Week 4
Word of the Week: biadxi
‘plum’
(First word “learned” from Memrise online course. Didn’t think I was really learning from the
memory drills I had done the night before, but when I was preparing my
breakfast, I was commenting on how big the blueberries were and compared them to
plums. Immediately, the word biadxi came
to mind!)
Learning Experience
I
officially registered for the Memrise Juchitán Zapotec, free, online course http://www.memrise.com/course/46103/juchitan-zapotec-2/. I am giving it a try, seeing how much I can
actually learn through this method. The
program claims that it is the fastest way to learn vocabulary in any language. It uses a Plant-Grow-Harvest metaphor for
memorizing words. The “plant” stage
works on short term memory; the “grow” stage works on medium memory (I don’t
think ‘medium memory’ is an official term.
How long is ‘medium’?); and the “harvest” stage commits the new
vocabulary words to long term memory. In
the “planting” stage, the program repeats the ways of presenting the new words
with audio and images. In the “grow”
stage, further practice is given through multiple choice and
fill-in-the-blank. If a question is missed,
additional review of the missed word is given.
Once a certain number of 100% are reached, the program “locks” the user
out from those words for 4 hours. After
which, the user can return for the “harvest.”
I actually received an email telling me it was time to “harvest.” The waiting period helps develop long term
memory.
When I
first used this program, I was excited about it, but then became a little
skeptical when I found myself having some trouble remembering the new words. The vocabulary words are introduced 8 or 9 at
a time and represent words from a particular consonant that differs from
Spanish. For instance, Spanish does not
have the /dx/ [ʤ] or ‘j’ sound as in ‘John,’ so the set of eight vocabulary
words all have /dx/ in them. In this set
of words, they also all had the vowel /i/, and many had a /b/. So basically, most of them looked like the
same word to me, for example dxiña ‘sugar’ and dxiiña ‘work.’ Eventually though, I began to distinguish the
words and associate meaning. (By the
way, this course is primarily in Spanish and just a little bit of English. I like that the vocabulary words are in
Spanish; it gives me practice in two languages at the same time. There are just a few Spanish words I don’t
know, which I just quickly look up on Google Translate http://translate.google.com.)
A metacognitive vocabulary-learning
analysis: Two of the most difficult vocabulary words to remember were dxiˈbaˈ
‘mounted’ and bidxiˈbaˈ ‘vomited.’
Just seeing the words over and over again on the screen was not
enough. (Perhaps, part of the problem is
that there are not any pictures for these two words like there are for the
nouns.) I had to create my own way of
telling the words apart. Here is how I
did it. Firstly, they were the only two
words on the list that ended with -ˈba.
I thought that maybe this was a past- tense suffix. Another thing that I noticed about the two
words was that ‘vomited’ looks like ‘mounted’ with the prefix bi-, bi
+ dxiˈbaˈ = bidxiˈbaˈ.
The imagery that came to my mind was that ‘mounting’ something is
getting on something (like a horse) and ‘vomiting’ is ejecting something. I imagined a cowboy being ejected or launched
from the saddle of rodeo horse. In this
way the bi “dismounts” a rider from a horse. This is now what I think of when I see these
two words. I associate ‘vomiting’ with
‘dismounting’ forcefully.
When I found myself relating words
from the Memrise vocabulary to English words that I thought or spoke throughout
my day, I realized that I was definitely learning. So far, I have learned twenty-five new words. I would highly recommend trying this program
for any language at least just for fun http://www.memrise.com/.
No comments:
Post a Comment