably takes time away from Urdu or Hungarian, two languages which I have much stronger external reasons for learning. I'm not going to go to Israel any time in the near-to-mid future, but it's likely I'll keep visiting Pakistan and Hungary. Hungarian won't be too hard to progress in because I'll have one class a week at university (although I'll still do my own study of course). For Urdu on the other hand I'll make sure to do one intensive activity a week (mostly reading news articles; I want to get that formal, Perso-Arabic vocabulary down). So Hebrew's not worth it just for the 1~ time a year I happen to come across Israelis, especially if that means slowing down my progress in Urdu and Hungarian.
If nothing changes over the summer, German and Russian are the only two languages where I'll work on all four core skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). I've spent a lot of time studying them passively and I think I'd benefit a lot from cranking it up a notch. I also kind of need Russian for my MA thesis. To give them more time I'm going to put away French, which is a shame because I've only recently started getting OK at active production, but I don't see any reason to prioritise Romance languages at the moment.
Turkish is the only "hard" language I'm going to keep working on. This means taking a break from Arabic, Basque and Finnish. It was fun working on so many non-IE languages at once but obviously if I want to get to B1 in any of them I'll have to focus on one, and since I'm by far the best at Turkish I decided to give that a go. This is the only language for which I'll make flashcards (on Memrise) for isolated vocab items, because I find this method actually a pretty effective way to get used to word roots in a completely alien language (I mean, it helped with Hebrew and Hungarian). I'll do lots of "fast study" sessions once all the vocabulary has been "watered" (because I find this little game on Memrise fun), but I'll also constantly delete and remake the deck because I find big decks with lots of random unrelated words too boring. I might start working on spoken production, but if I do take end up doing iTalki lessons I'll make sure to plan discussion topics in advance so I can memorise words likely to come up in preparation for the class. If I can be bothered I will also put examples sentences in Anki.
You could ask why I would bother with flashcards for Serbian or Polish given the level I'm at. I feel like my progress has kind of plateaued a bit and doing some more intensive study might help push me a bit further. There are definitely some rap songs that I'd like to understand better (lots of random words that I don't know), so that could be a good place to start. In any case, there won't be any rote memorisation, all I'm going to do is expose myself to sentences (and record myself saying them, which as far as I can tell makes me more aware of my pronunciation errors rather than fossilising them).
I'm also allowed to dabble in languages like Romanian or Albanian (or any of the aforementioned abandoned languages) IF I find some interesting input to use (a fun song ideally with an English translation already available, an interesting article, a video with subtitles, etc.) and all I do is look up words or listen to the audio several times. I am banned from making any flashcards or using any textbooks -- if I am really curious I can skim a textbook but I'm not allowed to take any notes or try to actively memorise words. IME this is a better way of dealing with distractions than fully giving into it (because then the language loses its allure and becomes a chore) or trying to suppress it (because that takes energy you could use to study).
Last edited by
Saim on 2018-06-17, 19:40, edited 4 times in total.