Western education does not\u00a0encourage memorization. Almost to a ridiculous extent, there is an expectation that if one simply learns the principles,\u00a0one will be able to figure out the details. As\u00a0nice as it is to learn the principles, there is no principle of a language that will save you from having to memorize thousands and thousands of new words. (How many thousand? One claim is that it takes a vocabulary of about ten thousand words before you’ll stop being caught by your inability to express yourself. Do you believe now that you need some organization to help you?)<\/p>\n
The lack of emphasis on memorization\u00a0in Western education means that people educated under that system don’t have either the patience or the resources for memorizing vocabulary. This is something that I ran into right away in language learning. It is something that I have been able to overcome to a large extent\u00a0through\u00a0using flashcards.<\/p>\n
If you just\u00a0want to get started, you can download Anki<\/a>. This is excellent, free software that will keep track of your flashcards for you. It works on Windows, Apple, and Linux. (There is a paid version if you want to use it on an iPod, iPad, or iPhone.)<\/p>\n If you’re not technical, paper flashcards can work just as well. It would be worth learning about the spaced repetition<\/a>\u00a0technique, to make your\u00a0learning more efficient. Basically, you see harder facts more often, easier facts less often. Anki implements this automatically.<\/p>\n If you’d like to learn more about Anki, this is a helpful 12-minute YouTube video<\/a>. It’s well-paced and shows you exactly what to do. Just a couple of points:<\/p>\n Here are the\u00a0important points of Anki if you’re not a video person:<\/p>\n You can create your own Anki decks. This is a great thing to do with the words you get from your language lessons<\/a>. There are also some Anki decks for Dari available through the LCP\u00a0online resources page.<\/a>\u00a0If you\u00a0feel the urgent need to build your Dari vocabulary, that would not be a bad way to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Western education does not\u00a0encourage memorization. Almost to a ridiculous extent, there is an expectation that if one simply learns the principles,\u00a0one will be able to figure out the details. As\u00a0nice as it is to learn the principles, there is no principle of a language that will save you from having to memorize thousands and thousands […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":14,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-66","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":197,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66\/revisions\/197"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/14"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iam-afghanistan.org\/lcp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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Anki decks<\/h2>\n