Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kane Minehunter]

Hello everyone, I'm completely buggered. I need to remember about 4 A4 pages of Spanish Writing for my Exam. I've pretty much given up trying to learn what it means so I'm just writing it out and now It's just a memory game; only I can't remember any more than a few lines it seems. I have a practice test for my first couple of paragraphs tomorrow, we only need to write what we can remember not say it - however I completely forgot about it untill tonight so I know I'm not gonna do too well, I'll probably stay up to the early hours trying to remember it

But for the future, and now I guess, could some of you kind people suggest some memory techniques that have worked for you while trying to remember a speech for a MFL, many thanks!

[LordBucket]

Let N = 1

Step 1:
Look at the paper, read N sentences.

Step 2:
Stop looking at the paper, repeat N sentences aloud.

Step 3:
Look at the paper. If you successfully repeated the sentence correctly, increment N by 1.

Step 4:
Did you successfully recite the entire 4 pages? If so, congratulations. You're done. If not, go back to step 1.


Other tips:
 * Don't plan to cram this all into one night. The sleep cycle is important to committing things to long term memory. A page a day might be more realistic. Once you've committed the whole thing to memory, recite it every day until performance time.

 * In most cases, precise memorization is not necessary. Most audiences will prefer something delivered smoothly over something delivered accurately.

 * I am assuming you understand what you're reading. If you don't, and you're memorizing just the sounds with no idea what they mean...this is more difficult, but it can be done. I've memorized plenty of songs in foreign languages. But it's much slower, and you might have to do it word by word rather than sentence by sentence.

[Sir Finkus]

http://ankisrs.net
But depending on when your test is, you may already be fucked.  You really have to plan ahead for these kinds of things.

[Kane Minehunter]

Thanks guys, I'm gonna' try using the technique, LordBucket, thanks. Hopefully I can get it memorized with a combo of that and that sweet program, Cheers for that one Sir Finkus. However, our little practice test did not go to tell. I managed to remember about a paragraph, a few of my mates didn't bother practicing and wrote about a line between them:
'Hola! Me llamo Alex. Tengo Quince Anos.'
And one of my other mates copied out the whole page onto a A4 piece of paper, sat on it during the test and re-wrote it by reading it from in-between his legs...

Hopefully I can learn it this time! Thanks again guys.

[gimlet]

You're goin through a LOT of effort to make up for not actually learning the stuff, and it's effort that's not even helping you learn it either.  After you get through this, I *really* recommend you get a tutor asap and catch up to where you should be in class, otherwise I predict you'll be doing the same kind of crash project for the final and will exit the course having learned nothing.  I know our school had free tutors, if not you should be able to find somebody relatively cheap.

If you're not gonna take further courses that build off this then that's not a catastrophe, but a lot of colleges really want you to prove you know a language - I know I had to waste time taking 2 fracking semesters of German again because we all screwed off in HS German and I didn't remember anything   AND I lost out on a great job I could have had during junior/senior year that would have paid more than double what I ended up getting plus would have been great experience in my field...

[Kane Minehunter]

To be honest with you mate I don't really think I'm in TOO much bother if I screw this up. I think there are 2 Speaking exams and 2 Listening Exams that amount to 20% of your total marks. Then there are a couple of sitted papers. So its not all bad, I'm not really that bad at Spanish, I could pretty much tell you the jist of each of my sentances but I'm really poor when it comes to each word or tenses. I think I'm gonna' put a bit more time in from now on.
But in all honesty, I wouldn't even be doing this were it not required for the E-BAC, which I'm looking to get. Its like C or higher In English, Maths, Sciences, A Humanities (Geography in my case) and a Modern Foreign Language. Pretty sure I'll get everything but like I say, little shaky on Spanish, so I'm gonna devote a bit more time to learning it from now on

[Tronak]

'Hola! Me llamo Alex. Tengo Quince Anos.'

Hahahahhaha. I can't believe somebody actually wrote that, it's like a bad joke.

If you keep having trouble finding the meaning of sentences (or words, or tenses) and are desperate, maybe you can put some of them here so I could translate it to you. For me it's very easy, and knowing what everything means may help you remembering what you are writing .

[Kane Minehunter]

Thanks man, it means a lot. I'm pretty sure knowing the right English for what I'm saying would help me remember it quite a lot. My Spanish teacher recommended:
1. Reading it through in Spanish.
2. Reading it through but think about what the English is.
3. Copy it up in Spanish.
4. Copy it up in English.

So yeah I guess knowing what the English and Spanish is exactly would help a lot.
Alex is a bit of an idiot as well.  Not stupid, just a idiot.