Vocabulary lists

I have been making notes of the vocabulary and translations on my computer and I think it has been helpful. I know you are not supposed to but I don’t think I would be able to remember all the vocabulary otherwise. I am on challenge 11.

I do, too. But after the lesson when I know the pronunciation.

It’s useful when a topic is revised in a later lesson. I can look up which lesson to revisit if I need to.

Raymond

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If it’s what you need to make you feel comfortable carrying on with the lessons, then that’s the most important thing.

But for anyone who’s uncertain about it - time and time and time again we have seen people who thought they needed to take notes trusting the system and discovering that they didn’t… :slight_smile:

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There is also a theory that physically writing vocab lists on paper helps fix the words in the memory (and, incidentally, that typing into the computer is NOT an effective substitute!). This technique used to be used to good effect, for example, in Russian crash-courses run by the military both here and in the US after the war.

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Yes, there’s some pretty good (and replicated) research on this, isn’t there? It’s definitely (with the hand-writing element) a tool in the memory forming tool-kit (although I would rather love break down the results by forms of testing, which I haven’t seen done - other research on matching learning environment to testing environment makes me wonder if the bump for spoken production would be less than the bump for written production)… :slight_smile:

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For a while, I did a variation on this: I would write down the English phrases in each lesson, but not the Welsh ones.

This way, I felt I could get a handle on the contents of each lesson, without exactly “cheating”, and writing down the Welsh. After all, I know how to read, write and pronounce English already, so writing down English isn’t going to do me any harm.

It meant that if I wanted to go back and revise the Welsh for a particular English phrase, I could look it up here, and then go more or less straight to the relevant part of the lesson (I had written down how many minutes in to the lesson each English phrase occurred).

I think it was a reasonably helpful thing to do, but after a while I gave up doing it, Partly through lack of energy, but also, it no longer seemed necessary after a certain point.

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I’m not using it as a memory aid; for me it is about creating a computerised index that I can search to find the lesson I need when I’ve forgotten how to say something.
On the other hand, I do have a spiral pad for words I come across outside of the lessons. Is that discouraged, too?

Raymond

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In most cases, it would probably be faster and more effective just to run through the last session of a Level (or at most, the last two) - everything will be in there…:slight_smile:

Nope, not discouraged as such - everyone tends to build their own strategies for widening their vocab - I’m a big fan personally of something Michel Thomas used to say about not bothering to look something up until you’ve heard it several times - and generally I’m a huge believer in letting your conversations lead you in the direction of the vocab you need. But if you enjoy collecting them and writing them down, it’s not going to do you any harm… :slight_smile: