14. November 2012

Swedish in Sweden - Practice and Rehearsal

When learning a foreign language, there is an abundance of new words, new grammar, and new expressions coming in. Rehearsal is necessary in order to keep the learned items in memory. Much practice is required in order to turn passive understanding into readily available active language skills.

My choice fell upon Anki, a general-purpose software based on spaced repetition learning . The reason why I use software rather than vocabulary cards on paper is simple: I do not want to spend time on considering which vocabulary to rehearse. This lowers the inhibition threshold radically because I can just sit down in a time window of 20 minutes and plough through (max.) 100 items. Anki automatically schedules when each vocabulary item is to be rehearsed. If one gets behind, Anki does not scare you away and still only lets you rehearse 100 items a day — a neat psychological trick.

All articles in this series:

  1. Swedish in Sweden
  2. Swedish in Sweden – Translation Tools
  3. Swedish in Sweden – Gathering New Input
  4. Swedish in Sweden – Learning to Listen
  5. Swedish in Sweden – Practice and Rehearsal
  6. Swedish in Sweden – Musings about Motivation