telophase: (Default)
telophase ([personal profile] telophase) wrote2006-05-02 05:35 pm
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Language people

Those of you who've successfully learned other languages - what sort of study strategies did you use? One of my problems is that I've been able to retain just enough information for just long enough to regurgitate it into tests, and maintain a B or B+ average, so throughout highschool and undergrad, I never actually learned to study. It was less of a problem in grad schoo, because the fields I went into were a bit more focused on analysis than on internalizing data (when you're a librarian, it's all about leanring how to look it up, natch :D), so study skills were not actually required.*

And thus I throw myself on the mercy of the internet again for help in this. I also need some sort of language-neepery related icon, but I'm fresh out of ideas.

And if I manage to get four pages toned quickly, I'll toss up some of the pictures from this Italian book, just to prove to everyone that "Mark" (un altro americano) is gay and to show everyone the six-legged dog.

* My first stint in undergrad, the MA in anthropology, required more learning of that nature than did library school**, and my mother didn't let fall the gem of information that she was a kinesthetic learner, and thus typed all her notes throughout school because the action of typing fixed it in her brain, until the very last two weeks of the very last semester of my MA. I tried that, typing in the answers from our study guide, and by God it worked. Am I bitter that she didn't tell me that, say, back my freshman year of undergrad? GOSH NO WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT.


** Which requires approximately zero. The only test I had that wasn't open-book was a one-question essay test where the exact question had appeared on our qualifying exams the week before. The professor kept our blue books - she was pretty upfront that the primary reason for giving the exam like that was to have the results for her records so she could show people what the students were learning.
oyceter: teruterubouzu default icon (Default)

[personal profile] oyceter 2006-05-03 05:42 am (UTC)(link)
Um... I think I'm a kinesthetic learner, like you, so I'd always copy out all the vocab and meanings before tests. That was usually short-term memory, though. What really helped was using the language every day in class and trying to speak it outside of class. It was helpful that I was learning Japanese with a whole bunch of anime-lovers, so there was a great deal of incentive. We also made up lots of silly sentences using the grammar and poked each other a lot whenever we heard anime using grammar or vocab that we knew.