Forums

General My way to use memrise

And stop procrastinating on the forum.

This requires a fair amount of self-assement however. There are some words I felt I knew "100%" but I don't ignore words and 2 months down the line I was tested on one and was drawing COMPLETE blanks on it. I felt as if the word itself was completely foreign.

So sometimes its better to pile it on and halt progress (stop learning new things!) than to ignore things you feel you know 100%.

PS: The word was 封筒

Then you didn't use the word enough. You have to put what you learn to use somehow. Discuss the word with yourself in your TL. I once did self-talk for about an hour on "the importance of 伝える that damn message". Sounds silly, yeah, but who gives a flying fuck? I sat in my bath tub and nobody could hear me.

What I can use, I know. If I can't use something confidently over some period of time, I have to find ways to use it more.

Regarding 封筒, how about rephrasing it to手紙を入れるものって何だっけ, just to make your head buzz? When I think in German for 10 hours, then sit down, and memrise asks me for the Japanese for "envelope", I probably go WTF, too, but if I chatted with a friend just 5 minutes ago, it'll just come up naturally

By the way, I sometimes can't come up with a word I need right now even in my mother tongue. I know people who talk like this pretty often: "Can you give me that thing? I need it to make that thingy.."

Guess I'll do that, thanks for the tip.

I keep on reading on forums about "ignoring" words you already know. As I didn't see any "ignore" button yet I wonder if it is a feature for advanced learners that only appears when you cover a certain ammount of words or if you just go to the next word.I would appreciate your answer.

There is a bar near the top grieg that if you click gives options. One of those options is "ignore".

@Andi I constantly forget words in English like that. I think many people momentarily blank out with their vocabulary. For the life of me I wanted to say it was 手紙 but letters go in envelopes! :P But I still couldn't remember 封筒!

Using it often and having a spaced repetition can both achieve the same thing. There are words I've never used once that I can recall instantly simply because I've used an SRS system to learn them but never actually put the word to use.. such as 回る. I've never used the word but I know what it is instantly without thinking about it.

griegozurita - 'As I didn't see any "ignore" button' - slide the mouse curser up to the grey bar at the top and the menu appears.

thanks Andi - Great points ; I agree with all

Yeah, I never to my knowledge used something like "Intravenöser Tropf" (intravenous drip, 点滴) in German, yet I know it. I could use it if need be, and if I came across it in the wild, I had no problem. That word's in my passive vocab, just like 両替、横断歩道、過労死. While I don't use those at all, I come across them randomly.

Throw 横断歩道 at me randomly and I might have to stop a second and thing "okay, 歩道 was sidewalk - ah right, that meant pedestrian crossing!". Now, if I was watching a show about traffic, or the narrator of the show I was watching was talking about it, I'd be likely to recognize and understand it. That's the thing with these vocab learning tools - they're sterile environments, like a laboratory.

I had instants where I could instantly remember words here on memrise, but if I wanted to use it outside, I couldn't. That's perfectly normal, too, as a word you learn has to pass several stages of consciousness to become really usable. Hell, after 20 years of using English now, I still sometimes get lost in longer sentences while producing (as can be seen in my OP, unfortunately there's no edit button here), sometimes I have to use dict.leo.org to look up some specific word I had on the tip of my tongue, but couldn't remember.. that's no problem really, because...

When I speak in German, I might produce 50% of a sentence, leave it unfinished and instead start another sentence without even knowing. The flow of the sentence just changed. I sometimes start over with a sentence to rephrase it. We have fillers for that like "maybe I should say" or "what I meant was" and so on. Natives use those a TON. That's also what makes it hell on earth for a Lower Intermediate learner to follow speech by native speakers. And now add contractions like そんだけ instead of それだけ, or "gonna" instead of "going to". French is a nightmare in this regard, as you learn much of the language in its written form, while the spoken language is like something completely different. German might suck, too, but I wouldn't know, as a native speaker. English is a horror. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6JzYkj5Pns

Now, regarding the cases of "I thought I had it, but it turned out I didn't actually have it after all"...

Your brain filters out useless stuff. I never used 象徴 (symbol) at all. I never saw or heard it in use. Then, all of a sudden, a sentence like これは僕らの愛の象徴だ came up. I KNEW I had 象徴 already in the past, and the fact I couldn't remember what it was drove me mad. Well. I paused the show, loaded old, trusty jiten.net and ... this was the trigger I needed to really own the word. I never forgot it afterwards. Yeah, I mistyped it a few times on memrise, but then I ignored it. I can still use it, and do so from time to time.

Another thing that helps tremendously with really cementing a word is embarrassment. I learned 目覚まし時計 on memrise. A month later, I skyped with a friend and told him I got a new 目覚める時計, and he corrected me. This helped me, too, as things fell in place and the emotion connected with the word, due to this "incident", made the memory strong. This, too, has now been ignored. I don't need memrise anymore to keep it alive. that's 14 key strokes plus "enter" less I have to do, and probably 10 seconds of my life spent learning cool, new words like 断罪 ;)

That's the exact thing memrise's mems try to emulate. I really like the concept, but in reality, I suck at creativity. I wish I could come up easily with great stuff to remember a word, but that works only once in a blue moon for me.

@IkeniAndi - fascinating to read, somethings I agree - sentences, immersion, some, ignoring words, I'm not so sure about. I liked reading your experiences so that I could examine whether I should do some of the things you suggested. And yes, I've been known to go on long monologues in my TL as well. Sometimes, it get's a little strange but hey, it forces me to activate it so I get what you're saying about talking about that phrase. BTW - to everyone - you can ignore a word using the menu located at the top of the words page when you are shown it. You can also "un-ignore" it now - see Memrise FAQ in the topmost forum.

Before memrise, there were SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, ANKI, BYKI and what have you. There's also Quizlet, but due to not having SRS, that one has no long lasting effect (even tho it has tons of features I'd love memrise to have - memrise should go on a copycat tour IMHO, but that's stuff for another thread).

Those SRS auto-delete or auto-delay words you just get wrong over and over and over again for you. Once in a while, you can go through that list of "leeches" and reactivate them, but seriously, why would you wanna do it? There's a reason you make the same mistakes repeatedly. Maybe your language skills are not yet advanced enough to make the word fit into the puzzle.

Speaking of puzzle, you don't just grab random pieces and put them where you guess they belong - you fit them in, if you found a connecting piece.

Contrary, when you know a word 100%, because you only had to learn it at some point, but come across it regularly, because it's just so common - why keep it in your SRS, allowing it to eat your time and drain your energy again and again?

They say you need X amount of words to understand Y amount of language. Yes, you need to learn those. Then you got them, you get used to them and since they pop up at every corner, it's safe to delete them from yet another instance to come across them: memrise (or any other zombie raising SRS, for that matter - I call them zombies for a reason: they eat brains).

It doesn't matter what language you're learning, certain words are pretty common across every language, like eat, drink, go... those are the words you get to learn first, following any course. What's the purpose of memrise here? I can't watch any TV drama without hearing the word "eat" at least ONCE - okay, I have to admit, I'm a learner of Japanese, and in basically every show, foodstuff pops up at some point. Yeah, maybe not in Death Note, but that's not what I watch. I'm a peace loving guy enjoying comedy, slice of life, romance - ya know, "stuff women watch", and every time memrise presented 食べる, I died a little inside - so I removed that from my list.

I don't advocate learning a word and then kick it hastily.

I say, if you got a word 100% and don't really need memrise on top of all the other sources you receive at least passive repetition from, go ahead and delete it.

There's a short quote from AJATT I'd like to post:

"Same here. Sometimes I’ve been on the fence about deleting a card. But when I choose to delete it, I’ve never regretted it. I’ve never said to myself, Gee, I wish I could have that card back with the kanji compound I kept reading wrong again and again. Those were the good ole days! … Hahahahaha no. Every time I’ve deleted a card, I’ve felt free and invigorated, like I’ve finally thrown off a heavy burden. Like Drewskie, I’ve never looked back."

Ya know, this is exactly my experience. I know a lot of people who desperately punish themselves with whatever obscure methods to learn vocab, crying blood and tears every day because they keep forgetting them or guessing them wrong ... just because they hate SRS so much.

Why do they hate SRS, I wonder. Well, guess it's because SRS is like a hydra. You chop off a head and 2 new ones grow instead. A wicked cycle. One has to find a way to fix this broken method for themself, right?

P.S.: The un-ignore function is a great excuse for everyone to give the ignore feature a serious try. I bet people will not use that new function too often, but it's also cool to have for all the stuff you ignored by accident.

Hey ikenai, great post! Totally agree (though thankfully my garden isn't nearly as unmanageable)!

I think that it's critical for people to realize their goals because it will drastically change how you use memrise. If you want to be conversational then learning random lists of words won't help (even if you know a lot of grammar). There's a trap with overdosing in vocab which you don't really need/know how to use. Start with stuff that you know you'll need, not what the basic course has in it. Some people just want to order at restaurant, read Anime, talk to family, conduct business or maybe even study literature. It's not bad to learn a ton of vocab, but you should do in in moderation. (it's like thinking you have to know every word on the SAT to be proficient in English)

Ikenai what's your Ling8 user name?

My username used to be Kaze. However, I managed to forget the password of the email account I registered with over there.. now I forgot my Lang-8 password too and can't retrieve it ;) This was me: http://lang-8.com/209629 I need to make a new account in the near future tho, found the site really helpful.

The thematical learning you're speaking of, is a great thing in itself. When I started to explore the internet in the 90's, basically everything was in English. I sucked at that language, as school language education is not the greatest thing on earth, which, by the way, is not the teacher's fault, but the system itself is flawed IMHO.

However, I mainly read stuff I was interested in and slowly developed a vocabulary based on those interest. Let's say you love computer role playing games, you might come across wizard, warrior, monster, magic, experience points etc all the time. That's not bad, right? What was it exactly you needed to know "agricultural" or "psychosomatic" for?

Maybe you're a games loving medicine student, you'll want to learn "wizard" AND "electroencephalography", and that's great, too. And once you learned "wizard" and played through "zombie slash 5" the third time, you can kick the word from your memrise lists.

That's how you keep growing without bloating your lists to a point where memrise feels like work, rather than a fun learning experience.

No way memrise can do this for you. The site can not guess what you'll do with a word outside the system. It's YOUR responsibility to take the trash out - ask your wife, she'll agree.

Oh, cool. Just remembered my L8 password. Drop me a message and I'll add you as a friend. I can help you out with your German posts - even tho I've been lazy over there lately. I'll check it more often in the future. :)

I didn't read everything on this thread but I think that I will try to ignore some words soon - I haven't tried that yet.

This was a very interesting thread and comments- thanks all.

Interesting posts, Andi. I'm persuaded by your insistence on culling unhelpful words (leeches). Can someone tell me, when you ignore words, does memrise put them somewhere accessible - so later you can have a look at your list of ignored words and judge whether or not to revive them?

Interesting posts, Andi. I'm persuaded by your insistence on culling unhelpful words (leeches). Can someone tell me, when you ignore words, does memrise put them somewhere accessible - so later you can have a look at your list of ignored words and judge whether or not to revive them?

To my knowledge, there's no central ignore list you can take a look at. But you can make ignored words visible again from within the list it came from.

I'm not sure, however, if this function will instantly raise 5000 zombies at once with one click. Might as well shoot yourself in the foot.

Did I do something wrong? I've begun to ignore words, but it made my total words count go down in the course, and I can't find anywhere to view them, either.

Your "learned words" count will not decrease. However, your percentage "words seen" and "words harvested" in your garden view will decrease. Don't worry about that. Unless you're inside the matrix, nothing has happened.

Think about it, you learned the words. Why is it important if memrise keeps track?

About the ignore list: I answered that question just above your post.

Memrise is still in Beta, there's so much stuff not yet done completely or properly, and so much in the pipeline - with a site working so well, people tend to forget that fact easily, me included.

Actually, it's exactly what you want: The "long term garden" is the pool of words memrise will keep testing you. Optimally, you want that garden to only contain the words you actually learn or think you need memrise to maintain them. You don't need a "hall of fame for fallen heroes", spitting out new undead every night.

Alright, I was just a bit bewildered. Thanks.

No problem. And don't worry :) Memrise tends to lag behind with stats in general. The daily leader boards for example can take quite a bit, and points earned are not always visible instantly. The site adds them eventually. Happens all the time.