This week we focused on combining our vocabulary skills with grammar lessons. We are talking this week about occupations, countries, prepositions, and pronouns so we made sentences and questions combining all of those elements. This was really helpful a lot of the sentences I would actually say in real life. An interesting point about working with a Swedish person in real time is that together we can work through insights about the language that hadn't occurred to her (because she doesn't need to think about the language explicitly day to day) or us (because we don't know the language!). Anyway, as an example, I wanted to say "I am a student" and had an intuition that in Swedish (like Spanish) you could just say "I am student". Louise hadn't really thought about it but realized I was right! You can just say "Jag är student".
Also, I am taking a cognitive psychology course this semester and we have been talking a lot about memory in the past few weeks and last week we talked about study techniques that really aid long-term retrieval. I learned that the best way to study vocabulary is to chunk the information into categories (like occupations, colors, etc.). Then you take flash cards and study three words at a time in a particular category and then move on to the next (rather than trying to learn 30 words about occupations at once because you are likely to forget the words in the middle). Obviously it is even better for retention if you can do something like use the word in a sentence too or make a connection to something else in order to store it in your long term memory. But this was really helpful for me because I was trying to learn 30 words in one sitting about the same thing and found that I couldn't encode all the information!
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