Tuesday, December 18, 2007
What do you get when you review a word with flashcards or a spaced repetition system?
When you can go through a list and give all the correct answers, what have you accomplished? Do you know the words or are you simply adept at reciting answers?
What does it mean to “know” a word? At [...]
Saturday, December 8, 2007
How do you take something that’s fun to learn and make it soul crushingly boring? Make flashcards.
I’ve made flashcards by hand with my hideous handwriting (the technical term is “chicken scratch”). I’ve bought thousands of Kanji flashcards. Good cardstock, cheap cardstock. Curved corners and decks of paper cuts waiting to happen. [...]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
I’ve never been a fan of tests or reviews for the simple reason that they are rarely used to move you forward.
Did poorly on a test because you had difficulty understanding the material? That’s nice, the class will be moving on now.
Reviews, Tests, Quizzes and the like are typically used to determine what you [...]
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Keep it simple. It’s amazing to me how many people learning Japanese do everything within their power to not read anything in Japanese. As though there is this magical point when they have memorized enough Kanji, drilled enough vocab, and crammed enough grammar, reading fluently will spontaneously occur.
Now, to be fair, reading Japanese [...]
