I failed out of Latin because I thought all I had to was be able to recite all the declensions and conjugations from memory–easy enough to accomplish, but not very helpful.

What happens is you learn the table as a sequential blob, you know this follows that, and you have to go through the whole table until you find what you’re looking for. Not very efficient and extremely distracting.

What you REALLY want to do is be able to pick the form you need from it’s USE, not from it’s position out of the table.

The way to do that is to drill on picking out the exact form you need. Your magic tool for this is: flash cards (anki or physical), or a website like Conjuguemos or Linguno.

My experiment this week is to learn portuguese conjugations just from drilling the individual forms, without ever learning the table. Being able to recite the table should be the result of learning the conjugation.

Sorry if this is all horribly obvious to you, but it took me fucking forever to figure this out.

Any little tips you’ve learned?

  • emb@lemmy.worldM
    3·
    4 days ago

    I agree you need to change the cue. Memorizing tables is fine, but it’s pretty far abstracted from actual usage. Moving to a more specific question in Anki like “give me the preterite form” is better, but still out of context. Sentence or cloze cards would be even better. Ideally tho, you would be listening/reading every day, and the natural probabilties of the languages and its common words and forms would act as kind of a natural spaced repetition system.

    In practice that’s really hard to do, so you have to find the right balance. You need to memorize just enough that you can start using the language (at least for input). I like how Sakubi’s guide approaches it:

    Basically, this guide is a primer. This guide takes a very specific stance: The only way to acquire language features and become fluent is to consume them in a real context. This guide doesn’t try to drill you, and that’s a good thing.

    When you read this guide, don’t try to memorize it. It won’t work.

    You shouldn’t spend a week on each lesson. In fact, I think one new lesson a day is far too slow, even if you’re also reviewing old lessons.

    Every single main lesson in this guide covers basic grammar. You should read the entire thing as quickly as possible. It’s important to get stuff in your head sooner rather than later. It gives it time to grow, subconsciously, and even if you didn’t feel like you learned it the first time, it makes it easier to remember it for good next time. Just don’t get stuck reviewing it forever.

    It’s kind of specific to that particular guide, and maybe to Japanese, but I think the worthwhile takeaway is: quickly gloss over the forms and constructions so you’re aware of them. It’s enough just to recognize them. And then when you see them repeatedly, you’ll be ready to build intuition.

    Not to knock memorizing conjugations and tables too much. I did it a lot in school and enjoyed it. People should still do it if they think it’s fun imo.