On 14 April 2010 22:56, Arthaey Angosii <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've heard that some people put entire sentences into their SRS
> system* of choice. Does anyone have experience with this practice?
> I've never been certain how it would be helpful... How do you choose a
> sentence? What makes a sentence a good candidate? Are you memorizing
> the entire sentence, and if so, why is that a useful thing?
>

Yup - I do the full sentence approach. Once I'm at a certain stage in a
language I'll add three cards for every word of vocab I want to learn: both
directions (En <--> X) with the standard dictionary form of the word and
then a card with a sentence in the target language and its translation (X
--> En). This way I pick up on standard constructions, shapes, grammar, and
vocab.... All at once! If a sentence is really outside my comfort zone when
I see it I try to gloss everything, parse it grammatically, then read its
translation.

What makes a good candidate sentence? I try to pick sentences with some kind
of internal coherence which is illustrative of some word or some
construction. So If I want to learn the word "apple" it would be a bad idea
to use a sentence "Apples are good." or "I like apples." because there are a
lot of good things and a lot of things that I like. Thus, it's not clear
what the word apples refer to. If I want to learn the grammar of declarative
sentences and the "I like ___" construction, I might include those
sentences. It depends on where I'm language in my language learning. An
example I might use to learn the word apple is "She took an apple from the
fruit bowl and bit into it." Unless, of course, that sentence is way beyond
me at which point I might not include the sentence card, and focus on the
learning the word exclusively.

On another note, I tend to make multiple sentence cards for those semantic
hydras: prepositions and particles.