| That's odd. Your strategy of rushing through basic grammar and a small number of words quickly is actually a use case I said SRS is useful for. In the link you're responding to, I said: > "The second situation where spaced repetition works really well is when you're studying something more complex, but you can use spaced repetition as a scaffold to get through the initial phases a bit faster. Learning vocabulary is like this. Though there are the issues that pointed out earlier about context and collocations and word boundaries, spaced repetition can still be a huge win. And that's because you don't have to use it to learn and remember everything. You can use it to get a scaffold, to get started with whatever foreign language you're learning or medical vocabulary or whatever kind of vocabulary. And after having memorized, say, five hundred or a thousand or even five thousand words in this new area that you're studying, you can then do a lot of reading and use those words and encounter them in many different contexts and actually acquire a solid grasp of that topic." I would definitely start with training my ear to the sounds in a language at the very beginning, but flashcards can also be a useful supplement early on. It's funny you mention Oliver! I was in contact with him when he first launched his site (just for Chinese, initially). For what it does, it's made well. LingQ is probably my favorite for getting the initial base down, though. FWIW, I don't think I've every encountered anyone who saw SRS as an exclusive language learning system, except maybe a few hopeful app developers who have realized how easy it is to make a flashcard app. The real question is how much of your study time do you want
to spend on decontextualized sentences or words vs time spent on sustained reading, listening or conversation? |