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Against 3x Speed

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Re: Against 3x Speed

#331

Post by wiml »

bmm6o wrote: post #322
ben_w wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor. I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using. Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctl…

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

For what it's worth, I've also used an app called Lingvist, which tends to tell you the grammar rules more directly. You might like its approach a little better. (But also, you might consider getting an old-fashioned grammar book, with tables of declensions and tenses and such, and keeping it nearby while doing Duolinguo exercises.)

Re: Against 3x Speed

#332

Post by paulmooreparks »

TL;DR: I'm generally suspicious of life hacks. Doing what seems natural generally gets it done.

The advice regarding spaced repetition strikes me as being as too-pat a solution as listening at 3x. A combination of approaches works for me.

If I'm listening to an audio or video presentation for the first time, I prefer to listen at 1.8x to 2x to get through the material more quickly, but I'm COMPLETELY focused on it while I'm listening. No browsing the web or driving or whatever. I'll stop and write notes, or back up and maybe slow down if something isn't clear, but I default to high speed. The same with reading: the first time through I'll "speed read" or even skim just to get an overview and load the material into my mental cache.

Once I have a good map of the material, I'll revisit it with a better understanding of what I want to cover and where my understanding is still weak. Sometimes it takes a couple of iterations, or I'll try to put the knowledge into practice and return to review the parts that the practice shows that I have an imperfect grasp of.

Effectively, this approach ends up being spaced repetition without Anki decks or reminders to review material.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#333

Post by paulmooreparks »

Mimmy wrote: post #275
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #242

The article isn’t just about playback speed. It’s a well-written piece about the importance of direct experience and not rushing through spoken lectures alone. It’s extra ironic, then, that much of the comment section here only seems to have absorbed the headline but not the content of the article. I have noticed that my most voracious podcast and book consuming friends seem to have developed a lot of surface-level k…

I think the article makes a fair point but I don't think it offers anything substantial. It's been beaten to a dead-horse that lectures or passive consumption aren't the most efficient ways to learn. Almost everyone in tech already knows that. Does the article offer anything new? Work on projects (aka direct experience). Thanks...? Also I think the "space-repetition" advocates suffer from a similar problem to the "co…

This. It's trading one hack for another.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#334

Post by lifeisstillgood »

trees101 wrote: post #279
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or surveying,…

Interesting. So perhaps another term for "contextual framework" is "mental model"? I like the way you've thought about this. I don't share your atheism, but without wanting to start a debate it would be interesting to hear why it features on your list as one of your most useful concepts?

Partly it's often a break through point (as in "I never knew there was an alternative allowed" - a conversation years ago with some people from Mid West reported that till a certain age they simply did not know Atheism was a thing - it was a choice between this God and that.

But more probably it is that once there stops being a prime mover, the question becomes how did the universe / world / us come into existence. I guess atheism is the model before evolution. But we needed to get to evolution first before atheism became the obvious solution.

Thank you - had not tried to work that one out before

Re: Against 3x Speed

#335

Post by lifeisstillgood »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #181
trees101 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im interested in your categorisation of learning. Can you elaborate on "contextual framework"? Are these your own concepts, if not where do you get them from?

The difference between Lucy (the putative earliest human found by Leakey (?)) and me is not that i am innately more intelligent, but that for decades my brain has been stuffed with the collective education of humankind. Lucy does not know about the sun revolving round the Earth, about germ theory and oral-fecal transmission, she does not know about writing or reading, about triangulation for surveying, or surveying,…

So I have been trying to think about the major contextual frameworks - could we for example create a Ted talk that told you "everything you ever needed to know"

- Earth revolves round sun (transit of venus??)

- Earth spins (Foucaults pendulum)

I started this in "important experiments for kids" on github.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#336

Post by ben_w »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #323
bmm6o wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

Have you checked out the "tips" section for each lesson? That usually has pretty good descriptions of things like grammar rules. Also, when you make a common mistake during a lesson, Duo Lingo will often interrupt the lesson with an impromptu tip showing you what your mistake was, why it was a mistake (what grammatical rules it broke, etc), and how to avoid that mistake in the future. Those have been pretty helpful i…

> I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course

Unfortunately the interstitial hints do vary by course. Spanish course has stuff like that very frequently in the early lessons (I have not done the later Spanish lessons); the German course barely has them at all anywhere, possibly not at all (if I had perfect memory it would be much easier to learn the languages).

Re: Against 3x Speed

#337

Post by petters »

mcguire wrote: post #312
petters wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very clear to me that listening at 3x works after some training. (Not surprising, since almost everyone already reads way faster than normal speech) The proof for this is e.g. blind people. Listen to what their screen readers sound like! I bet it will be hard to know even what language it is.

I have listened, and it's amazing, but I'm not sure they are understanding more than I would if I were scanning the page for the navigation options. (I haven't heard someone listening to a long-form text for understanding.)

But people reading a long-form text faster than normal speech should be common and uncontroversial, I think.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#338

Post by Veen »

titanomachy wrote: post #308
culebron21 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to learn driving a car this spring, with manual transmission. Knowing these things helped a lot. I made notes of all the traffic regulations document, and made tables of all long and intricate rules (e.g. lists of places where u-turn is forbidden, or backpedal, or what are speed limits for different kinds of vehicles/roads). This helped avoid learning all those 1000 test questions, what most students did. And u…

Do you live somewhere with an unusually hard driving test? I don't remember studying much at all for the written test (Canada), let alone memorizing a bank of 1000 questions. I never heard of anyone failing the written test. Plenty of people failed the driving test, though.

In the UK, the pass rate for the theory test was 54% for the last year. Lots of people fail it. You need to correctly answer 43 or more questions from 50 they ask, and there are over 700 possible questions. In addition to which, there's a simulated hazard perception test, which lots of people fail too.

Also, under 50% of learner drivers pass their first practical test, which involves a 40 minute drive on public roads with an independent driving section and manouvres like parallel parking and bay parking, plus a bunch of questions you have to get right. You'll fail for stuff like not checking your mirror often enough, not checking blind spots, going too fast, going too slow, incorrect positioning at junctions, and so on.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#339

Post by Veen »

trabant00 wrote: post #129
porker wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The few podcasts I listen to, I do so in 0.2x speed or even less. Not by slowing the playback speed, obviously, but by pausing and rewinding very often to think about what has been said and even take notes if I find something that resonates with me Which podcasts have you found that contain thought provoking information? I've tried to get into podcasts but haven't found the ones to keep my interest yet.

"The History of Rome" and "Philosophize This". I finished them both in a superficial way, while driving on my daily commute. Now I listen to them in my spare time and try to really dig deep, take notes and read the original material on topics that resonate to me. After I finish them again this way I will search for something of similar quality. "Revolutions" seems to be it.

The History of Byzantium by Robin Pierson, which follows on where Duncan left off in The History of Rome is excellent too. In fact, I think Pierson is a better writer than Duncan was back when he did HoR, so I enjoy the HoB more. Duncan's got much better with Revolutions though.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#340

Post by imtringued »

ben_w wrote: post #269
Ajedi32 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go even further and argue that making students read or listen to lectures for any significant length of time without them being actively engaged with the lesson is sub-optimal. Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between teaching the student something and checking whether they ac…

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor. I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using. Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctl…

Isn't it time to start reading German books? Duolingo was never meant to be an all in one solution.
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