Thanks!

That and constant exposure to native material.

I think the reason why people are bitter towards Khatz about his zero grammar approach is that they have the idea drummed into them that language learning is a series of rules that you have to follow from the wider society of killjoys known as traditional language teachers. They seem to forget the way that kids learn languages, through experiencing them in context. You can completely ignore the grammar books because you don’t need them. With MCDs, you start linking different grammatical structures to contexts which become familiar to you through SRS. Like if the context is about how you spent your day yesterday, you might come across a grammatical structure involving the word ‘play’. (e.g. I played, which is in the past tense). You might look up the word in the dictionary to find the infinitive (to play). The point of that is to get the basic sense of the word. The different grammatical nuances are inferred through context (if the context mentions the word ‘yesterday’ for instance, that might give you a clue to the fact that the ‘playing’ occurred in the past, when you see the same sort of pattern in different places and you notice there’s a similar context involving times before the present, you’d be tempted to think that perhaps this isn’t a coincidence). As you add more and more cards, earlier cards become clearer. And the good thing with the MCD approach is that you say the word out loud. That gets you used to saying the correct thing in the context. Once I realized this, MCDs have become so much more clearer and so much more fun.

But just for clarification, finding sentences aren’t that hard, just hit up some news website or forum, but should I be sentence mining for sentences with translations in L1(in my case english)? Or should I gathering L2 sentences, and just makes cards while cloze-deleting words I don’t know but will eventually learn (since it is in context)?

I guess what I am asking is should I be looking up every word I dont know or based on this method, through constant SRS reps I will just GET what words mean?

BTW i use a grammar book so translations are already there, I just want to see if I would be able to move past the grammar book to L2 media and learn combined with the MCD method.

Ok – off to continue reading about acronyms language learning and whatnot. You’ve really helped me in my German learning; I’m so curious to read more about what you’re doing now.

Thanks again!

Alissa

I don’t wanna buy something without knowing first what it is. It’s like going to the Trading Cards section, closing my eyes, and picking out a pack of cards and then buying them without looking to see if they’re the kind of cards I actually collect… Okay, not the best example, but I’m sure you get it.

For you, Khatz, I actually might buy it anyway just because I trust you to be the eyes of the blind (in the sense of being blind toward what’s good for your language learning) in these situations. But I’d rather not rely merely on trust when spending my rarely-earned money. (I’m mentally too young for a real job, and only have a tiny “career” which is barely getting me anywhere because it hasn’t truly started yet.)

I’ll look it up and come back to you, though. 🙂 Hopefully I’ll find something.