Vocabulary planting and watering with Memrise

[Stephen Hughes]

Members may be interested in this vocabulary learning technique. I've been trying it with Akkadian (1 of 154 available languages) and it seems to get results for me. I have about a 60% retention rate for the words I've learnt.

The common words in Trenchard are covered in this course.
http://www.memrise.com/course/64259/koine-greek-2/

The complete vocabulary seems to be covered in this one.
http://www.memrise.com/course/66563/koine-greek-3/

[Jonathan Robie]

I've been playing with this deck, and it works quite well. A few comments:

• It does not use Greek words in sentences, and uses a lot of English/Greek or Greek/English translation.
• It's really helpful for getting Greek words "on the tip of my tongue", I suspect it will help me produce Greek better, instead of just reading it.
• It requires you to get your accents and breathing marks right, which is good practice, but might be overwhelming for beginners.
• Near synonyms and synonyms may have English glosses that are indistinguishable. I find it aggravating when it asks for a word that means 'send' and I give it one, but not the one it was thinking about. This is only a problem for a relatively small number of words.
• The memory schedules seem to be good.
• It really is just vocabulary.
• Nice friendly user interface.

[Stephen Hughes]

I've been playing with this deck, and it works quite well.

I have "completed" all the vocab lists for North and Hillard, "Greek prose composition" (http://www.memrise.com/course/17735) now and feel I can add some comments of my own to Jonathan's.

(1) I find that the best way to learn and retain a list is to spend time previewing the list before jumping into deck. Doing that, my retention time is markedly better (my feeling), my later recall of words is more instantaneous (less tip of the toungue as you put it) and accuracy is 30-40% better (statistics from the game).

(2) As the practice sessions go on over several weeks, the fixity of the word that they "require" becomes difficult and I started putting in synonyms (that I had no previously learnt but were synonyms in English). At that point accuracy dropped to 20%. After more practice the "accuracy" returned. The main reason for that was the lack of contextualisations - my mind supplied words that synonymous but in the wrong context. eg. "disembark" for "go down", "accuse" for "bring a charge against". It seems that habitiuation requires context at some point.

(3) The second most common error was that occurs a bit later in the recall process, the "direction" of the actions. When I "sit back" and let the process of the programme "teach" me, then comonly meanings like "to appoint" - "to be appointed", "to revolt" - "to cause to revolt", "to ask" - "to answer", "to separate" - "to differentiate" often get confused. It seems that learning by habituation doesn't address this difference well. I think maybe having a context for the words might make it easier to "recall" directions within a relationship.

(4) There is little reward or feeling of satisfaction for this type of study. Grit, determination, self-control and the raw belief that it will be useful in the future are needed to follow through with it.

I have made further comments on this here; http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/vie ... 879#p11879