Consuming sentences more important than memorizing sentences

I tried for a long time to try and reproduce sentences I had memorized as language practice. This was a slow and painful process. A lot of time was spent digging around in my mind trying to find the clue that would allow me to remember the sentence. Looking back, I think this was a complete waste of time.

Now I just try to consume as many sentences as possible. I just see them, comprehend them, and let them sink in without worrying about being able to reproduce them. It’s easier and more fun that way, and the stress and discouragement that I felt from trying, and often failing, to reproduce sentences has gone. In the past, this kind of discouragement would perhaps have made me down books for a week or two, surely a much more damaging result that just letting a sentence go past without trying to memorize it! I think the thought of having to push myself through this memorization process was enough to make me think twice before picking up my textbooks during those times.

Now I'm banking on the fact that there are only a finite number of sentence patterns in a language, so enough exposure must surely result in mastery of enough of these patterns to achieve a certain level of fluency eventually.

I think this is clearly the case for vocab too. I remember my word list: a sheet of A4 paper that I used to create (by hand) everyday, containing ten to twenty Japanese words with example sentences. I would carry it around with me in my pocket and try to memorize the words every time I had a spare second. I remember there were words like 法律 (law) and 期限 (time frame) and countless others that I can't remember now because they clearly weren't relevant to my everyday life.

Useful, relevant words will crop up again and again, providing you are putting in enough hours in contact with the target language to allow this to happen, and I think in order to put in enough hours, you have to try to avoid discouraging things like sentence memorization.

Using Google images

Yesterday I had a lesson in Chinese about ordering in a restaurant. I'll be honest, I'm a complete dunce when it comes to food. Even in English I have trouble describing dishes and tastes, so trying to do it in Chinese is an Everest sized task for me. Anyway, I left the class with a list of Chinese food stuffs on my sheet of paper and as I sat down to go over the vocabulary today I was struck by a great idea: Google images!

Check it out. Just punch the word into google and you get the perfect idea of what you're looking up.

From the top we have:

粽子 zong4zi: a rice ball in a leaf

春卷 chun1juan3: spring rolls

馒头 man2tou: steamed bun

羊肉串 yang2rou4chuan4: lamb kebabs

粥 zhou1: congee

在香港我吃了真好吃的粥！