I want to post a series of learning insights that have emerged for me as important in the last year. The first one concerns the issue of redundancy.
As it happens, ChinesePod learner, ‘kmk’, picked up on this issue today. Let me first explain my view of what it is.
By redundancy I refer to where course developers plan a language syllabus around high frequency language. This language is is re-cycled over and over without the learner getting bored with it, by using it in different contexts and situations. If it is done well, the learner may not even be aware of the repetition.
There are many things the learner needs to know about a word to be truly familiar with it. From a lexical perspective, for example, it is important to know where the item is most likely to be found and how its meaning can change with context. A teacher has 2 choices in how she presents new language items
- She offers detailed explanations of the differences, the nuances the grammatical behavior, etc, of each item
- She provides copious, manageable examples allowing you to learn by seeing the language as it really occurs (often without explaining the subtleties)
kmk hit the nail on the head in his/her post:
… it’s the quantity of lessons. You don’t need to drill many times the same lesson to memorize vocabulary but you can just cross many lessons. I’ve got a low intermediat level but learned a lot with 150 newbie lessons (in one week) and the 80 elementary lessons (in 2 weeks). With this incomparable quantity of information you cross lot of subjects and lot of vocabulary. During the process I tend to memorize much more than with a traditional “drilled” lesson.
Redundancy is inductive in that it provides examples (rather than explicit rules of usage or repetitive drills) that allow your brain to do what it is designed for - the active, but sub-conscious, processing that enables memory. The result, hopefully, is a painless (nay, interesting?) form of repetition.
This is also why we use an anecdotal approach in the podcasts. Background information (on culture, personal experience, or of course, the language itself) helps the learner to fix the new input onto some part of existing knowledge or experience. Purely new language items without that redundancy/padding would soon overload the learner’s system.
In fact, there are many reasons why we adopt the conversational approach here on ChinesePod, and I would like to explore those in the next installment of Lessons Learned.
Ken Carroll
I found similar and have mentioned before. I think it is akin to the classic 80/20 rule (you get 80% of the goodies for 20% of the effort) although in this case I would put it at around 75/25.
So if you get 75% of the content from 4 lessons in the same time that you can get 99.5% of content from one lesson then breezing through the early ones at a fair rate of speed seems to pay off (it did for me).
The Intermediate lessons currently warrant more listens for me because there is more in there but I still don’t stress about getting it all.
Another rule that goes along with this and I have used for great effect in learning all sorts of things is “Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” (thanks to the Author Douglas Adams). Don’t be afraid to ring fence areas of fuzziness to comeback to later. If the lesson is about catching a taxi and you aren’t about to travel to China and currently don’t give a fig about the word for taxi then don’t learn it now just be aware that you don’t know it (let it wash over a few times and you might learn it anyway, words like little children often respond to reverse phsycology). If you can only count to a hundred then don’t sweat the rest until you find you start needing it etc. Like and inverse version Maslow’s pyramid acquire the words you need and desire first.
For someone who already knows a certain amount and who can cycle through the lessons rapidly, I agree with you 100%. If a term is used 3 times, that person will encounter all three within a week and benefit from the redundancy.
In practice the redundancy effect is much weaker for someone beginning to learn. They might hear those same three angles on the term, but they will be spread over a period of months. Oh it’s still great to have the redundancy, but a newbie would need it in three _consecutive_ lessons in order to get it in the same time frame and have the same level of benefit as in the description you quote above. When starting from scratch, it is impossible to take in dozens or hundreds of lessons in a week, even one a day is stretching the brain quite a bit.
For absolute beginners, there are things about the learning here that are good. For high level newbies, elementary, and intermediate, the podcasts can be skimmed much more quickly and the intended effects of your approaches, such as this one, finally start to be experienced.
I think that’s why we so often hear beginners asking for an old fashioned structured approach. The time factor removes them from the redundancy effect and the only way they can suggest to put it back is to have a long sequence of linked cumulative learning. When curiosity is aroused and there’s no formal explanation it can take forever to find enough examples to form a hypothesis, and by then the urge has passed, so we see some people plead for grammar early on, to provide today the insights that are lacking because they have effectively no redundancy.
Sometimes when people ask for the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve, it’s not because they don’t get it, it’s because they’re simply not getting it.
Yes after all this Chinesepod lessons, I feel like if I was listening to a long discussion in which same vocabulary, sentences and expressions came back regularly in different context. It wasn’t boring at all but required almost 40 hours of your time in short periods of 2 hours.
I should add that this process may also help a lot to learn to read the chinese characters of this lessons.
For me redundancy works really well with what I call “emotional content”. By lesson with “emotional content” I mean lesson with “life” not so much in the dialog but in the explanations and comments. The teacher should really feel and be affected by what he say. I see it as the opposite of the monotonous Melnyks voice which got a funny soporific effect on me as many “old school” chinese teachers.
Ken seems to be very good at this emotional transmission specially in the latest podcasts.
IT’S THE SAME, NOT - I kinda have been getting irked lately when someone tells me that two Chinese words mean the same thing. I think it’s a cop-out for not giving examples of the words in different contexts. If there weren’t differences…it’s really unlikely that there would be two different words.
It’s like saying Was’up and How are you? mean the same thing…yah, but not really!
I have noticed lately that it’s almost an exercise in futility for me to try to say something by using the dictionary to look up a word. Invariably the Chinese recipient will tell me it’s not the right word for what I’m trying to say, tell me I don’t make sense, or worse tell me my Chinese is horrible.
I’ve noticed that my actual sentence however is fine, except for that inserted ‘dictionary’ word or phrase. This insertion though totally destroys my Chinese! Definitely no plug and say here.
So anyway, I’m all for redundancy, remixing and getting into the nuances of words thru interesting dialogues and banter. It’s probably the only way to properly pick up words and their proper use and context.
This ‘redundancy’ is actually one of the reasons why I like the expansion module in the premium section so much. It provides me with a couple of extra examples about the use of a certain word or phrase. I find that by repeating these and writing them down, the words tend to stick better too without having to use flashcards or other memorizing crutches.
I like to listen to the MP3s several times. I burn a CD with several losson (中级) and listen to them over and over in the car. Since I am often taking short trips (15 minutes) to drop my daughter at school or collect her from school, etc, I get plenty of time to listen to them. I also read the transcripts and the additional material, although not as much as I should.
Anyway, as a result of all the ChinesePod work I have been doing, I have written the following for an oral presentation I have to do for the formal classes I am doing at Foothill college:
我學廣東話的故事
我1981年十二月三十一日在香港結婚〪
結婚的時候，我不會說廣東話〪
岳母從香港來跟我們住〪
她是很好的人〪她每天做飯給我們吃〪
我最喜歡她的冬菇雞〪
不過岳母大人不懂英文，所以我不會跟她說話〪
她不很高興〪一天，她說: “如果你不會說廣東話你就不可以吃飯”〪
我很喜歡她廚的飯，所以我很快便學會說了廣東話〪
現在我要減肥〪
Chris said:
The Intermediate lessons currently warrant more listens for me because there is more in there but I still don’t stress about getting it all.
Everytime I listen I find more that I understand, even in the commentary.
Lantian you are spot on there. I suddenly hit a phase where I found just how much dictionaries suck. They have a great word, on paper it looks great, the English translation is bang on. You try and use it and are met with stony silence……….. repeat (maybe I pronounced it wrong) ………. ok lengthy explanation time and then they seem astonished that you applied the word in this context. One word can derail an entire sentance and the rest of your carefully constructed and correct sentance might as well be in Klingon by this point.
Then you have the problem like dan4shi4 and ke3shi4. “whats the difference?” you ask. “They are the same they reply but we usually use dan4shi4 because it sounds better”. Five minutes later you are told “You should have used ke3shi4″. Finally after applying thumbscrews and my own interpretation I have come to the conclusion that ke3shi4 is just softer, ke3shi4 is the ideal ‘but’ for butting in politely or the ‘plaintive’ but. dan4shi4 on the otherhand can be a weapon, hit the two forth tones hard to slice through the opposition. You don’t get that from a book.
On the flipside I have the same problem sometimes when in ‘cold blood’ I am asked to explain a bunch of English words that have similar meanings. It is only when I start to work with them and produce examples that I can explain the difference.
Writing is frozen language. It can have beauty in its own right but only begins to thaw and show its true colours and passion when warmed in the mind of a fluent reader. A less fluent reader has only frigid chunks to play with and all a dictionary can offer is little frozen word cubes.
The paragraph above is my pathetic attempt at an example, hopefully an English speaker can taste the flavour of my thoughts, but to an English learner it may be a puzzle that can be solved with the help of a dictionary but still remains strange.
I have now reached the stage where I realise that a dictionary is just another small tool in the big picture and if overused can actually do me more harm than good.
Yep! Dictionaries suck; most of the time. The best way is to see the word in use in context. However, at least, when stuck for a word, normally you can use the dictionary to show a chinese person what you want to say, and they understand it, although, not the right word.
I fully agree to Marc and his appreciation of the material in the expansion section. But is has a big draw-back for me, too: I am forced to be online at a computer in order to benefit from. I just don’t get enough redundancy like that.
I would need all the sentences as mp3-download as well as pdf-transcript, with or without pinyin depending on my choice when downloading, as suggested by AuntySue some time ago in the forum.
Yes, I am a pretty new learner (newbie+elementary), and AuntySue is perfectly describing my redundancy situation in her blog response above.
FOCUS - Adding 30%
In a more recent thread, Steve Kaufmann espouses the value of repitition:
Is Kaufmann Right?
http://blogs.chinesepod.com/2007/02/16/705/
It’s a lengthy but engaging discussion but I thought I’d share some thread love here. Kaufmann has thrown out a percentage for talking to total time spent studying, 10-15%. That’s radical in some peoples view, I totally agree with it.
Now I’ve discovered another brave educator who also has tossed out a percentage, and I’ve been reading her blog, she seems well versed in the theories and practical, not a BLCU tenured professor. She says,
“Carefully select a listening text which contains less than 3% new words for you, and listen to it again and again until you understand every word without translating them into another languge in your head. Then use your own words retell what you have heard till your expression is quite fluent. The next is go on to the next listening exercise. Do the same thing.”
http://mslstudentsgroup.blogsp.....focus.html
Eric has some stats about Cpod’s lexicon:
Newbie Eli Inter upper advanced
bonus 74.92% 76.82% 78.48% 83.61% 81.59%
core 18.61% 19.07% 17.55% 14.13% 16.58%
common 6.47% 4.12% 3.97% 2.26% 1.83%
words 618 729 1185 1458 2238
Lessons 146 85 75 20 21
bonus = 1 or 2 occurances
core = 3 to 9 occurances
common = 10 or more occurances
Thus it seems to me that from lesson to lesson there actually is too much variation. Core and high frequency words make up only 25% of a particular lesson. That’s good? Bad?
Would a Cpod Lesson Set have less variation and still be interesting?
http://www.chinesepod.com/lesson_sets.php
My suspicion is that although Cpod is not striving to be a graded-reader sort of site, there is opportunity to increase the percentage of common vocabulary from podcast to podcast, about a 30% bump will make a huge difference to learning efficiency. IMO
It could also be definitely the case that I suffer from analysis paralysis.
http://cantonese.hk/wp/?p=51