My Russian studies
My friend David asked about my flash cards, and I realized I had a lot to say. So here's a big brain dump on where I'm at with my studies.
I am still distinctly at the stage where I need flash cards, because I still need to incorporate a lot of words into my vocabulary. I have annoying gaps to work around. I'm getting better at it as I practice more. But I've found a couple of useful insights that I'm still in the process of incorporating into my flash cards. But I'm getting there.
In general, I make two major kinds of cards: vocabulary and grammar cards. Vocabulary cards are to learn a specific word. For a vocabulary word, I make one entry on the database and I get four cards:
- audio of the word, I have to remember what it means.
- the written word, I have to remember what it means.
- audio of the word and the picture, I have to remember how to spell it.
- just the picture, and I have to remember how to spell it and speak it.
The backs of all four cards have the same info: written, spoken, pictures, notes, and example sentences. For example, the notes usually include the gender of nouns. I should include more conjugation information on my cards (like fleeting vowels and things like that) but I do a poor job of that right now.
For verbs specifically, I make entries into my database in pairs: perfective-imperfective. My notes field for a verb has the conjugations for present tense 1st and 2nd person singular, and then usually one or two forms for past tense. There's no direct link between the two verbs but I list the other verb of the pair in the notes field. I also put more work into finding example sentences for verbs because the conjugated forms can sometimes be very different from the non-conjugated forms.
Grammar cards usually require me to use a word in the context of a sentence or prove that I know a rule in Russian. For grammar cards, I have two templates I use most often.
1. Fill in the blank, word given as hint. This is usually a conjugation test.
Мне понравилось гулять по улицам ______! (Киев)
Мне понравилось гулять по улицам Киева.
2. Fill in the blank, no word given. This is usually a test to know which word goes there.
___ следующем году мне исполнится шесть лет.
В следующем году мне исполнится шесть лет.
For verbs specifically, one of the insights is that if you know the first and second person conjugations, you usually have everything you need to know to get the other four forms (for 99.9% of the verbs anyway). I had heard that before but back in March I found a great description of it in a concise grammar book I was looking at. While that was fresh in my head, I was driving home and a piece of dialogue out of a Rosetta Stone lesson hit me over the head:
Когда ты уезжаешь?
Я уезжаю в одиннадцать утра.
Когда ты вернёшься?
Я вернусь в восемь часов вечера.
This lesson tells a story in four sentences, and it does so in a form that gives both the 1st and 2nd person forms. So the brainstorm I had that day is that i can turn most of the work for learning into the verb into a search for a concise story between two people talking to each other. Then I put those two sentences into grammar cards.
A verb that is easy to follow gets just the normal 4 vocabulary cards. A verb that's harder to learn gets 2-4 more sentences. Double that and you get roughly 16 cards for each verb pair. More for really complicated or difficult verbs.
I just started going through Daphne West's Essential Russian Grammar, and I think it is organized a lot better than many other grammar books. In particular, it has a lot of tests inline with the discussion. So I am methodically going through it right now and turning each section into a set of grammar cards to test. I made about 40 pairs of card for nouns that test me on the gender rules and the plural nominative rules. I still use all the other grammar books, but for the moment, I am choosing to focus on making cards just from her book. The grammar cards I'm making that aren't from her book usually come from sentences I've written but had corrected by someone else. If I made a mistake once, it goes into a card and I get tested on it.
There is probably a lot more I *could* do on my vocabulary cards to document some of the rules -- I.e. this is a conjuration 1a verb, and what does that mean. But I haven't done so yet. I'm focusing primarily on practical fixes and not trying to be insanely systematic about everything. For certain conjugations, I do have a more extensive set of cards in the deck, just to force me to use all of the rules. But obviously, I don't need a card for every single conjugation of a verb, because that amounts to 30 cards per verb - not sustainable!
Anyway, assuming 4 cards per word, and 2000-2500 words, that's already 8000-10000 cards. (I don't really have cards for every word though, because I already know a lot of words that aren't in my card deck). Add another 2000-4000 cards for grammar rules and I will end up with a deck about 50% bigger than the one Gabe used to learn Russian. (Gabe being the guy who ran the seminar I went to). Gabe suggested that spelling cards become redundant after a while, but since spelling is a huge problem for me, I'm taking the hit and forcing myself to spell and type all of those words. At least right now, I'd rather have too many cards than too few. The worst case scenario is that my reviews become too easy and the cards start coming up less often.
So I am getting more systematic about making good cards. Verbs are still a sticking point, but for the moment I accept that my cards aren't perfect, but that perfect is the enemy of good. I can't wait 6 months to be better at making cards before adding verbs. :) What I CAN do is replace bad cards with better cards when I am more skilled. There's cost to create and review new cards, but when appropriate I will take that hit. For example, I just deleted 8 vocabulary cards I had created back in January. They weren't made with my vocabulary card templates and had english text on them. I had created them so that I could recognize the 6 grammatical terms (in Russian) as well as the words for singular and plural. They did their job -- I recognized those word when I saw them. But I still couldn't remember or write them! So I just replaced those cards with vocabulary cards using my normal templates. No english!! I just had to figure out how to invent cards that told the story with pictures. But now I will be forced to actively recall these words. This is part of a general push on my part to learn the vocabulary for Russian grammar IN RUSSIAN. It makes it easier to read monolingual dictionaries and it also helps if someone who speaks only Russian corrects a mistake. I would love to find a Russian book on writing, similar to my "The Little Brown Handbook" for English.
Anyway, that's a pretty long post. The takeaways are
* Every non-trivial word gets cards for spelling and audio.
* Many words get grammar cards to force me to practice the grammar rules.
* Verbs in Russian are best expressed using short stories.
* Learning the grammatical words for Russian is helpful because it means I leave Russian texts less often.
* Be willing to throw out cards that aren't working well and replace them.