Welcome to Day 14, the two-week mark, in The French Revolution, which is my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in a few hours a day for 30 days. I'm writing about the whole quest, so everyone can profit from my endeavors. It's not that I even care about French all that much, but rather I care about Earthian, the collective language of Earth.
Today's study will have a timeboxing theme.
What Is Timeboxing?
Timeboxing is a concept that people have been talking about in the Japanese self-teaching community a lot lately. Basically, you constrain your study with artificial time limits, like limiting your flashcard review to 10 minutes. Of course, you can do multiple 10 minute slots throughout the day if you don't finish in the first 10 minutes. But the idea is that it somehow psychologically makes you more efficient. Somehow the task seems smaller and easier when it's broken into littler chunks. It's like my 6th grade math teacher used to say: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." I'm gonna try it out!
1:44 PM
I did 5 minutes worth of sentence flashcard reviews. Sentence cards are cards where the question side is a French sentence and the answer side is the English translation. The goal isn't to memorize the English translation, but just to comprehend the French. The English is only there to check my comprehension. I've written about this elite, cutting-edge, super-optimized study technique in my article, Sentence Mining. I'm using Anki to manage and optimize my flashcards.
There were 81 sentence cards scheduled for review. (Why so few? Because the last two days, I totally neglected to mine new sentences! I'm such a bad boy.) At the outset, based on my prior performance through the last 13 days, Anki is predicting it'll take me ETA=17.3 minutes to clear these cards. Let's see whether timeboxing cuts that down at all.
I reviewed for exactly 5 minutes. When the dust settled, I was down to 21 cards left, including 3 in the failed stack. The ETA on Anki is now down to 4.0 minutes. So I guess according to Anki, 4+5=17.3. Either that, or Timeboxing works :)
I'm actually pretty amazed at how much difference that made. It's almost spooky.
3:21 PM
I went back and finished the rest of the sentences deck. I gave myself 5 minutes to do this, just like the previous timebox, but I only ended up needing 2!
4:18 PM
I made a 5 minute timebox to do the audio pronunciation cards, and finished them all with 5 seconds to spare. I forgot to note how many total there were or what the ETA was according to Anki, but it was certainly over 5 minutes.
4:38 PM
I spent exactly 10 minutes mining sentences from Tex's French Grammar. I mined 50 sentences. Starting with the "c'est vs il/elle est" section of the pronouns chapter, and going up to the line, "Tammy: Tex m'aime." in the "direct object pronouns" section. This illustrates one drawback to timeboxing: ending right in the middle of a section. Indeed, right in the middle of a dialog.
6:06 PM
I mined some more cards from Tex's French Grammar, again for 10 minutes, this time mining 44 cards. The total is now 1118 sentence cards. I mined up through and including the "pronoun y" section of the pronouns chapter.
7:24 PM
I spent 10 minutes sentence-mining Chrono Trigger, getting 11 new cards from it. In the game, I'm in the middle ages, so the language might be a little archaic, but I don't know enough to tell.
But that's okay. When a French baby is learning French, the baby will hear some archaic language from time to time (assuming it's anything like English), and still learn French just fine.
REMARKS ON TIMEBOXING
Timeboxing seems to really work, at least so far. I'll try it some more before passing final judgment. Besides seeming to make me more efficient and get more bang for my minutes, it also makes it harder to procrastinate. It's easy to procrastinate from doing a huge chunk of study all in one sitting, but when it's just 10 minutes of studying, how can you say no? Heck, how often have I wasted 10 minutes watching some video on YouTube that I wasn't even really interested in? Or even just spacing out?
And timeboxing isn't just limited to language learning, but in principle could be used for any task. Hmm. Very interesting. This needs more experimenting!
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 13
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 15
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles.
Ergative Verbs
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
Self-Responsibility
Scientists And Leadership
How Fashion Works
Today's study will have a timeboxing theme.
What Is Timeboxing?
Timeboxing is a concept that people have been talking about in the Japanese self-teaching community a lot lately. Basically, you constrain your study with artificial time limits, like limiting your flashcard review to 10 minutes. Of course, you can do multiple 10 minute slots throughout the day if you don't finish in the first 10 minutes. But the idea is that it somehow psychologically makes you more efficient. Somehow the task seems smaller and easier when it's broken into littler chunks. It's like my 6th grade math teacher used to say: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." I'm gonna try it out!
1:44 PM
I did 5 minutes worth of sentence flashcard reviews. Sentence cards are cards where the question side is a French sentence and the answer side is the English translation. The goal isn't to memorize the English translation, but just to comprehend the French. The English is only there to check my comprehension. I've written about this elite, cutting-edge, super-optimized study technique in my article, Sentence Mining. I'm using Anki to manage and optimize my flashcards.
There were 81 sentence cards scheduled for review. (Why so few? Because the last two days, I totally neglected to mine new sentences! I'm such a bad boy.) At the outset, based on my prior performance through the last 13 days, Anki is predicting it'll take me ETA=17.3 minutes to clear these cards. Let's see whether timeboxing cuts that down at all.
I reviewed for exactly 5 minutes. When the dust settled, I was down to 21 cards left, including 3 in the failed stack. The ETA on Anki is now down to 4.0 minutes. So I guess according to Anki, 4+5=17.3. Either that, or Timeboxing works :)
I'm actually pretty amazed at how much difference that made. It's almost spooky.
3:21 PM
I went back and finished the rest of the sentences deck. I gave myself 5 minutes to do this, just like the previous timebox, but I only ended up needing 2!
4:18 PM
I made a 5 minute timebox to do the audio pronunciation cards, and finished them all with 5 seconds to spare. I forgot to note how many total there were or what the ETA was according to Anki, but it was certainly over 5 minutes.
4:38 PM
I spent exactly 10 minutes mining sentences from Tex's French Grammar. I mined 50 sentences. Starting with the "c'est vs il/elle est" section of the pronouns chapter, and going up to the line, "Tammy: Tex m'aime." in the "direct object pronouns" section. This illustrates one drawback to timeboxing: ending right in the middle of a section. Indeed, right in the middle of a dialog.
6:06 PM
I mined some more cards from Tex's French Grammar, again for 10 minutes, this time mining 44 cards. The total is now 1118 sentence cards. I mined up through and including the "pronoun y" section of the pronouns chapter.
7:24 PM
I spent 10 minutes sentence-mining Chrono Trigger, getting 11 new cards from it. In the game, I'm in the middle ages, so the language might be a little archaic, but I don't know enough to tell.
But that's okay. When a French baby is learning French, the baby will hear some archaic language from time to time (assuming it's anything like English), and still learn French just fine.
REMARKS ON TIMEBOXING
Timeboxing seems to really work, at least so far. I'll try it some more before passing final judgment. Besides seeming to make me more efficient and get more bang for my minutes, it also makes it harder to procrastinate. It's easy to procrastinate from doing a huge chunk of study all in one sitting, but when it's just 10 minutes of studying, how can you say no? Heck, how often have I wasted 10 minutes watching some video on YouTube that I wasn't even really interested in? Or even just spacing out?
And timeboxing isn't just limited to language learning, but in principle could be used for any task. Hmm. Very interesting. This needs more experimenting!
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 13
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 15
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles.
Ergative Verbs
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
Self-Responsibility
Scientists And Leadership
How Fashion Works
Posts
1 comments:
For timeboxing, do you use Anki's "Session limit (mins)" feature, or just a stopwatch method? Your series has been interesting; thanks for taking time to post it.
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