Saturday, December 27, 2008

Mental Acupuncture

Some days later, and I've managed to make a good deal of progress. Audio dictation is proving quite useful, especially considering the fast-paced, natural delivery of iKnow's actors - don't you hold back on me, I want the real deal! For pronunciation and accent's sake, this is superb.

The only real "problem" I've encountered is that I'm having a heck of a time memorizing vocabulary. I mean, I can zip through most sentences and comprehend the full meaning most of the time, and that's great, but constantly forgetting the readings of various words kinda gets in the way of things. In order to combat this problem, I've been adding every word (or expression) that I've had trouble with to its own Anki entry... and to an extent, this has been helping.
On the other hand, it sure isn't much fun to go the path of rote memorization on these suckers, constantly failing each before I finally manage to remember their pronunciation, often forgetting them again the nexy day.
To that extent, I can see just how effective learning the pronunciation in association with its accompanying sentence truly is. I definitely seem to have an easier time recalling a word's reading within a sentence, rather than on its own (most of the time). Still, brain numbing as it may currently be, I don't think it can really hurt to add a bit of separate vocabulary words to my deck.

I uh, may have gone a little overboard yesterday, however; from the 30-odd sentences I mined, I added about 35 words to my deck. Ouch. I spent today simply reviewing cards rather than mining new ones, as I knew these new vocabulary cards would require some extra attention.

A little bit of trial and error presently, but it's interesting to find what does and does not work (as well, anyway). It's just a matter of refining the process and maximizing efficiency at this point - the rest is all laid out for me. It's a pretty nice feeling.

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