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    • CommentAuthoriszlq
    • CommentTimeJun 17th 2008
     
    It's not working for me, just goes over the colors. Will you be adding any new vocabulary soon? I love this method! Definitely keep going with it. It's the best system!

    Lisa
    • CommentAuthorSteve
    • CommentTimeJun 17th 2008 edited
     
    Hi Lisa,

    I had a look at your account and it seems like you've enabled the "advanced study interface" (in the settings menu). What that means is that when you're on the exercise screen you need to either add new facts manually (by pressing the "add fact" button) or you need to tick the "automatic" checkbox. You'll need to do this every time you enter the exercise screen if you want new facts to appear. If you want everything to work automatically all the time then you should disable the advanced study interface.

    I'll try to add some more vocabulary soon. If you have any ideas for vocabulary topics (in line with the current ones) then please let me know.

    cheers,
    Steve
    • CommentAuthoriszlq
    • CommentTimeJun 17th 2008
     
    Oh, I see how it works now. Thanks!

    On the vocabulary, how about something like politics, business, or science? I think it might be okay to mix the parts of speech, too.

    Thanks,

    Lisa
    • CommentAuthorSteve
    • CommentTimeJun 22nd 2008 edited
     
    I've added a couple more vocabulary topics and there are still more on the way (expect them within the next few days). The topics you've suggested sound reasonable - I'll get on to them as soon as I've got some more core topics out of the way.

    Concerning mixing parts of speech, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I've deliberately separated the parts of speech in the vocabulary lists for a few reasons:

    * When studying a vocabulary list you are dealing with isolated words without any context. Knowing what the part of speech is in advance provides you with a little bit of context which should help you identify words faster. This should make the learning process more efficient overall.

    * When it comes time to use the words in real sentences, you need to select words according to their part of speech. I think that by learning them separately they'll tend to get "filed" better in your brain for later use.

    * Many words in both English and Italian fall into mutiple different parts of speech. Separating them into different lists avoids confusion that could result from this.

    * I'm not sure whether I'm going to include any parts of speech other than nouns and adjectives at all. Most nouns and adjectives have fairly straight-forward, unambiguous meanings with a good one-to-one correspondence between different languages. Also you need to learn literally thousands of them in order to master a new language. These two facts make them ideally suited to learning in vocabulary lists. Other parts of speech can be a bit more tricky - they often have multiple different meanings in different contexts and there are usually fine points of usage that can't be illustrated in a simple list. Also there are far fewer of them to be learnt, so it's feasible to learn them all in context (whole phrases), as in the Grammar section of the course.

    I haven't made a final decision on this - I'll probably try constructing a vocabulary list for verbs and see what it looks like. Basically I want to avoid providing any resources on the website that encourage a poor method of learning.