this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Language Learning

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Tip: Avoid recitation! (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 week ago by schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works to c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
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I failed out of Latin because I thought all I had to was be able to recite all the declensions and conjugations from memory--easy enough to accomplish, but not very helpful.

What happens is you learn the table as a sequential blob, you know this follows that, and you have to go through the whole table until you find what you're looking for. Not very efficient and extremely distracting.

What you REALLY want to do is be able to pick the form you need from it's USE, not from it's position out of the table.

The way to do that is to drill on picking out the exact form you need. Your magic tool for this is: flash cards (anki or physical), or a website like Conjuguemos or Linguno.

My experiment this week is to learn portuguese conjugations just from drilling the individual forms, without ever learning the table. Being able to recite the table should be the result of learning the conjugation.

Sorry if this is all horribly obvious to you, but it took me fucking forever to figure this out.

Any little tips you've learned?

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[–] amio@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah. Massive amounts of individual words and out-of-context grammatical rules are not worth the paper they'd need to be printed on. This is why Duolingo is garbage, and why a lot of formal language education produces people who can't speak it for shit.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

are you using voyager btw?

yeah, formal education is bad for anything skill-based. easier to give students busy work you can instruct and grade them on than to patiently wait for them to develop skills.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Voyager? No, why?

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Oh, it seemed like you might have been responding more to one of my comments, but as a reply to the post--something I find myself doing on Voyager because of the way its laid out.