I don’t know. Steve Kaufman, for example, like to say that when he reaches 30K~40K words at LingQ he has some sort of mental breakthrough and are able to understand his podcasts to a great deal of degree. I figured it should be the same here. We are both just racking up our word count. There should be some sort of a general number correlation that pushes you over the edge. You need exposure and this quantifies exposure.
I would focus on them too, but that doesn’t mean that the words that are not in the top most frequency lists are any less important, as you would eventually need to learn them as well to make sense of what you hear and read. This is just prioritization. At the end, you still need to learn them all.
I don’t think you can understand a whole lot just from 3000 words. That will only put you in a A1/A2 level.
Consider this. You reached the word max interval and still don’t quite know it. Why does it matter?
At some point, if you don’t really know it, it’s just a matter of time (be it half a year or more from today), before you forget it completely and eventually make a mistake. That is all you need 1 MISTAKE. At such a point, you will just restart the cycle from 0, and again get a lot of new exposure and it will eventually click in your head without you even noticing.
You don’t need to keep track of what you really know and what you don’t really know. If you don’t know it you would eventually have to relearn it, so the focus on any one particular word in the grand scheme of things is utterly meaningless. It doesn’t matter. You just keep progressing and trust that what needs more work will resurface naturally on its own in the future. That is why I’m not so worried that I might be tricking the algorithm to a false sense of knowledge. I understand that I might need to practice words that I learned long ago in the past and it’s ok if it’s even hundreds, as long as my real voacb is steadily increasing with thousands of others entries that I do really know.
How high is the percentage of the vocab that does get ingrained in your brain? I don’t know. But I’m guessing it’s high enough to be worth it.
I remember that I read someone here in the forum that when he isn’t absolutely sure he knows the meaning, he picks the wrong answer on purpose. That is why I don’t see such necessity or concern myself with that problem.
Do you guys think that sentence courses might be better than single words courses?
I like the Memrise courses because there is a good proportion of sentences and the words that comprise them. That is a very nice method of teaching.
I think it might be more worthwhile than doing the single words course.
The answers might be easier to pick in the crowd, but the exposure you get is more and also higher quality.
I think you are expressing a good understanding of language learning. There’s actually plenty of neuroscience out there about how learning, forgetting, and re-learning actually makes stronger long-term memories. But Memrise doesn’t repeat the entire cycle when you make a mistake.
I personally would never select a wrong answer on purpose. I often think “I have no idea, I’ll just type something random,” and then it turns out that my typing is the correct answer. I think that is part of what has to happen to get to fluency - you stop overthinking and double-checking. Like walking, or riding a bike.
I think the Memrise courses are nicely well-rounded, but personally I try to keep a mix of courses going: a well-rounded course such as one of Memrise’s featured courses, a big frequency vocabulary course (typing), a recognition-only vocabulary course (non-typing), a few verb-conjugation drill courses (typing), a sentence course (non-typing), a small fun course with specialized vocabulary (typing). The mix would depend on the language: verb conjugations are more important in Spanish than in Japanese. And I might have 7 courses going in a language where I am pursuing fluency, but just one course in a language where travel usage is all I need.
I think sentence courses, ala Glossika really helps with gaining automatic understanding of certain grammar structures. I think the biggest problem with Memrise is if a sentence course is multiple choice it is easy to guess by high frequency words which diminishes listening comprehension gains, and it is a hindrance when typing if there are a lot of homophones. For example there was a really great course by Student Of Life for Mandarin sentences, but it over-uses the pronoun ta (他，她，它）which can mean he, she, or it. The course did not choose a single pronoun, so you have extra stuff to memorize on top of the content itself. If there are no ambiguities like that, and the sentences are authentic I think Memrise sentence courses are awesome and underutilized. But - I still think for sentences Anki is king.
For example if you want to do a sentence course on memrise which prompts on audio, then you type in your target language, you can make so many silly mistakes which give you the wrong answer (I gave one for Mandarin above). The number of alts grows combinatorially. Additionally, production of the target language is impossible on Memrise even more so due to the alts problem. So the more cognitive load you put on your brain, in terms of “extra” stuff to memorize to get the right answer on Memrise, the more burnt out of learning you can get. Our goal at first in languages, I think, should be to be understood by a native speaker, and through iterative correction converge at proper grammar. So I think enforcing perfect grammar at the very beginning is counterproductive to learning.
Lastly - for listening comprehension and grammar recognition is where I think sentence courses can help the most. For example listening to a sentence once and dictating/typing out that whole sentence and then translating it. Sentence courses on Memrise cannot force you to both dictate and translate to get the right answer. Which is a shame, because I think parallel development of decoding the grammar as well as sound recognition is the best way to develop listening comprehension. So for these reasons - I think you should use Anki for that , also if you have the funds I highly highly recommend Glossika (though I don’t know the quality of the course for the languages you want to focus on). There are tutorials on how to take the 3,000 Glossika sentences and put them into Anki flashcards so you can do SRS on them.
I started Memrise with the official Spanish 1-7 course.
Good quality course, good selection of words and sentences, I just don’t get why they limited the length of the courses. Gives 2-3 examples of grammar features, good for recognizing (reading/listening), but I’d need 20-30 examples to use them (write/speak) confidently. Maybe the Spanish for Polyglots is a good alternative or the old A1-A2 might have more examples. (I dont have too much experience with them.)
I tried one sentence course so far: https://www.memrise.com/course/123071/575-spanish-verbs-sentences/
Good selection of sentences, but lack of alternatives and no active topic to go with my issues. Could be a good course, just not user-friendly. Like @roflcopterlol wrote, many sentences needs memorization of extra stuff to get the right answer. Paused right now.
To get the most out of these courses, don’t just rush through the multiple choice, (often the multiple choice is easy). Instead, listen and repeat on every sentence, every time. You’ll be building a “it just sounds right this way” language intuition.
Many of Swampy’s no-typing courses are paired with a typing course by another user, but as you have mentioned, one soon runs into many alternatives with Spanish sentences.
I don’t think it is contradictory . Some things we as humans classify as small mistakes will still be marked red by Memrise. Some omissions of letters are considered red mistakes, and sometime when I have a typo it is a yellow. Both I would classify as a “mistake”. The cycle (as far as I know) repeats on red mistakes, and if it is yellow you will return to the normal schedule after reviewing again. I think the first person you quoted meant red mistakes.
Thanks the recommendation, great courses! It seems like the some sentences were reused in the Memrise official course. Too bad their audio doesn’t work for me But I’ll give them a try.
In the current state I would say Anki.
Memrise is a mess:
many stupid bugs in the apps; developers are either lazy, incompetent or don’t care
still many errors in language courses, which is an absolute nogo for a language learning plattform
official courses are very limited
broken connection to user generated content
ugly redesign
In this broken state I wouldn‘t recommend Memrise, not even with a free account.
I‘m still learning my current courses with Memrise, but I will move all my learning material to Anki in the next weeks.
I don’t really use either one of them these days anymore as I found a much better approach - daily watching of content on YouTube.
Might sound underwhelming, and not what you would expect, but that is a major breakthrough for me in terms of efficiency and quality of study - enlightenment struck.
YT is a much superior tool than anything else I have encountered after almost 3 years of intensive study with various methods, and it can replace basically almost all of them with ease.
Besides being much more efficient it’s also much more enjoyable and easy to do.
I don’t see much point in grinding with Memrise or Anki these days. Their usability is very limited to only very specific cases. It also became a very tedious chore for me, which I don’t take pleasure in anymore.
All you have to do is: watch, watch, watch.
Can’t be simpler than that.
I am saying this after completing 6 Duolingo’s trees, 5 or 6 official Memrise courses, and accumulating a total of 30,000 words here on Memrise. So I certainly tried what this platform has to offer. I have also studied a dozen or so languages to a fair amount.
Youtube is the best. Hear me on this. No competition at all.
An undiscovered and underutilized gem.
You just have to learn how to use it properly to rip the benefits.
You need a certain level of grammatical understanding and a decently-sized passive lexicon in order to begin to “read, read, read” or (in terms of YouTube) “watch, watch, watch” interesting content as a means of noticeably improving your knowledge of a language. You can go with the most basic of graded readers but even those require some knowledge of the language before beginning, and the easiest graded readers are almost all dreadfully boring. I’d rather stick with drilling vocabulary until I can actually get to the interesting stuff. Yes, I definitely prefer to read interesting books and/or listen to them and watch interesting YouTube content or TV shows or whatever over drilling words and sentences with programs like Duolingo and Memrise, but from my experience it is those drills that let me do the fun stuff as quickly as possible. I could not be more happy about the existence of spaced repetition software, even though it can be really boring at times.
But I’ll give them a try.
