In my opinion, the biggest challenge for learning Japanese is not whether you have the best teachers, techniques, methodologies or other nonsense. It is your interest. Real “discipline” come from interest, not will power. Real dedication comes through interest, not self-flagellation to maintain focus.
And so the question that I ask whenever I see someone struggling to [...]
We all have a tendency to think like this. We find something and call it “good” and with that, we imply that it’s always good.
But we know that isn’t true. Exercise is good, too much exercise causes injury. Food is good, too much food will damage your health. Water is good, but too much Dihydrogen [...]
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A quote from a discussion over at Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum:
What can I do to review Japanese at this advanced level? Reviewing grammar is painfully boring now — heck even have most of the guide and the grammar books that I read memorized –, and the only other option for any real [...]
For those who don’t know, an SRS is a Spaced Repetition System. It creates longer and longer intervals between reviews when you get the answer correct. The idea is to review just before you forget, to encourage long-term memory retention.
And in this technical statement from supermemo’s Theoretical aspects of spaced repetition in learning, [...]
Burnout is the greatest enemy of learning any language. It takes a goal like fluency that motivates you, that drives you, and turns it into something you hate.
I think most of us have had that moment when we’ve worn ourselves down trying to memorize as much as we can in as little time as [...]
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tae Kim has a great final post up on the “Remembering the Kanji” books. The best part isn’t when he discusses the merits of RTK but when he describes the process he went through in learning Kanji.
I may have mentioned this before but I never studied kanji; I studied the words that are made [...]
Thursday, January 3, 2008
How do you study? Simple. You are given the answers to a set of questions and you review those questions until you know the answers. The key is that you are given the answers.
And that’s the problem. True learning doesn’t come from being given the answers, it comes from discovering solutions, [...]
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. [...]
