[Parley-devel] Fwd: Features in next version of Parley

[Anša Vernerová]

Hi,

>> Can you build Parley from the sources?
>>
>> I will give it a try (during the weekend).
>
> How did it work out for you? Where you able to get it running?

Yes, I have it working pretty nicely. I must admit that in recent
weeks, I have spent more time writing down my wishes and ideas than
actually practicing vocabulary. Should I concentrate on testing some
specific feature? Or track my progress in some way?


>> In the following scenarios, in case of a failure to produce the right
>> answer, the learner has to indicate which confidence level should be
>> affected:
>> L2.text/L2.sound -> L3.text/L3.sound     (the problem may be both on
>> the L2 and on the L3 side, user clarification is necessary, then the
>> confidence levels for the passive skill of L2 and the active skill of
>> L3 can be updated)
>
> This is where it gets interesting.  Is the L2 -> L3 scenario really
> worthwhile? All theories about learning languages that I have read
> indicates strongly that you need context to learn something well. And to
> have 2 words that supposedly mean the same thing in 2 languages that
> you don't know sounds to me like the oppositve of having context.

I was mostly thinking of these scenarios:

1) My files contain three columns:
Target language word or phrase - Mother tongue equivalent - Target
language explanation or definition
      I only fill the last column if I can come up with (or, more
often, find in a learner's dictionary) a synonym or a definition that
makes at least some sense to me. This way, I am practising the target
language in the context of the target language. However, it sometimes
happens that I forget the meaning of the synonym or I confuse it with
a similar sounding word - a mistake which I recognize as soon as I see
the correct answer. (I use the third column only for questions; I do
not practice the opposite direction.)
    Conceptually, I suppose, my third column should go into the
"Synonym" or "Paraphrase" fields. Besides there being no way of
practicing "paraphrase -> actual words", I still find it easier to use
the paraphrases as if they were L3.

A similar case would be with question-answer pairs in the Target
language, where the Question would mostly be easily understandable but
could sometimes contain problematic vocabulary, and the answer would
require some factual knowledge. ("When is Christmas celebrated in the
United Kingdom?" - "On December 25." The user may confuse Christmas
with Easter or the United Kingdom with the United States, as well as
not remember the answer.)

2) (I intend to do this, but I have not tried it yet) I was thinking
of trying to memorizing Biblical verses in my mother tongue, using
Latin as the source language. I've had some introduction to Latin and
after all, quite a few Latin roots appear in vocabulary of other
languages I have been studying, so although my Latin is not good
enough for me to actually read in it, I can take guesses, and after
seeing the actual Czech translation, I can tell which word in Latin
corresponds to which word in Czech. (Most of the time, that is.) So
the idea is to get exposed to Latin while memorizing sentences in my
mother tongue. Paradoxically, the context is provided by the language
that would probably be marked as "Learning" in the current Parley.


3) I am a rather advanced learner of German, so using German instead
of my mother tongue would make good sense: German items would get
reinforced in my brain while I would be learning another language.
However, my passive knowledge of German is much better than my active
knowledge. Thus, in testing Learning->German in a written practice, it
can easily happen that I will know the meaning of the word (and be
able to confirm that after seeing the German equivalent as the
answer), but actually not be able to write down the German equivalent
before seeing it. In this case, the language marked as "Known" is
known only passively and it makes sense to record its confidence
levels for the active skills of writing and speaking.


>> At an initial stage of learning, the learner might also want to
>> practice just the following two scenarios. Should they have their own
>> grades?
>> dictation:            L2.sound -> L2.text
>>       the learner knows how to capture the sound in writing, but
>> possibly does not know what it means
>> pronunciation:     L2.text -> L2.sound
>>       the learner remembers how to pronounce the word, but possibly
>> not its meaning
>
> Technically I think they should. We should not design away any
> possibilities in the format alone. But in practice I also doubt that this is a
> good way to train and I also question if it's actually possible.

I was mostly thinking of people who are learning a language that uses
a different alphabet (in the sense of a relatively small set of
characters that directly correspond to the sounds of the target
language). I am currently learning Hebrew, which is an example of such
a language. Most Hebrew courses start with a chapter on reading,
although the student does not actually understand any of what they are
reading - the idea is to spend some time learning the letters and
sounds.

> What is actually happening is that if you learn a new word from scratch it
> goes from grade 0, pregrade 0 to grade 0, pregrade 1. And then when you
> train it repeatedly with intervals 3.5 minutes, 7 minutes, 15 minutes, and
> so on, it goes from pregrade 1 to pregrade 7.  The next step is grade 1,
> pregrade 0 and from there it's exactly as before, i.e. pregrades are not
> used anymore.

What happens when I only practice once a day? It seems to me that in
the case that I get the word right every single time (with the
exception of the very first one), I get to see it on seven consecutive
days. I suppose the new training system proposed by Andreas will
somehow address this, but for the time being, I think that the word
should skip all levels that have shorter intervals than the one for
which the word was actually retained. (This does not apply only to
pregrades.)

Also, it seems to me that once I answer the word correctly, it will
not appear in the same session again, even if the interval for next
repetition comes about. (I usually have sessions lasting longer than
15 minutes.) A new session has to be started. Moreover, as the "max
number of new words" cannot be set below 2, 2 new words will be
introduced if a new session is started right after a previous one.
(Only if there are some new words left in the lessons
marked for possible practice.) I would welcome some kind of "go back
to practice words from this session that are scheduled for now" button
that would appear at the end of any session. Or maybe "practice all
initial stage words that are scheduled for now". Aha! This latter
case, probably more reasonable, can be achieved with the current
practice setup (there is a setting for maximum confidence level). It
might be a bit cumbersome, but it would work. However, setting both
the minimum and maximum confidence levels to 0 still does not
distinguised between new words and initial stage words.


> The idea is that the sentences will give you the structure of the language
> rather than individual words. You will learn the vocabulary anyway since
> many of the sentences use the same word in different contexts.
>
> It's an interesting idea and I am looking into it if we can incorporate it
> into Parley at some point in the future.

I always copy the whole text of the lessons from textbooks/courses/phrasebooks
into parley, separate it into items and use it for practice. If it is
possible, I use the sound recordings that come directly with the
original materials - I am an aural learner.

I am not sure if Parley could really do more for me in this respect,
because automatically generated sentences would have to be equipped
with automatically generated sound, and it is unlikely that this
automatically generated sound would be satisfactory. In English, for
example, word stress changes depending on the sentence context. This
is important, because learners actually remember the "melody" of words
and phrases before they fully learn them. (I read just today that it
was shown already in the 1960's or 1970's that learners could
correctly answer questions about the number of syllables and accent
patterns of vocabulary items, even though they were not able to recall
them correctly.)

My feeling is that users should be encouraged to fill their
collections with sentences that occur in whatever materials they are
working with. They also should be encouraged to use definitions and
synonyms in the target language instead of translation equivalents in
their mother tongue (unless they intend to be translating between the
two languages a lot, in which case it makes more sense to strengthen
the associations between the two languages). All this provides natural
structure and context.



A different topic: my current reading has stressed the importance of
mnemonic techniques for the early stages of learning a vocabulary
item. I think maybe I could write some kind of summary of that chapter
for the parley documentation, if that would be useful. It occurred to
me that you could support users in making up their own mnemonics by
renaming the "Comments" field into "Mnemonics and comments".

Anša