Lessons

Lesson Info

Analog Methods

I want to show you how to use a how to do this without a computer because so that we can ignore that later we're gonna be spending the entire class talking about how to do this with computers and I want you to know that this is you know computers make things easier but honestly you could do this with flash cards to what you're trying to do is what you want you want a way of basically having a flash card I have one here I've written it out this is much hungarian get a good zoo uh I've I have no I've noted that this is going to be the front side of the card is it matters you know which card is happening when um and so I have f here just meaning front we'll talk about flash card designs later but just want to show you something uh so I have this last word this is much going my job is to think what's on the back side of this card you know what what is here and so I'm trying to think and I remember ok munchkin is again it's always cats and dogs because that's all we talk about here for some...

reason on dh so this is this picture of a cat that I drew this is I mean I'm cheating because I could actually like read it right now but this is my childhood cat lily and it's pronounced march and so I will flip over the card I'll see who I am in fact right there is a picture of a cat uh there is lily there is much written and phonetic alphabet these are the sort of flash cards you can write what you'll note one of the things about making flashcards yourself is that the art is worse then you'll find on google images and that's just fine no one else is looking at these flash cards I've seen people I have a friend who learned russian she had thes ridiculous pictures of like people dancing and I just looked like sticks to me and it's fine it worked just fine for her she's the only person reading those cards uh right hand written flashcards are basically useless in fact all of these flashcards for the most part are basically useless in anyone else's hands uh you must make your own flash cards because that is the learning process and we'll talk about that throughout and that is actually the fun part of the learning process sis I mean that's the flashcard creation process is the process of building a language the review process is just kind of remembering all those memories that you built for yourself you're like oh yeah I did pick that image that was fun I did draw that but you have these flash cards then what you do with them when you want is something that will quiz you on march and say what does this word mean today and then wait for days and then our weight of three two three four days quiz you wanted again if you're right quiz it to you like like ask you again in eight days and if you're right then ask you again and sixteen days and as soon as you're wrong asked you again in two days and then three days and then four days you want something that can react to how well you remember each word and you want that to happen with every single flashcard you right so you could I guess like have a giant calendar and like sleep each one in one by one but then you have to write down like what was the last interval like this would be a real pain so there's a really clever way of doing this it's called the lightner box which basically has a few ingredients you get a flash card file you get a lot of flash cards I have a lot of flash cards up um so those flashcards are for you to make your flash cards you get eight dividers see if we have not when resumed in um you have eight dividers you have one divider that says new cards on it this is where you store all the your new much clothes and things like that uh basically any time you write a new flash card you stick it in this section then you have basically seven levels you have cards level one you will look at these cards every day you have cards level to you will look at these cars every two days level three you look at every four days before you look at it every eight days level five I imagine we're at we looked at every I think we're at sixteen days I hope losing track of numbers level six you look at every thirty two days in level seven you look at every sixty four days and so the cars will sort of jump between each of these sections depending on how well you know them if you've gotten it right then a card will jump to leave the first time you see it the card will jump to level two if you get it right again the card will jump to level three and you won't look at it for a while then you're going to look at it again and see oh I got it right again jumps to level four now you're seeing it every I think eight days then you look at it and it's been eight days you look at level four and you think I forgot it just back down to level one the way these cards work is that every time you get a card right you jumped forward one level every time you get it wrong you jump all the way back to level one and it will quiz it quiz you on those cards frequently and then less frequently and then less frequently until you get all the way through if you can get out of level seven this is a game if you can beat level seven and you can remember your word for more than sixty four days at a pop then hurry you win that card is now basically in your long term memory for about a year you can go burn it or whatever or save it as like trophies staple into your wall I don't care you have a lot of options that's basically the game of it um so the only tricky part and that's not really a tricky part is that you to do this you need to know which levels to look at every day you need to know should I look at level four today like what how do I know when to look at each level ah and so there is a schedule that is one of the uh one of the sort of class things that you get out of the registering for the class um whatever you have access to this right here it's the same thing that's over here it's a sixty four day rotating schedule and so you take like a calendar any sort of day calendar I cal anything on you right in what day you're on so if I start studying my language on may fifth of two thousand fourteen then I'm going to write in one two three four five six all the way up to sixty four which I think sixty four hits around july and then I started and these are the today numbers basically you know what day in my own of my language learning process and every one of these day numbers has uh instructions basically says okay stay one today you're gonna look at level two you're gonna go through all the cars in level two going to see okay know if much goes in there I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna look through my cards I see much but I think uh that one is kat and I move that into level three and I keep going through my cards every card I go I get wrong goes back into level one and then I will look at all the cars in level one that will be everything I got wrong the first time and then any new cards I learned generally when you learn new cards uh you pick a certain number per day let's say you want to learn twenty new cards a day thirty new cards a day you take thirty cards from your new cards pile in the front you move them into level one and then you start your whole thing so on day one I take my thirty new cards I moved them into level one I look at all my cards in level to anything to get right goes into level three and if you can't get wrong goes back in a little one and then I look at level one and I studied those cards and I keep going through until all of those cars are memorized and get bumped up into level to the end of every day level one should be empty next day I look at level three I have much cause in there in this case because I got it right I look at march guy say okay, I think I got the one right it bumps into level four and everything else that goes wrong goes back down in a level one notice that there's card that they're a bunch of cards in level two I'm not looking at those on this day those cars air sitting waiting for me to forget them a little more on purpose day three at local levels two and one again day four ai lao look at level four and one and so you follow this schedule every day it tells you what to do first and what to do second and that will simulate donkey for you this will basically create a space repetition system for you with paper it's like a computer program that runs some neighbor kind of need so I think we're ready for questions and we have so many questions for sure we do. A lot of people are really interested in yankee system, and they also using flash cards as well. We can run through some of the questions that relate to that and there's, some of the others that relate to just the general course and your thoughts on learning techniques in general. So let's start with polly glut well, I think maybe means public lot. Maybe that may be all the things that I take a lot of notes in microsoft word. For example, is there some way to automatically download my notes into donkey or some other flash flashcards software, where it creates the flashcards automatically from the text file? Um, there are ways of taking itself files and importing them into a monkey. Um, the only issue is the flashcard design process is so intricate in terms of choosing your images and choosing your sound files and creating something that's there's really yours that sort of taking a lot of notes and bulk and dumping them in the monkey eyes sometimes kind of productive. Now, if you've written all those notes, then that's actually not that bad. I know what you want is, uh there is a sort of converter thing. I think it's, a donkey plugin on basically just search search online for importing csb files are importing excel files into a donkey uh they will show you how to do that in bulk. You will need to take your microsoft were document moving in to excel. Adrian has another anke technical question do you need to keep the files in the foldaway you imported them from two anke or doesn't anke save them in your profile says in your profile he takes care everything you can delete all those files that are on your desk top and stuff like that? I think you may have already covered this, but just to reiterate ace in seventy one is saying, can we upload already made flashcards into yankee in any language we want? Yes, but that would mean in a way that would find your thing. You're putting things right? Yes, I don't like using premade dex I make one exception for pronunciation, but I don't I I do everything I can to make it so that that's a usable learning experience by giving people videos and things like that, like with with the program bonus the thing that you get for forgetting the all access pass this deck that is a siri's of one hundred twenty flash cards that goes through the international international phonetic alphabet and teaches you each symbol I don't recommend using it directly, I recommend watching a video that I have prepared teaching you every single one of those cards as if you made those cards once you're familiar without end that information, yeah, then you can use your flashcards, but using someone else's deck is usually a recipe for trying something out, saying, oh, this kind of works and then giving up to buy us asks how complaint of the flashcards for the phonetic alphabet, you putting in clicks on diet critics and bits and pieces? Good question, the phonetic alphabet cars are for the dialects of english. I have a siri's of three videos on my website that go through in rial detail how the fanatic alphabet works and how fanatics works in your mouth. We'll be doing that during this workshop, too, and so I'm using english as a base because I want people to be familiar with the sounds of their own language, assuming that the biggest part of this audience are english speakers, or at least are familiar with english, which is probably the case if you're listening to me right now and can understand what I'm saying, and so I use english as a base. I don't want people at this point to memorize all the hundreds of symbols of oppa because you won't need them. I mean, do you need to memorize every single click? No, unless you're learning one of the click languages, I want you to know what your own languages, and then know what your target languages quite a lot of questions on the same subject. I just run through some of the names very quickly, but uber, rick and awesomely humble and sarah so sorrow, sir, they're asking basically the same question cannula in multiple languages at the same time. And do you recommend that, or do you really think it's best to focus on one uber? Rick as she's forced to learn three french, spanish and italian, I highly recommend splitting. I don't like doing languages fight in your head no matter what. Uh, there's, I think a lot of people had this experience of they've taken french and college is something they start learning italian and someone they need to recall an italian word, and the french one keeps coming up and started fighting languages fight in your head and it's tux it's not comfortable, and so I like to split those up as much as possible and say, ok, if I'm gonna be if I wantto have five languages in my head, I'm gonna spend one year on each one, I'm going to separate them. I'm going to focus on one as far as I can until it's, a riel built up thing where it's like, I have friendships in there, and then later I'm gonna start building up italian, separate, um uh we'll talk a little bit later about laddering this this concept of learning french in italian idea of using a book for italian speakers to learn french and using that I like that idea because in your flashcards that's going to go away to mean the flashcards are one hundred percent in your target language always er and so the idea of getting a little extra review of one of your old languages while you're learning is great, but in terms of these flash cards, they should be immersive, and they should be in one language at a time and generally I recommend sticking with that for like, six months to a year because if you could do to short if you're gonna go like, gonna spend three hours every day reviewing flashcards and I'm just gonna learn french in two months yeah, you can do that, but you will forget relatively quickly. The longer you do this, the longer will stay in your long term memory question about the flashcards, specifically with languages that have huge number of words for the one thing. So she says assuming this method will work with arabic but that's supposed to be the most full language on earth with, for instance, three hundred words for camel so how many flash cards would take? And also how would you deal with the three hundred words for camel dumitru what? Just going without going with karen it's. Awesome. Uh, why do you need to know all three hundred words for campbell there's? You know, the english word set for since s e t has four hundred fifty one definitions. Do you need to know all of them? No. I mean, I like to separate words out into as many chunks as possible in the smallest bits possible. And so generally for every single definition, I will have a new flash card. If I wanted to learn every single definition for set, I would have four hundred fifty two flashcards. That would be I don't honestly manageable in donkey. I mean, donkey is really good at handling huge bodies of information and jamming it all into your head. I mean, it's great. Just why would I need to know for hundred fifty two definitions of set? Uh and so, uh, the idea of okay arabic has three hundred words for camel. Great. How many do you need? You know how many of you could even encounter on a daily basis? So let you then going to your frequency word list in working out which of the camel woods is the frequently this camel? Yes, you would look for, you know, what is what is the word? What is the most common camel word? If you even need camel, why do you need camel necessarily? I mean, I guess for arabic if you're thinking of getting a fair, fair, fair, fair, fair, fair fair uh if that's if you're going to be traveling, then yes if you're not going to traveling, maybe not, but yeah, I think there's there's you know, english has for instance I think something like eighty six thousand word families a lot of words english speakers speak know about twenty to forty thousand of those words we don't know the entire english language and you don't need to we function just fine with many, many fewer words than the whole vocabulary of the language. If arabic has three hundred for camel that's great you don't need them unless you want to be camel expert which cause you do need them well, I just checked with our student because they've actually been following along. They have the workbook they have monkey up on the computers here how's it been for you so far this morning? Guys, deep experience I did have one question game please do you still find yourself testing yourself a language that you feel like already comfortable with, like german or french? We're gonna talk about language maintenance in the link later segment what I've found is that you will forget things I mean there's no way to go to prevent forgetting I mean yes my book is called flute forever and it's about how do you hold on things for really really long term periods of time and for your whole life but that being said if you completely ignore if I completely ignored my french since two thousand ten I went to russian I didn't do a thing with french because I didn't want them to fight and then I went on to hungarian I didn't do a thing with hungary with with french then either it's now it's two thousand fourteen I'm like it's a fair distance from french and I have this experience of needing to record a video showing my street cred of lowing lots of languages on my website and I found oh no I've forgotten all my french but one of the things that happens in the course of doing this is that you build something that is really robust um you build something that isn't just I know a few facts about french I know a few words I know a few grammar rules but I know a language I know howto think in this thing and that comes back really fast um I basically in that case I watched two seasons of the tv show twenty four in french and it all pretty pretty pretty much came back within a month I was dreaming and french by the end of that and so these things really do come back when you learn them to. Ah, sufficient degree. When you learn that to the point where they really are there, then even if you forget stuff, and even if it's not right on the surface, where you could just immediately say, yeah, I know all french, and I can speak it. Any moments. Notice it will come back very rapidly.