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12 Months of Mandarin

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Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#111

Post by pessimizer »

cblum wrote: post #45
kentosi-dw wrote: post #12

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duoling…

> Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.

For me the new habit has been to not guilt myself too badly for skipping my cards if I know I spent an hour or two on native materials. Key to this has been to make sure that while all of my subdecks under my combined deck offer me a set number of new cards every day, the combined deck is set to zero new cards per day. If I'm missing days, I need to stop adding cards for a while until my daily load is tolerable enough that I'm not tempted to skip out.

Also, I like to get new cards of the same type at the same time. After I've cleared them once, let them be mixed in with the other cards, but when they're introduced, I should be focused.

I hope that FSRS* eventually solves this: they've pretty much done away with manually-chosen "ease" as a concept (although not everyone has accepted that yet.) I hope they'll ditch the idea of people regulating the number of new cards they get per day and move to allowing users to select an amount of time they want to spend, or a date by which they want to have a particular proficiency (defined by card recall), and instead have the algo choose how many new cards you should have. e.g. I'm looking for 45 minutes a day of review, optimize for that; or, I want to be able on the 15th of October to be able to get 95% of this set of cards correct, drill me on them repetitiously for as long as it takes.

There's been a lot of thoughtful discussion about pushing the app forward in ways like this.** Simpler is better, and the scheduler should be scheduling, not the user; the scheduler's job is to adapt to the user.

The next frontier for SRS after polishing the schedulers is to gain an understanding of what makes a good card or a good deck, rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader along with a bit of handwaving about how it's better to learn from one's own cards than ones that others have made. I'm about 3 years into daily SRS and this is not my experience. I'm eternally grateful to people who come up with innovative decks or just well written and focused cards.

-----

[*] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/

[**] https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/pass-fail-grading-as-default/ https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/how-to-prevent-users-from-misus...

(sorata seems to be a contributor to AnkiDroid, and Expertium the lead of FSRS. It's really nice to watch this be worked out in public.)

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#112

Post by haliskerbas »

swatcoder wrote: post #101
lxe wrote: post #68

I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria. Examples: Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good. Programming? Sure I can pu…

> I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system... I'm willing to bet you've never had probes analyzing anything about your dopamine system and how it responds to any of the activities you go on to describe. More likely, you've started using trendy pseudo-scientific jargon to justify why you believe yourself to be physiologically limited. Do you struggle to see through or enjoy to some of those activities? So be it.…

I feel similar to how the parent commenter feels, but describe it using different words. Therapists and psychiatrists will use similar language, dopamine, motivation, and executive function.

How do you recommend one does this? > I strongly recommend trying to break it

I currently try to hack my main activities to prevent myself from being too lazy to do them. Would be happy to hear your suggestions!

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#113

Post by Baeocystin »

hangonhn wrote: post #19
iforgotpassword wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not white or otherwise have unusual features? I'm a random white dude and I've been to Beijing and Shanghai many times over the past 15 years, and while I was asked for a photo a few times at parks or touristy places, it was far from feeling like a celeb or anything. And it has gotten less and less over the past years, but maybe that's because I'm getting older and more boring. :)

You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status! I (ethnic Chinese) went to China with two friends from Texas in the early 2010s. One of them has long blonde hair. She was never stopped in Shanghai, a couple of times in Beijing, but in Chengdu, they were just so amazed by her and her husband (but mostly her and her long blonde hair). People wanted to take pict…

I (white, blonde and green-eyed at the time) spent a lot of my childhood in SE Asia and southern China in the late 70s/early 80s.

Once we got to the smaller, interior towns, we had to be really careful with our movement, as we could attract dangerously large crowds just by going to the morning market or the like. The vast majority of people were just curious, and I have a lot of happy memories of smiles and connections, but a few of coming close to getting killed, too.

Still, risk is everywhere, and the positives win out. I loved learning what I could, and I hope meeting us was a net joy for the folks we interacted with, too.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#114

Post by naniwaduni »

kentosi-dw wrote: post #12

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences. For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated.

This is definitely an overstatement. It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations. This is a hurdle people frequently run into when deciding to learn a language, but it's a pretty tight problem to be having and SRS is not like, critical.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#115

Post by qingdao99 »

udit99 wrote: post #90
thatsnotmepls wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ChatGPT create 20 sentences for a new word I want to learn, works super well with Anki. Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20. Back -> Word and sentence translation.

Wait...how do you do this in Anki? The randomization part.

Anki supports HTML and JavaScript so technically anything is possible.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#116

Post by pessimizer »

Apfel wrote: post #98
jmyeet wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're quite literally describing textbook ADHD symptoms. If you haven't already, you may want to get assessed.

I'm someone who was perfectly able to use anki and learn chinese to a decent level with fairly intense combined-type untreated (at the time) ADHD. What you need is a compelling reason to learn (for me, it was the fear of letting down my wife by not being able to talk to her family).

Ignore them. There's a belief system that sees a lack of success in anything that one wants to do as illness or witchcraft. For them, a person doesn't lack motivation to practice something because that thing is difficult and exhausting and one can't always see a sufficient reward (or chance of gaining that reward in a reasonable amount of time) in the end. For them, it's always going to be an illness or a curse that is stealing away your ability to achieve your true desires.

They might be recommending pharma here, but it would be prayer on another forum, or more protein intake on a third.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#117

Post by Balgair »

For those of you like me that had never heard of Bloom's 2 Sigma effect :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

"Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment."

Um, what?! Why the hell am I not doing this for myself?

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#118

Post by swatcoder »

haliskerbas wrote: post #112
swatcoder wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system... I'm willing to bet you've never had probes analyzing anything about your dopamine system and how it responds to any of the activities you go on to describe. More likely, you've started using trendy pseudo-scientific jargon to justify why you believe yourself to be physiologically limited. Do you struggle to see through or enjoy to some of those activities? So be it.…

I feel similar to how the parent commenter feels, but describe it using different words. Therapists and psychiatrists will use similar language, dopamine, motivation, and executive function. How do you recommend one does this? > I strongly recommend trying to break it I currently try to hack my main activities to prevent myself from being too lazy to do them. Would be happy to hear your suggestions!

For the typical HN person who might valorize evidence-based living, the starting point is probably learning to:

1. Recognize where you've adopted a belief from little direct evidence,

2. Pay attention to what impact these (inevitably) many beliefs have on your life

3. Stop reinforcing and repeating those that are only there as invisible walls to justify negative or limiting self-image

Even between "dopamine" and "motivation", one belief blames an imagined phyiology that might only be remedied through some therapeutic medicine/practice that may not even exist; the other blames a weak will that you might find some satisfaction (or pleasure) in challenging now and then.

Are either strongly evidenced in one's individual case? No, but if you have to believe one of them, it may as well be the one that lets you wake up some morning and see if you might accomplish something surprising.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#119

Post by watwut »

jmyeet wrote: post #78
lxe wrote: post #68

I don't think I can do SRS. My dopamine system is at a point where I can't do anything for a long time that isn't interesting, has immediate or intermediate rewards, or can capture attention for a long time. And on top of that, repeating that habit requires all these criteria. Examples: Scrolling on the phone?: Basically direct dopamine injected into my brain. Can do indefinitely. Not good. Programming? Sure I can pu…

You're quite literally describing textbook ADHD symptoms. If you haven't already, you may want to get assessed.

He is also describing perfectly normal average person.

Re: 12 Months of Mandarin

#120

Post by thaumasiotes »

hangonhn wrote: post #19
iforgotpassword wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not white or otherwise have unusual features? I'm a random white dude and I've been to Beijing and Shanghai many times over the past 15 years, and while I was asked for a photo a few times at parks or touristy places, it was far from feeling like a celeb or anything. And it has gotten less and less over the past years, but maybe that's because I'm getting older and more boring. :)

You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status! I (ethnic Chinese) went to China with two friends from Texas in the early 2010s. One of them has long blonde hair. She was never stopped in Shanghai, a couple of times in Beijing, but in Chengdu, they were just so amazed by her and her husband (but mostly her and her long blonde hair). People wanted to take pict…

> You need to leave Beijing and especially Shanghai and head farther inland to regain your celebrity status!

Just going to the suburbs of Shanghai will do it.

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