4 ms·
what does it mean to have learnt a word if you can't recall it?
by exe34 2y ago
what does it mean to have learnt a word if you can't recall it?
- mandmandam 2y agoEver have a word on 'the tip of your tongue'?
- exe34 2y agothat's fair - but I consider it useless if I can't recall it when I need it for everyday words. for really rare words that I'll use 5 times in my career, sure, I'll explain it to chat gpt and it'll get it in one go.
- StefanBatory 2y agosorry, I wasn't clear. Personally, I just went through word lists. When I had them memorised, I'd put them into Anki deck. Because I am going to forget them over time.
- exe34 2y agoI haven't quite convinced myself either way, whether learning a big list and then anki them for recall is better, or having a big list on anki but only introduce two of them a day. personally I find it makes it much more enticing to learn two new phrases each day, rather than trying to remember same 50 phrases all week.
- sn9 2y agoUnderstanding versus remembering. You first understand and only afterwards encode your understanding in cards. It's in reviewing the cards that you put the understanding into your long-term memory (or possibly reveal gaps in your knowledge, in which case you revise your understanding).
- exe34 2y agoSwedish: Vad har det med saken att göra? direct translation: what has this with the matter to do? meaning: what does this have to do with it? Where does understanding come in? I can imagine what understanding mean for mathematics, science, etc. but for language, I'm having difficulty figuring it out.
- dambi0 2y agoThe understanding comes from knowing when to use that phrase compared with other phrases that might mean similar things. Idiomatic usage to some extent. If learning a language was just remembering direct phrases then machine translation would be trivial
- exe34 2y agoright so "med saken" was the new word, I understood the rest of the phrase. so it took like 4 seconds to understand. it'll take about 10-20 reviews to remember it for good. so the understanding took far less time than remembering. I could read a whole grammar book 10 times, but if I don't remember any of the words, then I'll never be able to write/say something. having all the words on the tip of my tongue is no good for communication.
- dambi0 2y agoI understand the English words you are using. I’m still not convinced I understand what you are saying. In this particular case recall doesn’t seem to be the problem.
- exe34 2y agoI think it's possible we're not in disagreement at all, but I'm struggling to express the issue: to me, "recall" is the task that takes all the effort, "understanding" is pretty much instant. Therefore "recall" is the bottleneck between me now and me using the word in a conversation or piece of writing. But it's possible that we have conflicting ideas of what recall/understanding means.