Steve Kaufmann – lingosteve
The key to success in language learning is to engage with the language often and in ways that you find enjoyable. If you like doing flash cards, using spaced repetition systems, then it’s worth doing. If not, this kind of learning activity won’t help much.
0:00 – What are spaced repetition systems?
2:38 – Why SRS is not a method I use when learning languages.
4:55 – The spaced repetition system we have at LingQ.
9:06 – The brain recognizes patterns when learning a new language.
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#learnlanguages #languages #polyglot
I study flash cards from time to time, usually after reading, when new words are still fresh in my mind. I'm not a fan of spaced repetition determined by an algorithm. Too many words to learn. I prefer to spend my time letting my brain get used to the language, listening, reading and speaking.
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After seeing your video I will definitely avoid using Anki often, i have been using it for some time and feel it’s not working anymore. I have also found that words stick better when I am reading content I like.
ヘイトコメント書いた人は、とにかく話すべき。英会話は短期間で習得できる。って考え方の人だと思います。流暢とただのコミュニケーションレベルの区別がついてない人。
Because frequency drops off so rapidly is why I think an SRS can be helpful. By putting a word in the SRS (whole sentences clearly illustrating the context only, never isolated words), I can usually recognize the word almost instantly when I see it the 2nd time. I still might have to see a naturally a few times before I really got it, but my impression is judicious use of an SRS can help.. It's more of a booster to help make your other input more efficient. I think something like 5-10 minutes a day can be helpful.. Every minute you spend not getting input better be something that makes your other minutes of input more efficient… That's my current thinking but it could change.
Audio so poor
I haven't figured out how to use the flashcards in LingQ yet. I'm doing Japanese, and I think it played a sound and just had a blank spot for me to type in… Was I supposed to type in the meaning? Or the hiragana/kanji/katakana? Or the romaji? I didn't know. I tried one of them and got it wrong. So then I turned off the flashcards. But now I feel like I'm not retaining a lot of the words as efficiently as I could be.
The problem with srs systems is that they are extremely boring. I've been learning Japanese for 14 months and have never used any srs system I just read and listen,so what uf took me longer to learn japanese or kanji for that matter ,I prefer to enjoy myself for many years than doing something boring for even an hour
I 200% agree !
I see where you're coming from and you make some good points. Anki might not be the stimulating thing in the world, but for me there is no better way to build vocabulary. (At first anyway) But once you have a solid base in the language it's probably best to take off the training wheels
I always use your arguments when my Arabic teacher tries to get me to use Anki. Thank you for the ideas.
I can only do SRS flashcard review for like 10-15 mins before getting bored. I think its a great efficient way to revise for a test if you need to study specific information for school. For language learning I like to make flashcards for specific vocab, not every word i don't know. I have a Harry Potter SRS deck of vocabulary I wanted to remember when I was reading Harry Potter in French. I think if SRS is done in a short, specific, targeted way its helpful and fun for me. Otherwise its just another boring drill! But for overall learning i do activities more stimulating like Steve says listening and reading, as well as movies and watching vloggers in my target language. I have seen such an improvement in my french from reading books I already liked in English in French! excited for this journey!
Et veus molt bé Steve! No podem esperar més per tenir el tailandès a Lingq! Petons des del cor, des del cor de Catalunya, des de la Cuina al Cor!
Bat—flying mouse in German and Russian, and probably some others.
Ok i will delete my anki, it feels like a chore
I use SRS (specifically Anki), not to learn individual words but to learn complete sentences from my mother tounge (English) into my target language. I create these myself either from transcribed conversations, or sentences based on things that I want to be able to express. The new sentences I create are based on structures that seem new, interesting or complex.
Typically, I will only start learning 4-5 sentences each day, which means I can usually complete my daily session in under 20 minutes. If you have ever used Busuu, this will sound familiar and indeed, this is where I got the idea.
I think that one of the problems with getting past the 'intermediate plateau' is that there is a tendency to stick with the simpler structures. I have found that drilling more complex structures really helps the difficult aspects of the language stick.
Love your content Steve. You are so inspiring. I think during the first few months of learning a language, when I am super excited, it's nice to use Anki to force myself to remember boring stuff like: numbers, day of the weeks, etc. I feel that my excitement can defeat the boring moment during that few months. It's more efficient to learn things like numbers and days of the week from flashcards. But other than these words, I do agree 100% that it's much more fun and sustainable to learn naturally from interesting content.
I have no luck with spaced repetition as I eventually for get to do it over long stretches of time.
Having spent a lot of time with Anki and many of its add-ons, creating decks and managing them long-term is a chore (even managing shared decks). It’s ok for more discrete information such as STEM material, but for languages I haven’t used it at all. I’d probably use it for non-Latin alphabets and characters, but I haven’t the need yet.
Repeated exposure to the language and time is all you need, until you’re at a high level. At this point you can take on deliberate, targeted training to improve upon any aspect of your use of the language that you’d like.
I don't know why you have a opinions for you appearance, you are amazing! Ignore that and record where you feel more comfortable.
Anyway, try to be care with audio.
💖💖
First of all, I just want to say that you look for very healthy and happy Steve. Hopefully the negative comments were not meant to attack you because if so, they should not be given any stock. (Also the bat story was wild)
Secondly, I really appreciate this perspective! When I first started learning Mandarin, I relied solely on flashcards and pure "test" memorization. I think as I've gone through the process and picked up more and more, I realize that I really enjoy the flashcard memorization style ONLY at the very basic levels (i.e. the first 100 words or sentences). Once I have this small foundation, I agree. I think they become the antithesis to what they're there to do, which is help you become accustomed to seeing and using these terms. If you have too many flashcards, it becomes about getting through the deck of cards and not learning and understanding their content, imo.
I really like spaced repetition! And I've made a really good flashcard system with chunks, full sentences and even reading exercices inbuild. Because I won't remember things that show up once in a book and then the next time three books later. And I can see my vocabulary growing this way.
But… I don't enjoy doing this for hours and hours! The only problem with spaced repetition is, in my opinion, that the growing vocabulary also means: More and more words need to be repeated. For me the problem that making such fine flashcards is time consuming does no longer exist, because, yes, I want to learn new vocabulary, but I have no time for that because I have to repeat the old ones. Well, more than 1500 for English and over 700 for Spanish, in less than a year. I think it'll take the rest of the year to kick them somehow out of my way.
The flashcards could be in the form of sentences. And you could delete/suspend sentences that you understand (i.e. the equivalent of being able to recognize all the words in a sentence at LingQ). You could also create flashcard decks based on books for example. What I often do after having gone through a flashcard deck containing the 5-10k most common words in the context of sentences. I will start converting ebooks to flashcards (this can be done in a matter of 5-10 minutes using Word to parse the book into individual sentences, copying to Sheets, exporting as CSV then importing into an Anki Note template). I like it because I can delete/suspend all the sentences I can understand (counteracting the downside you mentioned of doing needless repetition), and gain some repetition on the sentences I understand less well.
The downside of all this is of course the learning curve and the necessary technical knowledge. The benefit with LingQ in contrast would be that everything technical is essentially done for you in advance.
I would never use SRS with individual words or phrases. Always using full sentences if I am trying to acquire meaning.
So in this way SRS is not necessarily just a bunch of words scattered randomly. Since you can read a book in the correct sequence first. And then simply get som SRS repetition on the sentences you understood less well. And then you simply suspend/delete sentences as you recognize that you can understand the sentences.
When you'll do an exit video in indonesian?
In my opinion srs is by no means a substitute for reading and listening, it should only be treated as a way to quickly recap on words and it get's more useful when dealing with rarer vocabulary since you won't find those words frequently enough in the wild to remember them. Also if it takes more than about 15 minutes a day it starts to grow tedious in my opinion, in that case the time is better spent reading.
I am thinking of instead of doing SRS with flashcards, I'll do it by reading the lesson a few times on the day that I would do the flashcards for all the individual words in it. I call it spaced reading.
haha, you know so little about SRS and the basic principles behind, and to compare Anki with Memrise/LinQ etc is just even more so.
Отличное видео. Поздравляю!
I like your videos, inside or ouside.
Pay no attention to those negative comments. I love the awesome content you put out. As an aspiring language learner, your videos have been really helpful.
Is anyone else feeling Mr. Kaufmann kinda sad?
Steve, thanks for your videos, I am writing to you from Colombia
Thank you for sharing your honest opinions. You are great!
SRS is not as bad as some people could think. It's still a good idea if you want to have less headache and have some fresh easy start with CORE 1-2K words. But no point to have more words than 2k, because it will have lots of vocabulary you will not need at all.
I use anki with my kids. They get a treat for every 2 right lol. However I have it set for 8 new words and 40 review cards. Takes about 20 mins. I see it more as reinforcement or review of words so I know the SRS is off with only 40 review cards and don't worry about it. I saw a huge jump in my kid's language ability after starting this. Of course my kids do a ton of listening, online tutors, reading, workbooks and activities in Chinese. For myself I make physical flashcards of characters I come across in books. Reading alone isn't enough to learn characters for me. Especially the less common characters. I'm trying to do more re reading short articles but I find re reading more boring than flash cards. Thankfully reading with my kids forces me to re read.
"I've got a deck, I've got lots of them"
Exploded in laughter
A sporadic, come-and-go recall of thousands of important but infrequent words is more than Kaufmann would have achieved by playing golf, as one suggestion here has it, instead of reading and listening for an hour or two a day. A tenuous hold on these words is something, not nothing. It's a foot in the door. Best moment in the video is Kaufmann's mention of important words that appear just twice in a book. That there are such words is flatly and comically denied by many language learners. It challenges their ideas about efficiency, perhaps reminding them of other important matters upon which their hold is tenuous or sporadic. They define this always as failure. In response they might try to maintain their notion of efficiency by saying: okay, just add the infrequent words to a spaced repetition system. Plug them into the algorithm. But there are thousands of important-but-infrequent words, so marginal gains in efficiency are offset by losses in motivation. In the end the least efficiency, the least return on investment, comes from repeatedly locking horns with one's own humanity.
Der Ton ist viel zu leise! Bitte das Microphon näher an den Mund halten. So ist das sehr anstrengend!
I love SRS because my knowledge is safe with it. I just spend 20 minutes a day adding 10 cards
srs really does make you wonder if it’s worth it. My only success with it is actually reading and listening to a crap ton of sentences. Around 6000 sentences separated over 600 cards, all from the dictionary of japanese grammar (pre-made deck). So basically I did my reading and listening on anki and used it as my reminder to review my comprehensible input. My sort of mini stories you could say. I get really bored playing visual novels so that deck was my next best thing since the difficulty started from basic sentences to complex paragraphs. The happiness I get when I understand a whole paragraph or even just a sentence is so good and helped motivate me to spend more than 3 hours a day reading and listening since I could feel tangible improvement. I’ve recently finished the deck 2 weeks ago and I am comfortable just watching anime that the ambiguity is tolerable enough for me to enjoy. Definitely a massive change for me compared to two months ago.
Now i can understand more of korean language. For me Now is so easy learn with words in context.
Like the first course in LinQ "이 코스는 흔히 쓰이는 표현으로 이루어진 이야기예요." The sentence and words still in My brain. 선생님 너무 많이 감사합니다 ㅎㅎ 너의들 비데오를 너무 사랑해요😊
This guy is amazing
what is your alternative to space repatition?
wait lisening and reading k