71–80 of 113 posts
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I'd like to learn Mandarin. Can you give details on how you're doing this? Like what you use for initially learning the material and what you use for SRS?
Definitely - contact me at the email in my profile and I can tell you more about my specific approach for Mandarin. (Don't want to sidetrack the thread too much.)
I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember. Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytic…
FluxCards provides spaced repetition learning with easy to edit and create own cards. You can sneak the answer line by line, you can finger-paint and the stats are fast and meaningful.
It is free to use with 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 days intervals. Beyond that you need the premium version but your cards are yours, so if you consider it not worth the fee, you can export your cards to SD and use them in Anki.
And yes, spaced repetition rocks. I can only encourage any flash cards programmer to implement it, as all these apps that implement flash cards but no spaced repetition learning are just not worth your time.
I was working on mobile app that helped with spaced repetition as a side project. I built a pretty good looking user interface but ran out of time to work on it between school and my company. If anybody is excited about spaced repetition and wants to join me on my side project, I'd love to try to make a little bit of extra time to get it live. I really wish that the application already existed - my midterms would be…
Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memor…
I use fluxcards that I wrote myself and have some 2600 facts that I'm learning.
The Spanish words work smoothly, cause I actually want to really not use them wrong in my daily life in Chile.
The friends and family birthdays work so so. Yeah, I admit, I don't care so much. I learn them as a favor to my friends that enjoy when I remember their birthday but I find birthdays kind of unimportant.
Then there is Farsi. I was in Iran and for my Iranian friends I learn some 35 words of Farsi. That is the worse. It makes no sense and my brain just won't accept these weird words to stick. Every time I want to use these words in a chat with my Iranian friends, I don't dare cause I just would mix things up and I don't get these words above the one month level in 2 years. If I would want to give up, I would have to delete these cards and acknowledge that I will not learn this stuff. At least not now, but I do it for them, so why not repeat one of these cards per day for them? Costs 3s and eventually I get my * brain to not forget these "important facts".
Critical thinking would only help me to admit that I will not learn this or that now. If I took the conscious decision to learn stuff anyway I know nothing better than spaced repetition.
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I've previously had good experiences with ProVoc (and now iVocabulary, a fork of ProVoc) but stopped using it and instead use Duolingo now because I lacked a good flashcard resource. I didn't have the time to think up new flashcards and learn them on a regular basis. Where do you get your sentences from for Anki? Is there a good repository online that you'd recommend (preferably with some kind of community review)?
I recommend creating your own cards, they just feel more weighty. I did jump start my sentence deck with the 500 card starter deck from AllJapaneseAllTheTime ( http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/my-first-sentence-... ). Yet those cards feel different. If I were to redo things I would start from zero and build cards as you go. My process is to add 4 cards everyday. These sentences come from posts in my RSS feed…
I've been using a standalone SRS app on my iPhone (StickyStudy) and about a year ago learned all N4/N5 vocab (ie, not just the kanji). But I'm having trouble making the jump to full-on sentences/text like that since there are too many unknown kanji or grammatical structures. StickyStudy does have a bunch of sample sentences for any one kanji or vocab word, which is great, but the learning focuses on the kanji or vocab words themselves, not sentences. So the ability to use the kanji in context of sentences is much harder.
I'd love to get to the point of being able to read webpages like that.
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I recommend creating your own cards, they just feel more weighty. I did jump start my sentence deck with the 500 card starter deck from AllJapaneseAllTheTime ( http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/my-first-sentence-... ). Yet those cards feel different. If I were to redo things I would start from zero and build cards as you go. My process is to add 4 cards everyday. These sentences come from posts in my RSS feed…
Can you comment on how are you translating the sentences at esuteru to add to your deck? Ie, if you can adequately translate those sentences already, seems like you don't even need to study them in the first place? I've been using a standalone SRS app on my iPhone (StickyStudy) and about a year ago learned all N4/N5 vocab (ie, not just the kanji). But I'm having trouble making the jump to full-on sentences/text like…
Earlier on I could not understand most sentences. At that time I would select the sentences I thought I knew. My understanding has expanded over time I think with great credit to anime and drama. I'm at ~330 series of anime/drama completed. Even before I started studying I had maybe 100 series completed.
Still a big thing for me is to card a sentence even if I do not understand it. The critical attribute I am looking for is "Is this a sentence I would like to learn?". Once it is in the deck I should understand it at some point in time. It may take a year but at least by then I will be able to pronounce every word in said sentence.
Even still there are some sentences I do not understand but those are often found in subjects I haven’t explored. Computer interfaces are 100% ok. Tech news likewise.
Start small and just never stop. Some of my first sentences were from children’s comics. I even have a few from pokemon games.
I'm also building a language learning startup that uses SRS. If you're interested in trying the system out in beta, or being notified when it's ready for general consumption, email me at languagebeta@jh.id.au and let me know which language you want to learn.