Learning words of the same category at the same time?

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Hello fellow learners, hello staff,

I’m all new to memrise and I like it quite well until now.

Still, there is one thing, I’d like to ask:

Why do language courses in general often have you learn same kind of meaning words at the same time?
To better explain:
I had a book to learn Russian and in the first chapter, I had to learn
-hello
-hi
-good morning
-good evening
-welcome
-good bye
-see you later
-see you soon
and so on.

I have no language academic background, but I love learning languages. Nevertheless, after forcing through some of the chapters I quitted the book, as I never really managed to have the words seperated in my mind and always confounded them (quite demotivating).

For me, the reason was that they were all somewhat translations for the same thing: “greetings!”.

Do you have experienced something similar? Is there any theory behind it?

2

Don’t know how much of this depends on the learner or not, but I am the same way. Too lazy to look up the research, but I remember reading it was better to learn at random in random than in neatly ordered categories or subjects.

3

www.languagecourse.net vocabulary trainer VT and www.lingvist.com let’s you learn mixed / random vocabulary by throwing words from different “categories / topics / groups”.

Lingvist uses the “fill in the word into the blank” technique but shows a complete sentence in the target language and reads it out load; you can can additionally click the “Arrow up symbol” on the top right side and the L1 source/base sentence will be displayed above the grey panel (the single base/source word is below the panel).

In comparison DuoLingo:
There are topics (skills in a tree, e.g animals, food) with up to ~10 lessons.
One lesson usually contains up to ~7 words and has multiple questions (can either be single word, quite short, normal or longer sentences with mixed typed of exercises, e.g pictures, listen audio, translation, enter a single word, etc.).

So yes, the “problem” with learning words all from the same categoriy (topic) even applies to DuoLingo.

I tried to use both (DuoLingo and Memrise) in parallel for 1 year, either focusing on prelearing/re-learning single words on Memrise with MartinPen’s “PT BR DuoLingo” couse, seeing some “real world practical phrases / sentences” with the Memrise PT 1-7 courses, and then going back each day to DuoLingo for all the Portuguese grammar skills, having mixed/random sentences for the “vocabulary skills” on reviews…

Mondly www.mondlylanguages.com uses the same tree topic concepts, whereas the topics may be more theme-oriented / practically divided (e.g restaurant, airport, etc.) which DuoLingo does not provide yet.

There are many peple on tehd DuoLingo discussion forum who have great experiences about retaining the learned vocabulary from Lingvist, as it seems. They wrote it to me personally or in general “Lingvist” threads. It was suggested multiple times.
Currently I registered for for Portuguese-English reverse course, where I can see the PT-sentence (top over the panel), but only get the reverse EN translation and English audio :frowning:
I hope they add the forward course EN-PT next year, like they do with Spanish, French, etc.!

What did you try? What worked best for you?

4

BTW: Completed / Finished courses on Memrise (1-5) give me nothing. There is no streak counter and I can not beat my old 95days global badget (which I can still see on the older Android Memrise app).

In contrast DuoLingo provides a steadily growing “global streak” (in addition to language course single streaks) which really motivates me, as I have already passed 365days++ and more.

There are even (user-run) “Streak hall of fame” lists. Really nice idea!!!
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Reviewing (strengthening) skills on DuoLingo is motivating me, as the “global streak” rates your 1-20XP/10XP exercise answers.

Memrise just writes (on the web course dashboard): “Course complete!”. This is not very motivating to do daily reviews (my other “problem” is the multiple-choice vs “all typing” script sentences; typing and reviewing is almos too hard for me in PT).
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I would have to sign-up for a big ~5000/8000+ vocabulary course on Memrise and leave out a single level (some words), to have the streak counter constantly ticking as that the course can never finish - including all reviews - to get something which is comparable to DuoLingo streak.

To all the Memrise staff:

Sorry to say, but your Memrise “business developer” and programmer team seems not have done all your “homework”, how you can daily “motivate” learners “game-like”?!

And the removal a few months ago of the “max. streak badget” on the Memrise web portal surely won’t make it any better (however, there is no max. global streak badget on DuoLingo: Once you lose it, it will restart and not save your max badget :()!!

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