#time to do those exercises and anki cards

[romanticize-until-you-drop]

2024-09-22

The first tests of the semester have caught up to me, and I’ve finally realized how close they are. It’s time to lock in — as the kids say.

[rigelmejo]

In honor of yet again seeing on reddit "how do I learn a language?"

I made a longer post on it. But the absolute shortest advice I have is: pick a study material and study plan and STICK TO IT. Ideally pick a study material/materials that teach you some new stuff regularly, and progress through them. Once in a while, review what you've studied either with that material or practicing what you learned by immersing (reading/watching/listening to something or chatting with someone in the language). Ideally pick a study material/materials which teach you the skills you wish to learn - reading, listening, speaking, writing. You may need to be creative to make up ways to use your study material/materials to study those 4 skills (or whichever ones you want to focus on). If you take a traditional class, generally the teacher will give you exercises to practice and study each of the 4 skills. If you need to, look up how other people use textbooks to study the 4 skills and copy what they do.

A mistake many people make is just... not finishing the study material they pick. Yeah, if you only ever study 100 words... 4 chapters of a beginner book... you'll remain a beginner. You must move forward. Study some new stuff regularly. Expand what you know over time.

Stick to your chosen study materials until you finish them, then pick a new study material that TEACHES YOU NEW STUFF. So if you just finished Assimil, don't start a Teach Yourself book as they teach the same stuff! Move onto an intermediate learning material after you finish a beginner material!

Do not repeatedly study various beginner materials for years. This is a mistake many people make, myself included. You need to keep picking study materials which teach you NEW stuff.

Good options for someone who struggles to pick study materials or get past the beginner stage: formal classes!!!! Take beginner 1 and 2, intermediate 1 and 2! There's free and cheap courses on Coursera and other online class sites, if you don't want to go to college and pay for courses. Or pick a series of textbooks learners use in classes - f9r beginner 1 and 2, intermediate 1 and 2. This could look like Chinese textbooks that teach HSK 1-6, or Japanese Textbooks that Teach N5-N1. Yes lots of people don't like "traditional study." But if you struggle to figure out how to improve, doing up to intermediate 2 classes then just practicing reading, listening, and chatting with people will teach you enough to do many things in the language. Intermediate 2 will prepare you enough to understand SOME shows, some reading materials, talk about conversational topics.

Alternative good options for beginners who struggle to pick a study material: pick a study method or approach and copy it. Do exactly what it says, progress through it regularly studying new stuff. Refold is a study approach with directions "do anki cards - usually premade sentence decks for a language (study new stuff regularly), and immerse regularly - practice understanding". So if you like Refold, look up Refold for the language you're learning and use the resources it recommends. (I suggest NOT making your own study materials such as your own anki sentence cards if you are bad at self motivating and making your own study materials as this could cause you to give up). Dreaming Spanish is a Great comprehensible input approach to language learning with a guide on the website to follow and lessons to follow for 1000 hours and directions on what to do after. It also has a community that mentions what resources they used like podcasts, and you can copy what others did. You like ALG and are learning Thai? There's youtube channels with ALG lessons and ALG tutor/teaching websites you can book lessons on. Just pick a study approach and STICK TO IT.

As long as you study new stuff regularly, and practice understanding the things you have studied before, you will learn a language. It mostly comes down to that, and how many hours you study.

Some people just keep repeatedly studying stuff they already studied so they don't make progress, or they studied 50 hours when... its probably going to take hundreds or thousands of hours.

If you like a very specific study method for a very specific goal? Find someone who already achieved your goal with your study method, and copy what they did. Use the materials they used (or improve on what they did and find equivalent materials that work better for you). Do the study activities they did. You have a good chance of getting similar results. That's how I came up with all my reading study plans... I found someone who'd already learned to read chinese, or french, and copied what they did. It worked. I'm using Dreaming Spanish as a guide now to figure out how to improve my listening skills, copying the suggestions dreaming spanish has for studying, its working well so far. I found the Listening Reading Method really cool, and copied that for a while, and did see significant improvements in my reading and listening skill after doing it.

[uncloseted]

i want to study everyday for an especific kind of test thats going to be in july. how should i do it

Assuming you have around 8 weeks, here's what I would do. First, figure out how much time you have every day to study - ideally, this would be roughly the same amount of study time each day and at the same time each day so you can get into a habit.

Make sure that your study sessions are no longer than 6 hours at a time, and ideally no longer than 4 hours at a time. Then, break your study sessions up into chunks - either 25 minute sessions with a 5 minute break in between (this is what I do), or 90 minute sessions with a 15 minute break in between if you have difficulty stopping and starting tasks. It can be tempting to skip the breaks, but don't do it - your brain stops being able to concentrate as well if it's constantly going, and that means that you'll ultimately learn less. Doing a small amount of exercise during the breaks can also help your brain learn more effectively.

During your study sessions, you'll want to do a number of different things, depending on whether you're learning new material, testing yourself on material you already know, or trying to keep material you already know in your mind.

When you're starting to learn new material, the first thing I would suggest is called "dual-coding". Basically, this means finding a way to combine verbal and visual information in your notes when you're learning something new. This could mean drawing diagrams, timelines, flowcharts, or concept maps alongside your written notes. Then after each chunk of material, try "self-explanation" - explain to yourself or someone around you what you've been learning. Try not to copy the explanation word-for-word as you learned it, but instead explain it in a way that would make sense to you. Bonus points if you can figure out how to explain it in a way that a child would understand. While doing this, you might ask yourself questions like "why does this work?" or "how is this related to what I already know?" Depending on the topic, it may also be helpful to do what's called "elaborate interrogation". This technique requires you to ask “why is this true?” or “what causes this?” for each major idea, and helps you understand the concepts more deeply instead of just memorizing them.

Once you've learned the new material, the next thing you can try is retrieval practice, where you use things like flashcards, free-recall summaries, past-paper questions to try and recall the test information from memory. You'll want to do this every few days so that you don't start losing the information you've already put time into learning. Apps like Anki, Quizlet, or Gizmo take a spaced learning approach to retrieval practice, so they tend to be better options than just making flash cards on your own. You can also try the "blurting" method, which is where you write down all the information you can remember on a topic and then check your notes to see what you missed or got wrong. This can help you to figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are and what you might need to focus on more attentively.

Finally, I would try to take a practice test once a week or once every other week. I know that's boring, but it's the best way to assess what you know, what you don't know, and how much progress you have to make before the actual exam. It can also help you get used to the exam format and, if you have old versions of the exam, how the questions are written and what might trip you up.

The last thing I'll say is that taking care of yourself is also important in order to do well on the exam. Sleeping 7-9 hours a night, eating well, reducing your stress, and exercising really do make a difference in your cognitive performance, so it's important to focus on those things as well, especially as you get closer to the exam date.

[theoisgoneagain]

April 28th, 2023

6-hour study session

Studied for around 6 hours today.

I know it sounds long and I also did go to Uni for 4 hours, but it wasn't that bad honestly.

When I study, I don't just try to memorize, but also to understand. With computer science, this sometimes takes a while.

My primary way to understand things is to take notes during lectures and listen to the professor's words. Then I let it be for a day or two and return to write my notes down in my notebook (not the laptop, the paper one). But this time, I also read through the script/PowerPoint (if the professor gave us access to it). When I'm done with that an hour or two have already passed and I now have written down the content of that lecture at least twice.

A while (maybe hours, sometimes days) later, I create some anki cards, which leads to me reading through the topic again and filtering out the most important stuff. That I type it into Anki for review. With that, I went through it for the 3rd time.

So at that point I at least have memorized the most important parts, from this point on Anki makes sure that it will stay in my head.

But not just reviewing those topics takes time. Doing the tasks our professors gave us also takes 30mins to 2 hours.

That is why I'm today, aiming to study even longer.

But how do I manage to study for 6 hours?

First things first: I use flow. This program reminds you to take breaks every 25-40 Minutes. So yes I take breaks regularly.

Second: start with the stuff that takes the most concentration. Writing cards go last while doing tasks or reviewing the topic will be earlier.

Third: No Phone, I use Forest to block my phone for 2 hours, before I take a more extended break. This means I have no access during my 5-minute breaks.

fourth: Exercise, do stretches or push-ups during short breaks. Even walking around your room can help.

five: Open a window and drink water.

Six: If you get bored, change the topic. Study some other subject for a while.

[meimae]

Language Learning Through Immersion: One Year Japanese Update

11/03/2021

I did it, you guys! I’ve successfully reached my very first year of Japanese language immersion! I honestly thought that I would have given up by now, but this really has been a fun and ultimately rewarding endeavor.

Studying the language has been at the back of my mind for years since elementary school, I just never really knew how to go about it before, and I always thought that I could learn it in a classroom setting someday. That someday for me was in two elective courses in university, and while those were fun as well, it did not give me the same gains that I have achieved in this past year.

It’s probably easier to quantify learning a language in a classroom setting, especially when going through a program to earn a language degree. Learning through immersion, however, I had to really consider what my goals should be on my own. Eventually, I stumbled upon an article saying that for an English speaker, Japanese was exceptionally difficult to learn and that at least 2,200 hours must be spent with the language to reach a certain level of proficiency. So I said to myself, “well okay internet, if you say so!”, and set that as my long term goal going forward.

Spoiler Alert: I did not hit that goal in my first year. I am not crazy and will never listen to Japanese in my sleep regardless of what Khatzumoto (the creator of All Japanese All the Time) says. 

I did, however, hit a total 1,226.65 active immersion hours in my first year, so I guess I’m still a bit nuts. That is 874.96 hours of active listening and 351.69 reading hours. I also did 270.59 hours of passive listening, also known as the time in the very beginning of my immersion where I was using Japanese subtitles (therefore not really concentrating on listening alone). That’s a cumulative 1,497.24 hours spent with Japanese. That’s more than halfway towards my goal! 

To further break that down for curious animanga fans out there, that’s 973 episodes from 109 anime, 765 episodes from 33 dramas, 7 movies, and 967 chapters from 107 volumes of manga (21 series). Here’s my anilist and mydramalist to see what I’ve read/watched.

During all this, I was also doing my daily Anki reps and now I have a 530 day SRS streak (includes the time prior starting immersion and only doing RTK and some vocabulary cards) and a total 8,857 sentence cards. I’ve been averaging 406 cards daily (because I’m trying to cure my leeches) and I spend about an hour per day doing reps and learning new cards. I don’t really track my time on Anki, but I do have a set timer that goes off after 1-1:30 hours.

What I haven’t touched upon at all is output. I have not gone out of my way to find a tutor or a language partner. There’s still plenty of input out there to immerse in before I even consider outputting.

Graphs, stats, and more thoughts:

Here's my current card count in my main deck (minus the cards in my new/learning queue and leeches I've been relearning which are in separate decks):

That one day in 2019 where I did not do my cards because I was seriously doubting whether I can actually stick with language learning this time around will forever haunt and inspire me to keep going everyday.

Workflow and Tips

You might be wondering, how do I have a lot of time? I started this whole endeavor in the middle of a pandemic, which eliminated the option of me going to a language school, and a slew of other things I were considering doing last year became impossible (and if anything, very scary to do in a pandemic). All I can say is that, things work out eventually if it is His will, and if I can learn a skill before everything properly settles back down again, then why not? 

I wake up at 5 in the morning everyday to either do my Anki reps or read until the time when I need to get up and I listen to compressed audio throughout the day. The biggest tip is to switch the time you spend watching/reading in your native language to your target language instead. Listen to a podcast during your commute, watch an episode during lunch break, read before going to bed, do your Anki reps in the bathroom if you have to. 

But, if you’re feeling burnt out, there is no reason for you to not take a break! I have been watching a lot of Among Us streams before bed, and I chat with my friends from time to time. Language learning is not a race.

More Stats

Here are a couple of grids of the kanji characters that I have encountered at least once in my immersion and how well I have answered them in my vocabulary/sentence cards.

It's interesting that after almost 9000 words, I have yet to encounter every single character from the Remembering the Kanji 1 (RTK 1) book by James Heisig, which teaches you the most common use characters that are part of the 常用漢字. Which brings me to the question, was writing down every single character being taught in RTK worth it every time it came up in my reviews for the first 3-ish months I was reviewing them? Maybe, maybe not. It certainly removed my anxiety whenever looking at blocks of text in Japanese, but the longer I think about it, the more I feel I should have switched to Recognition RTK earlier. Still, being able to write in proper stroke order is cool I guess, and it also helps me when looking things up in the dictionary.

Here’s the same grid but in JLPT order:

I clearly need to grind those N2 and N1 level cards! Speaking of which, I have apparently almost covered every single character that could possibly appear in the JLPT (except for the N1 which I have only covered half of) in just a year's time. If the JLPT word frequency lists I’m using are accurate, I have about 2,000 words more to go to to cover most vocabulary that could appear in the test. This makes the "10,000 sentences/words to fluency" argument a reasonable milestone to aim for for Japanese learners if said aim is only to pass the test. That said, 10,000 words is just that, a milestone. It's more akin to a comfortable level of comprehension, but not my own concept of fluency which is being able to read with ease, speak articulately, and write comfortably.

READING IMMERSION GRAPHS

My biggest motivation for tracking my stats is for the purpose of seeing whether my reading speed is improving over time. Reading speed is also easier to measure than listening comprehension which is kind of subjective, so I had a lot of fun making these. What I found is that for the first volume or chapter of whatever it is I’m reading, I always take the time to get used to the writing style of the author. My speed really improves whenever I keep reading the same topic over and over again. On the other hand and quite obviously, looking up many new words in a row and trying to parse sentences slows me down.

Manga: Reading Speed Progression per Volume

I clearly love ちはやふる and I am not ashamed to admit it.

I need to start reading longer manga. When I do, I’ll probably split this graph into less than and greater than 20 volumes. Imagine if I start reading something ridiculously long as 名探偵コナン or ワンピース, these graphs will start breaching the bounds of time and space.

Novels: Time Spent Reading per Chapter

#neverforget the time I read chapter six of Norwegian Wood for 9 hours when it took me less than half that time in English RIP. Also, my interest in Kitchen plummeted LOL. Still planning to finish it don’t worry. 

I also need to start branching away from manga and start reading more novels and light novels, too just so I can make more pretty graphs.

Visual Novels: Time Spent Reading and Daily Word Count

Also known as images that clearly show that I’ve already spent several days only reading the prologue of Island. I’m not sweating. 切那 needs to stop using words I don’t know in succession. More thoughts on this VN far into the future.

Thoughts on Immersion

I can’t really say anything else other that that it works for me, and needless to say if you’re considering this method, remember that the SRS is your friend but immersion should be your one true love.

Prior to all this, I couldn’t even read a sample paragraph from Genki without being confused to my very soul. Yes, I know, it’s embarrassing, but that’s the truth. I was way more scared of failing my Japanese classes than my actual thesis for my bachelors degree, I kid you not. I would quite literally spend all my free time in university trying to understand grammar, memorize vocabulary, and answer my workbook exercises with little to no success. 

I tried so hard to get all the grammar “formulas” into my head for 1.5 years and it only brought me more confusion. I’m never going back to traditional classroom study for language learning, but I will still refer to grammar books when I need to, and not because I feel like I need to answer 4783342 different workbook exercises like my life depended on it.

I still can’t believe it, but with immersion this statement is actually true to a point, don’t try shadowing anime/or calling your boss anime language slurs, use your common sense:

study anime to understand Japanese > study Japanese to understand anime 

Future Goals/Plans

2,200 immersion hours was my initial goal, but honestly I feel like that number could be much higher. There’s still a lot of stuff I don’t understand (news, politics, sciences, etc.), so I’ll make attempts to cover more of those things in my immersion. 

I’ll continue reading more, because that’s a natural SRS in itself. Try to read longer manga, more novels, visual novels, and light novels, and maybe news articles. 

I’ll try to mine as much “JLPT vocab” as I can before making any attempts at taking the JLPT. I noticed that a lot of the words I know don’t appear in the JLPT word lists as much, even though they appear a lot in media/daily conversation. 

Continue mining all words I don’t know because all words are useful anyway. There is no such thing as useless words. I never really understood mining only “interesting words” or words that “pop up” in your immersion. As I said in my previous blog post, 美人局 is an interesting word and I certainly caught it being said in my immersion, but in the three languages I know, I wouldn’t know when I would be able to use such a word, as compared to something like ジャガイモ which is a significantly less interesting word, but is certainly useful to know. 

_

I have managed to talk up a storm, but if you have any questions regarding my process or recommendations for new immersion material, please feel free to send an ask/reply to this post. I love hearing about other people’s language learning/immersion journeys. 

See you on my next post!

[langblr-rose]

tips for getting the most out of Duolingo

Because no language learning program is perfect, but Duo is free, fun, and admittedly addictive. Your milage may very, but these are a few things I’ve been doing to get the most out of the app.

- After you do each section, try to write some sentences using what you’ve just learned. Try to do it without looking back and the app for clues at first, to test how much you can recall. Then do the section again, go back to what you’ve written, and correct it. Finally, put it up on a website like lang-8.com, to get corrections and encouragement from native speakers. Do this even at the very beginning, even if all you are writing is “Good evening. I am a woman. I am not a man. I am not a boy. Goodbye.”

- Ignore the fluency percentage, because it means nothing (my German percentage keeps going down for some reason, because why not).

- If you come across a sentence that you want to remember, screenshot it, and make a flashcard of it, using a program like a anki, memrise, or Duolingo’s own tiny cards.

- There are also courses on memrise and tinycards specifically designed for Duo vocabulary.

- When you get into more difficult vocab, try writing sentences with the words, putting them up on Lang-8 or italki notebooks for corrections, then making flashcards with the sentences. This bypasses the translation aspect of Duo, and creates a little oasis of immersion to practice those tough words with.

- So, I’ll admit to rushing through the German tree because I wanted to feel like I accomplished something. The drawback is that I didn’t learn everything as firmly as if I’d taken my time. The plus side is that now the entire tree is open, and I can focus on what interests me. If you’re in a similar boat, try picking one topic (like science, or politics, or spirituality) and practicing it daily for a week. Then book a tutor or find a language partner and request a session speaking about that topic.

- Get a good grammar workbook. If Duo has a section on the grammar topic that you are working through in your book, do the duo lesson once before going through your books exercises and explanations, and again after.

- I find that adding friends (by which I mean random people on the Internet) and competing with them for lingots makes me study more.

- Similarly, at this point Duo is far from the only way that I’m doing language study, but I love maintaining my streak. I actually set it very low, because my only real goal there is to ensure that come hell or high water, no matter what is going on in my life, I do at least a couple minutes of studying every day.

- Speaking of which, don’t just do Duo. Get a grammar book. Get on italki. Get on lang-8. Read whatever you can. Listen to music.

- If you want a good first book, “The Little Prince” has been translated into about a gazillion languages, and it’s an actual meaningful story that uses super simple language and lots of repetition.

[linkalearnsjapanese]

JLPT N2. It’s a monster. A huge gap from N3 stands in the way, with only the rickety bridge of my study habits to cross the gorge. Right now, all schools in Japan are shut down due to the ongoing pandemic. Which is not something I thought I would ever say. Anyway, for reasons mysterious to me, teachers are still being told to go to work. So I’ve been spending a LOT of time at my desk lately. Which means I have plenty of time to study! (cue internal screaming)

Me, upon realizing how much study time I have now

So now I’m going to procrastinate on studying for N2 by writing about studying for N2. Here are some study techniques and materials I’m using in my quest to become 上手af.

Vocab

Resources: Anki, Tanos N2 vocab list

One day, I was flicking through TV channels and found the Japanese version of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? on. When the guy won, one of the kids asked him how he knew so much. The guy said that one of the things he did was study 5 new words everyday, so that each year he learned 1,825 words. I thought this was a fantastic idea and decided to do it myself. I found a vocab list from Tanos to work with. Every week, I write down that week’s words in my journal. This helps me to keep track of where I am in the massive list. Then, everyday I add the 5 words into an Anki deck and cumulatively study all the vocab I’ve entered in so far.

Blocking out my 5 words a day in my journal

If you’ve never used Anki as a study tool before, you absolutely should. Basically, Anki is a program that uses a SRS algorithm. SRS (spaced repetition study) is a study technique that spaces out reviews of materials based on how well you know them. For example, if I mark a vocab word as “easy” it may come up to be reviewed 3 days from now, whereas if I mark a word as “hard” I’ll have to review it tomorrow. The cards are very easy to set up, so you can use them for basically any kind of study. Go to AnkiWeb to make an account and get started. There’s also a free app, AnkiDroid, available on Android devices.

I also have a separate Anki vocab deck where I add words I come across in reading practice, or my daily life. This deck is non-JLPT focused, but helps me to keep adding more and more vocab to my repertoire. Plus, it’s always nice to learn vocab that I know is being used around me. And helps me read. Because I’m really bad at reading.

Kanji

Resources: Wanikani

I pretty much exclusively use Wanikani to study kanji. However, this method is very slow and steady wins the race style. Wanikani will start you on verrrrry basic kanji. Since I’ve been using it already since college, I’m at levels that challenge me. This is not something that you can jump into and will be at your level. Still, I highly recommend it. I’ve definitely noticed my kanji recognition ability improve when I’m serious about using Wanikani. It can also help with vocab!

What I like about Wanikani is that it forces you to be able to input both the Japanese readings and the English definitions. This really helps your ability to translate bilaterally and quickly recognize, read, and define the kanji. However, once you get into upper levels, the daily reviews can really pile on and it can get overwhelming. My best suggestion is really try to stay on top of your daily reviews, but also exercise judicious use of the vacation mode feature. If you’re overwhelmed by the amount of reviews, you’ll be less likely to continue to study. Just do your best, and pause things when you need to. All hail the Crabigator!

Reading

Resources: Nihongo So-matome reading book, Japanese.io, personal books

I’m not gonna lie, I’m bad at reading. It takes me a long time to read, and it’s exhausting. Part of this (a large part) is because I’m even worse at grammar, and part of it is just a frustrating lack of vocabulary.

The first resource I use is the Nihongo So-matome textbook series. They separate their books into sets. The reading book has passages to read, then comprehension questions following the reading. The readings are usually brief, but cover a variety of categories – like ads, fliers, and newspaper articles.

The next resource is one that I just found, and am still getting familiar with. Japanese.io is an online reader and chrome extension. The online reader has passages and entire books in Japanese. By clicking on words, you can read their definitions and ad them to words lists. Clicking on grammar items will give you explanations of those structures. The passages are also divided into JLPT levels, so you can select things based on your level. By using the “Feed” feature, you can also look at reading from Japanese news. You an even select your category of interest for what you want to read. Like I said, I haven’t used this site a lot yet, so I’m still learning how to use it. From what I can tell, the program is very well designed and easy to use, and looks like it will be a very valuable tool.

Finally, I occasionally go looking for real books (not structured textbooks) to try to read. I went to the Sumida Hokusai Museum a while ago and picked up a manga biography of Hokusai. I’m working through that now by adding sticky notes to pages with words I don’t know, and adding those words to my vocab Anki deck. Although this is just a kids book, I think it’s valuable to practice reading something not designed for study use. Plus, it gives me a break from the mindset of studying because I enjoy the topic and the art.

Grammar

Resources: Nihongo So-matome grammar book, japanesetest4you, bunpro.jp

God I hate grammar. I hate grammar so much. I really, truly do. But unfortunately to pass N2 and also to not sound like a cavewoman and/or small child, I need to use more complex grammar structures than “This is a sandwich. The weather is miserably humid. I do not like natto.” Sigh.

Ok, so first I have the Nihongo So-matome grammar series book. This is designed to be used everyday and introduces around 4 grammar structures a day. At the end of the week, there will be a mock test page with questions simulating those seen on the JLPT. Each day also comes with a small set of review and test questions. This series is great for giving you a structured way to introduce and study new grammar, and provides great sample sentences and diagrams for how to conjugate. what it’s a bit weak on, is English explanations of what the grammar item means. So, I highly suggest using this book together with japanesetest4you.com. I find that japanesetest4you does tend to have needlessly complicated sample sentences, but useful explanations. So use these two resources together!

I also write down all the grammar items introduced in the textbook, along with sample sentences, and add them to an Anki deck to study. This way, I have a physical copy of all the grammar I should be studying that I can add notes to, and a virtual Anki deck to study from.

The scribblings of a person slowly going insane

Bunpro.jp is a subscription based SRS grammar study site. It has tons of grammar items divided up per JLPT level. Each grammar item has an English explanation, conjugation guide, sample sentences, and linked readings that may help you understand it better. Once the item is added to your reviews, it will come up in your study. When studying, you are presented with a sentence that has something missing. You have to fill in the correct grammar, with correct conjugation. This is HARD. It can sometimes be very frustrating, just for the conjugation bit. But it is very helpful to be forced to input the grammar yourself, instead of selecting from a multiple choice. This makes sure you really know what the grammar is. If you don’t understand what the question is asking for, you can ask for a hint. There are 3 levels of hints, each giving more and more information away.

You can also input your Wanikani API key so that you are only shown furigana for kanji that you shouldn’t know yet. If you’re struggling, you can always click on a word to be shown the furigana. You can also either hide or show English in sample sentences to push you to read in Japanese. I’m not going to lie, using bunpro can be pretty mentally exhausting. It’s a struggle. But it is very valuable practice and really pushes you on your knowledge of the grammar.

Now….to study

That’s about all I’ve got for now. Yes, I know I should be practicing more listening and taking practice exams (check japanesetest4you or JLPTSensei for free practice tests) but there’s only so much studying I can do in one day before my brain fries. My best advice if you’re looking down the barrel of a lot of free time (oh hey quarantines) is don’t do long periods of study. Take it in manageable blocks a few times per day. Trying to do everything at once and pushing yourself for hours will just make you less likely to be able to recall what you worked on. Take 30 minutes to practice reading, then go do something and come back to clear out your Wanikani reviews. Don’t. Panic. This is a message for me just as much as anyone else reading this. Don’t panic, and don’t torture yourself. Study, but also live your life.  And remember most of all, that you and your worth are not defined by test scores.

Now, as learning through osmosis and/or telepathy doesn’t seem to be working, I should stop procrastinating by thinking about studying and actually go study.

Pls Luna….put the 日本語 in my tiny human brain

How I’m Studying for JLPT N2 JLPT N2. It's a monster. A huge gap from N3 stands in the way, with only the rickety bridge of my study habits to cross the gorge.

[sturlsons]

french in 1.5 years anon

Kinda random but I just found out that I’ll be required to be intermediate/advanced in French by the next 1.5 years; ALL I KNOW IS THAT MEIRDE IS A BAD BAD WORD! Idk if you’re a native speaker but I was wondering if you could provide me of any good French language resources (or language in general since I’ll be needing to learn Arabic soon as well), and like tips for language learning and how to go about it? Sorry to bother you haha this is MY stress but I appreciate any help! Have a great day!

HEY. so i really fucking dropped the ball on this one, i’m sorry. 2019 has been one health fiasco after another (or more like the same fiasco again and again) and i kept telling myself i want to sit down and make a proper post for this, until i realised that that’s just never going to happen given the way things are rn. and i’d rather give you a quickly-written post which is actually helpful than never write that perfect bullet-pointed one. 

first of all, i’ve been in your EXACT position (so no, i’m not a native speaker) except i had about...six months to go from je m’appelle teesta to voyez-vous, le problème qui se cache derrière tout ça n’est pas le manque de respect mais la personne dont il s’agit or whatever. i was like, i can so do this. (spoiler: i didn’t, because i was 18 and overconfident and stupid and didn’t actually know how to learn a language.) GOOD NEWS: having learned 3 more foreign languages since then, i am now REALLY GOOD at learning languages REALLY FAST. 1.5 years is a good amount of time, so don’t stress.

i’m going to go generic on this, with some extra tips about french since i speak it, unlike arabic. 

first thing, that typical thing everyone hates to hear but knows is coming from the mouth of an accomplished person (pat on my back) in any field whatsoever: you’re going to have to work really hard and practice like fuck. 

there’s just nothing else that can replace it. i’ve filled up notebooks and notebooks with japanese verb conjugations, once i did like 1800 of them in one sitting. but you better believe that a bitch will never forget those now. resign yourself to putting in at least three hours of your day to this until you get to the level you need. (and three hours is...kind. at my peak i was literally reading through french dictionaries at the library, 10 AM - 8 PM. i treated it like a workday.)

now, what you need to establish is: are you a hands-on learner or a digital one. 

i don’t really care for all the auditory learner and visual learner stuff, i don’t know about anyone else but i personally used those as excuses to avoid certain exercises. unless you have actual disabilities preventing you from accessing certain methods of learning, you can train yourself into anything. it’s a matter of practice. i could barely understand a new song without reading its lyrics first, now i eat up podcasts. 

SO. the question here is different. a hands-on learner, like i used to be more or less throughout my bachelor’s, is someone who absolutely cannot retain information unless they’ve written it down BY HAND at least once. pen and paper. (i’m still like this but i’ve learned to combine it with digital methods to go faster.) if this isn’t a hurdle for you, congratulations. your process is going to go that much faster, at least for french. (you’ll have to spend hours practicing your written arabic however, if you’re not familiar with the script.) 

now, if you’re a hands-on learner, you need to add an extra hour to your daily time. no matter how fast you write, you will take that time. and you cannot shorthand your way into languages. you need to understand how french is spelt, what accents it uses, that they put a space before exclamation points, question marks, and semicolons. (side tip: learn the IPA. it will be useful to you forever in language learning, at least for the romance languages.) i’m not gonna teach you how to make notes since i’ve never benefitted from copying someone else’s style, so if you don’t have a set method start establishing that. you need regularity and rhythm when you learn a language. my grammar notes look the same regardless of the language. i don’t have my french ones since it’s been years and i didn’t take good ones then anyway, but here’s my japanese and russian stuff. 

JAPANESE NOTES // RUSSIAN NOTES

now, it bears mentioning that these notes are NOT the notes i take when i don’t know shit. these are final level notes. they’re brief, idiosyncratic, and only reminders. something to refer to when i’m revising and suddenly forget a rule. the first notes i make are much more elaborate, whether they’re pretty or not. i’ve gradually lost the fucks i had about really going ham on academics so my russian notes are very messy, but my japanese ones from back in the day are magnificent. here’s a look. during lesson one i realised that japanese and my mother tongue, gujarati, are syntaxically similar as shit, and i started taking notes with references in gujarati. it sped up my learning process 2x while my french classmates were still going “BUT WHY IS IT LIKE THAT”. 

PRACTICAL GRAMMAR // THEORETICAL GRAMMAR

if you plan to learn more languages in the future, this will be so valuable. sometimes a phrase i learn in russian doesn’t make sense in its french explanation, but a phrase in english might use the same logic. bam, put down the translation in english then. you get what i’m saying? the more languages you learn, the easier it gets to learn languages. 

now if you’re a digital learner, i’ve got great news for you. duolingo and anki are your best friends. duolingo’s memed to hell and has a system that might not work for everyone, but they’ll do the brunt work of compiling grammar notes for you in the beginnings/ends of their lessons. note those down and transform them into anki flashcards, and you can learn grammar concepts without doing 20 exercises. (do those exercises if you can, though, nothing beats mindless practice.) now anki is an intimidating-looking but actually super intuitive app that basically builds digital flashcards for you and shows them to you in a rhythm based on your own learning speed. it’ll show you the front of a card, let’s say merde. you say the english translation out loud, shit, and hit enter. correct! was that easy? anki’ll show it to you in 10 minutes. hard? it’ll show you in 1 minute. super easy? merde won’t come up again until tomorrow. eventually you get so good at it that you can bury a card for 2 months. anki will also show you the same cards reversed, which is harder but trains you better. you’ll see shit and have to remember what it’s called in french, which is more difficult than you’d think it is. 

you can use anki for more than just vocab, like i mentioned. it’s a little tricky learning to convert grammar concepts into front/back flashcards, but you can do it. for example, here’s a sample of one of my russian grammar cards: 

front ^^

back once i hit enter^^

see? not that difficult. now don’t be an idiot like me who manually entered every single flashcard into anki. you can find pre-made packages online (but you can’t guarantee they’ll be correct) or you can make your own without killing your fingers. what you wanna do is open up a spreadsheet and make two columns, A for front of the card and B for back. it’ll look like this:

then you’re gonna save that spreadsheet as a .CVS (comma separated values) and import that into anki. bam, your flashcards are made for you with half the effort. there’s also a script floating around somewhere to make excel translate words automatically for you, but i don’t recommend that unless they’re really easy words. google translate can fuck up. reverso is your friend. 

you need to review your anki cards every day. it’ll take less and less time as you go along. i can review 300 russian cards in 15 minutes now. but you need to keep the rhythm going. download ankiapp and sync your cards, review them on commutes or in the hallway or whatever. trust me, it’s magic. 

apart from this, if a traditional textbook helps, go for that. i’ve always used textbooks and workbooks, more as supports than as principal methods, but it does help. it’s structured and organised and these people know how to train you. bescherelle is a good go-to for french. 

media is always a great way of immersion too, until you get to the country itself. it’ll show you how french people speak french. when i first came to france i didn’t have that experience and even though i spoke an arguably decent amount of french when i got here, it was like, if this is french then what the fuck was i learning in high school. if you like watching movies this is your chance. watch the classics first so that you can get an idea of french pop culture. amélie (though the pop culture aspect here is about shitting on it) and les intouchables, for starters. watch your favourite films, first subbed, then subbed and dubbed, then just dubbed. i watched all ten seasons of friends with french subs, it was wild. with music you want to start off with some indie-ish singers since they will universally sing softer and slower, making things easier to understand than idk, la tribu de dana. (if you’re into bts there’s a hilarious video of their baepsae choreo set to la tribu de dana.) anyway - angèle, cœur de pirate, céline dion, fréro delavega, uhhh that fucking french sufjan stevens. what’s his name. VIANNEY. don’t fucking listen to biglo and oli or like, fatal bazooka right away. you will not understand shit. i barely understand it. white people are wild. ooh listen to stromae. orelsan too, he’s a rapper but he has a relatively clean diction imo. he also sang the french opening for OPM. they call him orelsan-san in japan.

last but not the least: if you have the opportunity to interact in french with people, DO IT. native speakers will do their best to help you and be kind about it. people who learned french might sometimes be assholes from experience. it’s a whole superiority complex thing, and very hypocritical. anyway - online or IRL, wherever you can practice your french, do it. it’ll be immensely helpful. there’s nothing like the frustration of not being able to express simple things to get you motivated to get better. do your best to immerse yourself - changing the language on your devices can make a difference too. 

i think that’s all i have and again, i’m sorry for taking this long to finally deliver, thanks for your patience! if you have any specific questions don’t hesitate to hit me up, on anon or not. 

good luck - it’s not going to be the easiest but nothing is as gratifying as beginning to understand the workings of a language. you’re gonna love it!

[theflowercode]

28.07.19 | [9/100 days of productivity] 📚

50 hours challenge: [10/50 hours completed!] 

this one is for what I got done yesterday! I had a surprisingly productive, and some what boring day. The only two things that I did not manage to do were get some reading time, and practice exercises related to alcohol reactions.  also, i had some great kiwis! i forgot how much i love those 🥝🥝

studied id reactions used index cards for 100 min.;

made and practiced anki flashcards for molecular formula’s;

made a list of all the theoretical questions to solve (chemistry);

emptied out old e-mail folders;

looked into opportunities for abroad;

spent 1 hour on studying french:

20 minutes of duolingo;

40 minutes of grammar practice;

learned 10 new spanish words;

made a new account on animal crossing;

[delamhach]

So here's the thing.

For a long time now, every few weeks or so I would get another burst of motivation to maybe actually study something, and then I'd inevitably get distracted or lazy or busy or any number of things. It's been a problem.

I don't make New Years resolutions because that's always an exercise in disappointing myself, but I had... a thought. An idle fancy. That 2019 could be the year I made a real plan and made an effort to stick to it.

I read a book (Learning A Language by Ian Gibbs) that suggested breaking down language learning into tons and tons of tiny little actions that take very little effort and then just... doing as many of them as possible every day, anytime you get a spare moment. The idea is that something is better than nothing and eventually even tiny things will pile up and make a difference.

Sitting down and doing a full lesson out of a workbook multiple times a week is a lot of work, and honestly it's always been easier to put it aside "just for now" and play Skyrim for 12 straight hours instead. But I could probably take 5 minutes over lunch and flip through some flashcards. Take those flashcards with me into the bathroom. Turn on Raidió na Gaeltachta while I put my makeup on in the morning. Stuff like that.

S O

I've already fallen off the wagon a couple of times, sure. (I have about 150 Anki cards due, yikes.) BUT I have a schedule now and at least half of a plan, so maybe this year I can actually make just a little bit of progress. And a little progress is better than no progress, right?

[rigelmejo]

gonna be honest i think a huge weak point of immersion based learning methods (specifically ones like massive immersion approach/Refold and AJATT) is learning good production skills. In general these study approaches say explicit grammar instruction is unneeded (though you might choose to seek it out). So in general, you’re learning grammar through exposure. And word use through exposure. I think these study methods work well for comprehension skills, and that the study methods they use to learn grammar implicitly enough to understand it (srs flashcards, looking things up, etc).

But for a few reasons I think they aren’t super great for learning good production skills (and some of these reasons just apply to general self-studying languages in general):

A lot of people who DO these study approaches, and record their experiences, are beginners/intermediate. And since these approaches say do NOT focus on production until you have a high comprehension level, there’s just not much documentation of what to even DO during the production skills learning process. In general it is doable to find examples of individuals who have successfully done methods like Massive Immersion Approach enough to comprehend X material in a language, and who have explained what they did and their comprehension milestones. So it is feasible to copy their study plan and expect a similar result. 

But for production skills, there are less examples of people who’ve successfully learned to produce to the level of fluency they are satisfied with, and to find examples of them explaining specifically HOW they worked on those production skills.  I can think of only 2 examples of people I’ve seen who did mia and then ‘somewhat’ worked on production skills - Khalifa who studied Spanish (he did frequent tutoring sessions with lots of speaking practice to improve his production skills - https://youtu.be/lqxWYAGDQy0), Luke Truman (he produced language and did language exchange from the beginning of his learning and throughout - https://youtu.be/dDZgec6uzMs). In both of these examples - the people learned production skills by producing language with a language partner often (sometimes a tutor) to smooth out production skills. This does not particularly tell us if they could pass a language fluency test with their production skills, use their production skills professionally or in classes in that language, or if they’re still working on production skills (if so how much longer did they take tutoring sessions, how did they structure the sessions, and did they do any Other exercises to improve production skills?)

Since its hard to find what people even do during this production phase of learning in such approaches, its hard to see if it’s successful and by how much. Hard to see what pitfalls they have to work on addressing, hard to see what methods people do AT the production stage to improve and solidify their production skills. In general it is just HARD to see what steps people are even meant to take during this production stage if using these language learning approaches. In the examples I mentioned above, I’ve seen people practice production by simply TRYING once they reach a certain level of comprehension skill, and trying often. But that doesn’t address improving mistakes/issues with production. 

For accent - Shadowing has been mentioned in mia as an activity to do to improve production accent (which is a practical activity to improve that skill). For grammar mistakes and correction, mia’s Matt has mentioned making srs anki cards for grammar points he notices he can’t produce or think of and then drilling/studying them. This indicates looking up correct grammar points explicitly at some point - or does he just look at example sentences? Also this indicates still using anki cards, so is the solution to just continue drilling sentence examples even for production skills? 

-

From what I can tell, the methods for working on production seem to be:

Get a tutor. Start practicing speaking at least weekly. Also do language exchanges if possible. (only a tutor might explicitly address helping you notice and improve errors)

Start shadowing (improves accent, and I do think this is a free study method that would help)

Make more srs anki cards to drill any sentence patterns you don’t seem to know how to say well/notice you’ve made errors on (so continue the srs anki approach that you used in comprehension learning stage - what I dislike here is this is still potentially implicit study of grammar, so for example if you made the mistake to/too/two in english it would be studying example sentences instead of reading an explanation of when to use which to/two/too which seems more confusing/harder to quickly grasp for the kind of learner I am).

I am guessing here - but if planning to take a language test (like the JLPT, HSK, CEFR) get a test-prep textbook/guide/site/worksheets/practice-tests and work through it. I can’t remember if I’ve seen anyone do AJATT or MIA and then take the JLPT test, but most youtubers I’ve seen who have taken the test in general got a prep-textbook or course ahead of time to study and prepare. 

So. If I were going to apply developing production study skills to myself, what might that look like? Since I don’t like using srs flashcards much, and I hate learning from examples when there’s quicker ways to get a correction. 

What I might try to do in future for production skills:

*Shadowing - pretty self explanatory. Improve listening skills, improve accent. (And maybe if I’m lucky it will help with active vocab a little? Although I’ve seen no specific studies on that).

*Write more often in language - easy ways to do this include journaling (journaly is a thing?), so I have time to look up words I want to use (might help active vocab expansion) and think about my grammar. Strategies that might help grammar here could include looking at language sentence patterns (grammar/sentence pattern book/website), and practicing substitution (using other words relevant to me, while practicing a sentence pattern as a journal entry). This could help me practice from generally ‘correct’ grammar form, while also helping my active vocab and learning how to say what I generally think of saying.

*Use a test-related textbook/site and work through it doing the exercises. (Like the HSK books I have). While not super fun, I think this is the closest way to get classroom-like benefit of doing correct grammar patterns with aids to refer back to.

Language exchange - aiming to talk/write more. This would be free, and simply production practice (would help with active vocabulary, might only be practice for other skills). 

Paid: see a tutor weekly. Would help like language exchange, likely be more targeted since less time spent in english, and more likely to receive feedback on mistakes.

*Paid: test-related courses (like the coursera courses, or Chinese Zero To Hero* courses: https://chinesezerotohero.teachable.com/). Benefit would be more videos, possibly more support, and exercises specifically with direction and aids to refer back to. (I’ve had Chinese Zero to Hero courses recommended to me)

* starred ideas I think would be most likely to help. 

---

For me:

For free things, I think journaling based on sentence-pattern sentence examples would work very well. So read a grammar textbook/sentence-pattern guide/site/textbook then do a journal entry emulating that point with words I want to put into active vocab. I think that activity would put my already-owned study books to good use, and allow me to practice production/active vocab/correct grammar.

I also think working through a test-oriented site/book would help - I have pdfs of some so this is something I could do for free, and it would be something I could combine with journaling like the idea above. This would also be more progressive/organized more according to difficulty (which could bore me or alternatively help me build good habits from the bottom up). 

Shadowing and language exchanges I already do a little, and plan to do more once I start focusing on production more. I think for paid options - the test-oriented courses may actually help the most with the concern I have for ‘improving overall grammar.’ Tutors can help with production practice, more focused than some language exchanges, so tutors may help eventually too but not in that ‘explicit grammar improvement’ way I want to be able to mostly study and fix myself. 

-

So I think, ultimately, what my study plan is going to look like for production skills:

1. Continue improving comprehension skills. Add shadowing more, over time. (language exchange if desired)

2a. Once comprehension is in a good place, pick a book I have (sentence patterns if I have one, or HSK oriented textbook) and go through it doing practice journal entries for each example. Try to use words in the example book, and words in general I think I’d want to use. (Continue shadowing, and immersion in general for comprehension skills).

2b. If I can stick to doing this, work through a book/site. If I cannot stick to this (boredom, badly organized book, etc?) then look at paid course options at that point (Chinese Zero to Hero?) in case a class-style organization/commitment will push me to complete it better. (Continue shadowing, and immersion in general for comprehension skills).

Then After all that, practice away lol.  

[floridaindependent-blog]

7 Stunning Tech Toys for Kids of All Ages You Should Consider for the Holidays

New Post has been published on https://floridaindependent.com/tech-toys-for-kids-you-should-consider-for-the-holidays/

7 Stunning Tech Toys for Kids of All Ages You Should Consider for the Holidays

The winter holidays are fast approaching and that means the panic of gift shopping. Will you get overwhelmed in the aisles of Target and end up giving a gift card again?

No, you won’t, because you took the time to read this tech toys for kids guide. Learn the hottest toys of the season below.

1. Littlebits Star Wars Droid Inventor Kit

Were your kids all about the new Star Wars last year or the one before? Do they like to learn hands-on and love technology?

Well, you can stimulate their STEM play senses with this R2 D2 droid builder toy. Not only is it adorable, but it’s officially licensed, so there’s no strange sounds or parts.

The instructions that come with it are easy to follow, as long as your child can read. If they can’t, you should have a fine time putting it together with them as an adult.

The droid is controlled via an app and it can do some cool stuff. There are games in-app that coordinate with your droid. It can even hold a pen and draw you a nice space-themed picture.

If your child builds it with one modification, they can take it apart and switch it out easily.

This is a seriously awesome gift for parents or friends of a Star Wars lover – kid or adult.

2. Anki Overdrive Battle and Race Robotic Supercars

What the last gift was to Star Wars lovers is what this gift is for lovers of Mario Kart. Except you won’t need a controller with buttons for this track.

Instead, you’ll need your smartphone app to drive the cars on the track. That’s right – no more stooping over hot-wheels tracks that always come apart. This is digital – though the track itself is in person.

You control the cars that come with the track through the app. The cars themselves have sensors built in, which read the code on the track. You can rearrange the track in any way you want – and buy expansion packs.

The app even has weapon options for you to blast your competitors out of the running for first place.

For extra kid-cred, check out the officially licensed Fast and the Furious Anki Overdrive Expansion.

If your kid isn’t ready to give up the remote cars yet, learn more here.

3. Nintendo Labo

If your kid isn’t into track racing anymore, but still loves the driving games – Nintendo came out with the perfect gift. Instead of them driving something with their phone screen, this toy helps them create a useable steering wheel.

The parts are made out of cardboard, but there’s technology included that communicates with their Nintendo Switch.

It’s a pretty cool idea. Much more exciting than the driving wheel Wii remote modifiers they had years back.

And they didn’t stop at cars. You can build your own wearable robot for fighting games. It even includes a build your own headset that fits the Nintendo Switch.

The toy line is called Nintendo Labo and we can’t wait to see what else they come out with.

4. Hatchimals

Yes, they’re around this Christmas too. If you want something a little less STEM but still tech-related for a younger kid, check out Hatchimals.

You buy them as speckled eggs, which doesn’t seem like fun. That is until you unpackage them, then wait and watch.

When the animal inside is “ready” it’ll start poking its way out of its shell. It takes longer than you’d think – some parents went ahead and pulled the egg apart themselves.

But we’d recommend using it as an exercise in patience. It takes chicks a long time to work their way out of an egg too.

Once they’re out of the egg, they’re “hatched”. You can interact with them and they interact back. They’re almost Furby-like but without the nightmares.

5. Boogie Board Writing Tablet

Remember how we had those magnetic drawing boards that you moved the slider over to erase? Think of the Boogie Board like that, but way cooler.

For one, the design isn’t all pixelated from the hexagonal design. Instead, it uses LCD lights and pressure to make designs. Then, a simple press of a button erases everything.

If you get it and your kid doesn’t take to it – but why wouldn’t they? It can act as a renewable type of post-it pad. Leave notes for your partner or the babysitter without killing any trees.

It’s also perfect for the car, but it’s thin – so watch out for it falling in between car seat cracks. You’ll be able to get it out, but that sounds like a recipe for kids screaming until you do.

6. Circuit Maze Board Game

Your seven year old may not need to know how droids work in the next five years, but knowing how electricity works would be more realistic – right?

That’s what this board game teaches. It’s an expansion of the Snap Circuit game idea, but this one is more game-ified.

Kids get to solve over 50 puzzles that end up turning a light on or moving a fan. Honestly, it’s cool to sit down and work through as a parent too.

7. Selfie Mic

Do you have a little diva? That’s okay, teach them to use their talents. This toy allows them to do karaoke but also take a video at the same time.

The app has different song choices and puts effects on the screen.

Tech Toys for Kids

Remember when tech toys for kids meant a Furby or a Barbie doll with a button on her back? We’re far from those days.

You can’t go wrong with any of the toys on this list. They’re all cool, educational, and accessible with a smartphone app and maybe some batteries. We hope this helped you with your shopping list this Christmas.

Click here for more tech news.

[studyaroundthetokki]

Finding ways to be productive when I don’t feel good..

Low spoon day it looks like. I am going through another bout of insomnia and was up til almost 4 studying since I couldn’t sleep. 

When I have these bad times, I don’t worry about getting a normal workload done. I do the things that only take a short amount of time first, so that I can knock those out. If I can I’ll make some vocabulary flash cards. Maybe on anki or by hand if I feel up to it later.

 It’s okay if I don’t get into the practice section of my chapter today. 

Instead of doing the whole thing I can

Just do 2-3 small exercises

Go through my flash cards

Listen to a short podcast on Japanese

Practice my pronunciation with some Disney sing alongs in Japanese

Do some handwriting practice in bed

Review my notes 

Look for some study material to use later

Do a short Rosetta Fail session

Sometimes we have to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. It’s okay. 

[mathematicianadda]

Crowdsourced Studying Materials - Gauging Interest on Community Idea

NOTE: I mention a handful of tools in this post that you may or may not be familiar with. To keep the main content shorter, I will avoid explaining in the core of the post what these tools are, but at the bottom I will include more information on the tools and why I believe they are useful.

What is this?

Anki is not typically used to study mathematics. However, when studying through a course or a textbook with a lot of material, creating an Anki deck is a powerful way to help keep important definitions and theorems right at the forefront of your memory-- but this is a time-consuming process and often a large undertaking for a single person to do properly for a textbook. However, an Anki add-on called CrowdAnki allows for the integration of Git version control with Anki decks. I believe this could prove to be a useful tool for the mathematics community.

Consider a scenario where a group of redditors on this subreddit get together to self-study through Munkres' Topology, where a few of these redditors are familiar with these tools. They create a deck "Munkres' Topology" on AnkiWeb, giving all members of the group access to the repository where the cards are stored. As they progress through Chapter 2 of the textbook (say, the section on the Order, Product, and Subspace Topologies), each redditor opens their local copy of their Anki deck and add a few cards each. One adds the definition of the order topology and one related theorem, another does the same for the product topology, and so on, tagging cards with tags such as: munkres_ch_2, definition, order_topology.

Once they do this, they merge their local version of the deck with the community one on the cloud, allowing everyone access to the cards written by others. Then, when reviewing the topics they have been reading about, they can pull up their deck in Anki and quiz themselves on the definitions and theorems in a section-- without necessarily having to spend an hour LaTeXing all of the cards (more on the writing process later). But this can be more useful than just a way to review notes. A few weeks later, a redditor is reading on Hausdorff spaces and reads that any simply ordered set is a Hausdorff space in the order topology. Faint in his memory, he creates a custom study session in Anki limiting the tags of the deck to "munkres_ch_2 order_topology", allowing him to review the theorems and definitions related to the order topology in the section. Or in a semester, when he is studying through Algebraic Topology, he may want to review -all- theorems and definitions in Munkres' Topology related to the basis. Then simply using the tag "basis" allows him to study all the important facts from ALL chapters of the textbook.

Anki is particularly useful due to its accessibility-- while writing notes is easiest on a computer, it can be edited and reviewed using the application on a computer, through AnkiDroid, AnkiMobile, or even AnkiWeb, which makes it a great tool for commuting. This actually turns out to be handy in more ways than you might expect. Next week, our redditor is discussing topology with his math buddies at dinner. When talking about the K-topology, a disagreement arises about a small fact relating to the topology. Of course, nobody has their notes on them, and searching through math.stackexchange can be tedious for something this specific (please suspend your disbelief). However, pulling up AnkiDroid, they can use the search tool to find the note and settle the dispute right then and there.

This deck is of course public, and so anyone can make editions at any time-- fixing typos in previous cards, or adding in relevant information. If accessible to the /r/math subreddit, anyone can download the deck, and if they notice an error in a statement, they can edit the card right there on their phone or laptop, and later make a pull request so the public version no longer has the error. By alleviating the burden and human error that arises from a single person making all the notes for every theorem and definition as they go, we can achieve an impressive standard of quality with minimal effort from the community.

Some people debate the usefulness of flashcards with mathematics-- I personally believe they can be a helpful supplement. But this is a broader tool-- having decks like these is an incredible tool for any student, as it essentially offers an indexed reference to the topic you're studying that is accessible from your smartphone or laptop. Once created and shared, any student can download the deck and use it to supplement their studying in their course, or to brush up on topics to prepare for another course.

Thoughts?

All that being said, it's only as useful a resource as the community makes it. If nobody is interested in making or using flashcards, or if the decks aren't well-known or accessible to the /r/math community, then they become a weaker resource. That's why I am making this post-- I want to gauge the community's interest in such a resource. *Would you use it? Would you contribute? How would you improve the system, or what flaws do you notice? *

Of course, getting the ball rolling on something like this can be difficult. Luckily, you don't have to! I have been creating flashcards through Anki for my Linear Algebra, Measure Theory, Real Analysis, and Topology courses, and have a solid start on flashcards through these courses. If there is interest, I would be happy to implement CrowdAnki with my decks, and people can test out the idea with the decks I have-- seeing what the cards could look like, adding or editing cards in the deck, etc. They are currently in the need of some minor changes and updates-- for example, I initially typed up the cards using Anki's LaTeX functionality, but I am transitioning to MathJax for a handful of reasons.

Why?

Studying mathematics is a multi-step process. When learning a new topic in a math course, often the progression of learning goes something like this:

Initial interaction with new material. Through either lecture or reading through a textbook, a student encounters a new theorem, definition, or other note-worthy idea. Often involves playing around with the concepts to begin familiarization

Applying new concepts. The student then does exercises utilizing the new information, giving insight to the scope of the new concept and allowing patterns in application to arise, incorporating the concept into their intuition.

Full recollection of the concept-- for a theorem, knowing the complete statement, or knowing all of the required axioms and their implications. Oftentimes, this step is tied into the previous, where by repeated application, a student ends up memorizing the important theorems and definitions.

While this process usually works as-is, occasionally there is a need for a stronger familiarization of the concepts than one might gain from exercises-- or perhaps the time you would have to spend doing exercises to absorb the axioms for all the content you need simply would be too much to keep up with. I personally turn to Anki to approach this issue when it arises in my classes.

On paper, this system can work very well. However, this process involves a lot of steps-- pre-reading lecture material, attending the lecture and taking notes, creating flashcards for the notes taken, and then doing exercises. Each of these steps can easily be an hour or two, if not more. This adds up very quickly when taking multiple math courses, and can become unsustainable for a single person. The usefulness of having a group to work with cannot be understated-- this is commonly done for problem sets, but this should be incorporated in other steps of the process as well. Spreading the workload helps everyone involved save time and learn more effectively.

Now, a few disclaimers for points that I know will come up. This is NOT a replacement for traditional studying. You cannot just download a deck, study the cards, and say you know topology. Attending lectures and reading the textbook is important, as they include key details or connections that theorems and definitions cannot convey on their own. Perhaps more important is that it does NOT replace doing exercises. Doing practice problems and working with the concepts at hand is still key to familiarizing yourself with the theorems and definitions-- this simply helps you retain everything far better. Flashcards are a supplement to the math learning experience, not a primary method. You could argue that memorizing theorems and definitions isn't important in mathematics, but they sure are important in exams-- and if you're flipping to a textbook every time you're discussing content in a course, you'll be slogged down pretty quickly.

Tools

Anki

Flashcards? In my theoretical mathematics classroom? It's more likely than you think.

Anki is a digital flashcard program that utilized Spaced Repetition to help you review flashcards in an efficient manner. New material can be learned and retained so much more effectively using Spaced Repetition-- for more information on how that works, check out this interactive comic.

While Anki is typically used for rote memorization, say in biology courses, it can still be effective for mathematics. People far more experienced than I am have covered this in great detail, and it is worth a read. For a quick idea of how it can work, check out this reddit post. If you want more along those lines, check out this blog post that takes a different approach to formulating cards. More than just for studying a textbook, though, Anki can be used in mathematics on a broader level-- check out this and this post by Michael Nielson for more information on that.

However, on a more direct level, the actual creation of the cards can be complex. While LaTeX can be used, MathJax has better implementation with Anki that allows for smoother compatibility.

MathJax

MathJax is a browser-based typesetting system similar to LaTeX. Equations are coded almost exactly like LaTeX, but formatting is done through an HTML style. The Anki documentation covers pretty concisely what it is and how it is used in Anki-- for the most part, you can simply replace any $ $ delimiters in LaTeX code with ( and ) to render the equation.

There are multiple reasons why MathJax is more effective than LaTeX in Anki. The simplest being that MathJax is Javascript, and Anki is written in PyQt, which mesh nicer than LaTeX. Anki implements LaTeX basically by rendering a pdf of the code given, cropping a screenshot of the pdf, and then displaying the image when using the flashcard. Editing cards like this can become a real headache, and if the images aren't synced properly (and if the code is changed, it must be re-rendered), then it can quickly become a mess. MathJax directly renders within Anki, and so it plays nicer with Anki's font scaling and other formatting.

CrowdAnki

CrowdAnki is an add-on for Anki that allows for easy integration with GitHub. The add-on allows for the following workflow, as described by the developer:

The current workflow could be described as following:

The user creates or imports an Anki deck.

He makes some modification to it (i.e. to notes, deck settings, deck structure or note models).

Then the user can export the deck in JSON format (accompanied by media directory with media files used in that deck) and share it with other users. For example by creating GitHub repository with it.

Other people then can either modify JSON directly or import the deck to their instance of Anki and then make some modifications to it.

Original JSON then can be updated the with the changes, these people made (merging several changes together if necessary).

After that original user (and other people) can import updated deck to integrate these new changes into their collection.

GitHub is a fantastic tool to collaborate on large-scale documents, which is very useful for this purpose. It allows for people to contribute separately to documents and merge changes in a smart manner. The integration of version control with Anki is practically essential to this concept.

Final words

While I originally wrote this post with the broader goal of creating resources that the whole community could benefit from, this also serves as a PSA for anyone self-studying a topic with a group. The next time you organize a reading group on /r/math, consider adding this option to your plan. Having something more tangible to contribute to makes it easier for a group to stay on track.

There is nuance to the details of implementing these cards. For example, I have only used it thus far to keep track of theorems and definitions. However, it may be worth breaking a proof into pieces and studying the proofs as well. Some people include exercises in their decks. I currently use Cloze cards, but perhaps a different format is better. If this is implemented, a standard on formatting to some degree must be agreed upon-- I am still not sure what is really the most effective, but if you use this with your group, or if you want to use this in our community, it is worth giving the topic some thought.

If all else fails-- I am still running this with my classes, as I mentioned above! If you're working through Axler's Linear Algebra or Munkres' Topology, feel free to PM me if you are interested in trying it out (my other courses use lecture notes, and this is still experimental, so I won't do this whole process with Measure Theory and Real Analysis just yet).

Happy Mathing!

submitted by /u/BlizzardEternal [link] [comments] from math https://ift.tt/36sKmEL from Blogger https://ift.tt/2C6zUot

[briefprincecollectorposts-blog]

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[pricelessmomentblog]

New Project: Level Up Korean with Five Hours Per Week

One of the most important variables in any learning project is simply how much time you devote. Devoting fifty hours per week is going to have much faster progress than fifty minutes each week. This should be obvious.

However, when evaluating the success of others, this factor of hourly time investment is often ignored. People asking how long you’ve been learning a language always ask it in terms of months or years, never hours.

Most baffling to me was some of the responses I got from the MIT Challenge. I put in 50+ hours a week for nearly a year straight to get through it. Yet, I occasionally get emails from people asking whether it would be possible to do the challenge on time while also juggling a full-time job.

Due to this bias of months over hours, I often pick projects with intense full-time schedules. They are more compelling because most people focus on the total duration of the project, and not the number of hours.

I want to try to undo some of that bias by trying a different kind of project, one that is decidedly part-time. I want to improve my Korean language abilities with only committing five hours per week (one hour per weekday).

Why Korean?

Korea was the last of the four stops on Vat and my language learning trip. Korean is a difficult language, we had very minimal preparation, and the weight of having to repeat an immersive language learning process four times in a row burned us out. This combination of factors meant my Korean wasn’t at the level I had gotten to with Chinese, Spanish or Portuguese.

I would say, when I left Korea, that my ability was somewhere in a low-intermediate. I could have basic conversations. I could also have more difficult conversations, provided the vocabulary gaps could be filled with a dictionary or someone who otherwise knew English.

Coming off of the trip, I felt like my Korean was the most frustrating to maintain. While the other languages tended to get maintained in real-use situations—encountering people who spoke those languages—I rarely use my Korean, even when the opportunity comes up.

As such, my only current practice comes from a twice monthly maintenance lesson I have with a tutor on Skype. Given the initial investment in learning, and the ongoing investment in maintenance, I felt that it was time I either decided to get up to a comfortable usage level of Korean or drop it in favor of focusing on other things.

In the end, I decided I’d rather improve my Korean a bit to a level where I can comfortably use it, than to just let it decline. However, my schedule at the moment doesn’t permit a big full-time ultralearning project. So, I decided to use this opportunity to look at the kind of progress I can make with far fewer hours invested.

Ultralearning in Five Hours Per Week?

Ultralearning is a term I use to describe intense self-education projects. This puts it in contrast with the majority of self-education projects which tend to carefully pick activities to maximize enjoyment and avoid frustrating difficulty.

Learning a project full-time or nearly full-time is one type of intensity. However, there are good reasons to believe it might not be the best kind. Doing lots of learning in one large chunk has diminishing returns. Therefore, this kind of intensity may allow you to pick up skills quickly, but you actually lose efficiency over more minimal projects.

A different type of intensity, however, is the intensity you apply within each hour of your learning. Consider two different language learning tasks:

Grinding through an exercise at the edge of your ability. You need 100% of your concentration and you still don’t get it all the time.

Passively flipping through flashcards while you commute.

The former is certainly more intense than the latter.

I hesitate to say that the former is necessarily more effective than the latter. Good learning projects often use a mix of learning activities that themselves vary in their demands on concentration.

However, because the dominant mode of self-education is a heavy bias towards less-intense methods, the former activities are often completely omitted, even when they are necessary to make a key improvement. The research on deliberate practice shows that this amateur bias towards fun, is prevalent in almost domains of learning.

The ultralearning philosophy is to flip that on its head. Define a schedule for learning. Set clear directions and motivations. Push yourself to engage in intense activities that will drive improvement.

No, this approach isn’t for everyone. But, I believe the results are usually worth it. There is also something distinctly satisfying about doing something in a hard way, that doesn’t try to dodge the core activity of learning.

My Plan for Learning Korean

My plan for Korean is to commit five hours, but not restrict myself to five hours. That may seem like an odd distinction, but I think it’s a very useful one (particularly for language learning projects).

My five-hour commitment means I’m setting aside five hours per week to do the kind of intense, deliberate practice and active learning that will best create improvement. Those hours are going in my schedule, my daily to-do list and I’ll be doing my best not to miss any of them.

This commitment, however, doesn’t mean I will prevent myself from engaging in the language at all outside of these bounds. If I want to watch a television show in Korean, go to a Korean restaurant and speak to the waiter or casually do some flashcards on my phone, I won’t hold myself back.

The key is that, outside my committed hours, I’ll neither push myself nor avoid using Korean. If I’m sick of learning Korean for the day, there’s no pressure to do more. But if I have an opportunity to engage and I’m genuinely interested, I won’t stop myself.

This way of thinking about ultralearning a language, in my experience, works well because the core hours are often helpful for making genuine improvements, but once you start engaging in the language, opportunities start coming up to learn it in a more spontaneous way.

As of this moment, my current learning plan is as follows:

1. Two, one-hour tutoring sessions, via iTalki.com.

Because I’m already at a low-intermediate level, my goal here is to avoid complacency. Only speak in Korean. Use a variety of different tutors so that I don’t get into a communicative rhythm with one that won’t extend to new situations.

2. One hour of grammar practice.

I believe I made the mistake, in Korea, of learning the grammar through flashcards instead of an actual grammar textbook. My starting resource is to use HowToStudyKorean.com.

3. One hour of listening practice.

Intensive listening practice was very useful in Chinese, but while in Korea, I didn’t have particularly good resources for it. Since that time, new resources have come up that I’m eager to try out and see if I can fix that mistake. My starting resource is going to be FluentU, but there’s a lot of different resources here so I will probably experiment in the first few weeks.

4. One hour reading/writing practice.

My goal is still conversational with Korean, so adding reading/writing might seem odd. However, I found that learning to read/write in Chinese opened a lot of doors in my conversational ability. While it might be wise to ignore in the early stages, I think avoiding reading will probably hold back moving to an upper-intermediate stage and beyond.

In addition to these committed hours of practice, I’ll also be monitoring my usage with some other possible, casual learning activities. These include:

1. Anki cards.

For some people, Anki is a grind and would definitely require committed focus. Personally, I find it very easy to fill spare moments with Anki, and that’s why I got through over 16,000 cards in Chinese (probably too many, to be honest). I’d like to make a deck I can do the same with Korean, but I won’t push myself if it feels onerous.

2. Korean television or movies.

Not sure about this one. I know Korean dramas and K-Pop are a big reason many Westerners become interested in Korean culture, but I’m not a huge fan of soap operas or bubblegum pop. That said, I love moves like Oldboy and The Wailing. Although I’m still at a level where watching without subtitles isn’t enjoyable enough to sustain without effort, so I’m not sure how much benefit will come from watching with English subtitles.

3. Socializing in Korean.

Here I’m lucky. I live in downtown Vancouver, Canada, right next to a large community of Korean speakers. Many Korean students come here to learn English, so my section of town is full of Korean restaurants and bars. In theory, it shouldn’t be too hard to practice if I feel up for it.

What I Want to Achieve

Honestly, I don’t expect to accomplish anything impressive with this project. That might sound defeatist, but simply because, having done a lot of public projects, I know a lot of the biases that go into what other people think is impressive.

The monthly-over-hourly bias means people tend to view projects done over a very short time as more impressive than a similar project which took the same number of hours over a longer period of time.

Another bias is that people see projects which start from scratch as more impressive than those which start from an intermediate level. In part, this is because zero is an easy benchmark to imagine progress from. The other reason is that outsiders are bad at evaluating skill level, and so often can’t perceive even large differences in intermediate skill level.

However, while these biases mean that my project probably isn’t going to be as compelling as some of my other ultralearning projects, I think there’s a good chance I can still make some important personal gains in my Korean to justify the commitment.

My long-term hope is to reach an upper-intermediate level of Korean. I recently traveled to China and did some public speaking in Chinese. While I’m far from that goal now in Korean, that’s something I’d eventually like to reach.

My more immediate goal is to be able to spontaneously participate in Korean, the way I feel I can comfortably do in the other languages I’ve learned. This means I should be able to have a conversation with Korean people without anyone feeling they need to switch back to English to accommodate me.

It’s not clear how long this will take. I may be closer than I realize and can accomplish the goal in a couple months. It may be further and require closer to a year. I don’t really know.

For now, my goal is to commit month-to-month. Meaning I’m going to commit for one month and renew my commitment each month as I feel necessary. I’ll try to provide semi-regular progress updates to show how the project is getting on.

Interested in Leveling Up With Me?

I realize that many people find themselves in a similar situation. They’ve been learning a language for some time, but don’t feel it’s quite where they want it to be. However, they don’t have the opportunity to travel or otherwise commit full-time to improving it.

If anyone else is interested in doing something similar to “level-up” their language ability, why not share your plan in the comments?

New Project: Level Up Korean with Five Hours Per Week syndicated from http://ift.tt/2kl7pJj