As you know, today, December 25th, is a most holy and sacred day. Yes, this day is a celebration of the halfway point, day 15, of the French Revolution, one man's noble crusade to teach himself as much French as humanly possible in an hour or two a day for 30 days.
TIMEBOXING
I'm experimenting right now with the idea of timeboxing, imposing arbitrary constraints on study time in order to psychologically trick myself into being more efficient. Of course, a 30-day challenge like this is a kind of macro-scale timeboxing already; but right now I'm experimenting with a more micro-scale timeboxing. It worked pretty well yesterday, let's put it to the test again today.
4:18 PM
I reviewed sentence cards in Anki for 10 minutes. Anki is a free flashcard program where you rate your flashcards after reviewing them and then the program uses your ratings to optimize which cards to show you when. At the start of the 10 minutes, I had 214 cards to review (109 old, 105 new). At the end, I'm left with 128 cards (21 failed, 57 old, 50 new). I forgot to note Anki's ETA at the beginning of the 10 minutes; at the end, the ETA is now 13.1 minutes. Will I be able to do it within one more 10 minute session?? Oh the suspense :)
By the way, I kept meaning to mention this since it first began a few days ago, but some of my cards are now being spaced beyond day 30 of the Revolution, that is, the next time they're scheduled to show up will be after the challenge is finished. Of course, I'll continue doing reviews then, since one of the best things about the SRS is not actually learning the language, but maintaining it.
5:36 PM
Another 10 minutes, and I'm down to 73 cards (20 failed, 38 old, 15 new). That's not so hot for 10 minutes. I didn't count the cards at the start of the 10 minutes. Is it possible a bunch of new cards came due during the interval between the runs? This would be possible, because Anki calculates the interval between cards in realtime, not in days. This points toward a big possible drawback to timeboxing Anki. It could well be, that spacing cards out more, actually increases the number of cards to review. I'll wait another hour or so and see how many cards are up for review.
One other thing I'm noticing is that when I come back after an hour away, the program will go through the entire failed pile before putting back up any cards from the old pile or new pile. I wonder what's up with this.
6:30 PM
I went over the 10 minutes, spending about 11 minutes to finish off all the sentence cards. There were 77 of them, confirming that Anki had indeed put more in between runs.
On the one hand, I like how Anki spaces cards in a more realtime way, instead of just day-to-day. On the other hand, on any particular day, the fastest way (at least, the way with least cards) to review a deck would be to review it all at the earliest possible time in one sitting. I guess it's appropriate that the program behaves like this: the act of forgetting things, after all, isn't chunked into one big mass-forgetting once a day. Still, it seems like it would be logistically better to schedule cards by the day, like Mnemosyne. So that when I open Anki at noon, and see I have X cards to review, I'll know that I have X cards to review throughout the day no matter when I review them. The way it is now, X actually increases gradually until I go through all the cards!
7:38 PM
I gave myself 10 minutes. Anki's initial ETA was about 23 minutes. Actual time to clear the audio pronunciation deck: 4 minutes! I was really on fire, somehow my pronunciation was really on spot today.
9:46 PM
I timeboxed myself 30 minutes to mine sentences. I actually only ended up using 28 of them, because that left me at a pretty good stopping point. I mined the rest of the pronoun chapter in Tex's French Grammar, and the introduction to the conjunctions chapter.
I've stopped reading the grammar explanations at all. Noone ever reads grammar explanations to a baby. What's more, I find most of the new grammar "tricks" introduced in a chapter, will have already showed up in sentences from earlier chapters, so I've already had some exposure to them.
I wish Windows XP had an option to have two separate buffers for copying-and-pasting. Then I wouldn't have to switch windows as often, first copying the French sentence, then the English sentence. I wonder whether there's a Firefox application or something that would help.
I mined a total of 151 sentences. That's around 5.4 sentences per minute (5 sentences per minute if you count all 30 minutes).
By the way, I just wrote an entire article about Sentence Mining. The most elite, cutting edge technology in language learning. Sentence Mining. If only babies knew how to Sentence Mine, they'd be speaking by age 1.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 14
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 16
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote:
Studying Foreign Language Proper Nouns
Using Words Effectively
My Time In The Seduction Community
Models Of Reality
Short Story: The Juggling Balls Of Destiny
TIMEBOXING
I'm experimenting right now with the idea of timeboxing, imposing arbitrary constraints on study time in order to psychologically trick myself into being more efficient. Of course, a 30-day challenge like this is a kind of macro-scale timeboxing already; but right now I'm experimenting with a more micro-scale timeboxing. It worked pretty well yesterday, let's put it to the test again today.
4:18 PM
I reviewed sentence cards in Anki for 10 minutes. Anki is a free flashcard program where you rate your flashcards after reviewing them and then the program uses your ratings to optimize which cards to show you when. At the start of the 10 minutes, I had 214 cards to review (109 old, 105 new). At the end, I'm left with 128 cards (21 failed, 57 old, 50 new). I forgot to note Anki's ETA at the beginning of the 10 minutes; at the end, the ETA is now 13.1 minutes. Will I be able to do it within one more 10 minute session?? Oh the suspense :)
By the way, I kept meaning to mention this since it first began a few days ago, but some of my cards are now being spaced beyond day 30 of the Revolution, that is, the next time they're scheduled to show up will be after the challenge is finished. Of course, I'll continue doing reviews then, since one of the best things about the SRS is not actually learning the language, but maintaining it.
5:36 PM
Another 10 minutes, and I'm down to 73 cards (20 failed, 38 old, 15 new). That's not so hot for 10 minutes. I didn't count the cards at the start of the 10 minutes. Is it possible a bunch of new cards came due during the interval between the runs? This would be possible, because Anki calculates the interval between cards in realtime, not in days. This points toward a big possible drawback to timeboxing Anki. It could well be, that spacing cards out more, actually increases the number of cards to review. I'll wait another hour or so and see how many cards are up for review.
One other thing I'm noticing is that when I come back after an hour away, the program will go through the entire failed pile before putting back up any cards from the old pile or new pile. I wonder what's up with this.
6:30 PM
I went over the 10 minutes, spending about 11 minutes to finish off all the sentence cards. There were 77 of them, confirming that Anki had indeed put more in between runs.
On the one hand, I like how Anki spaces cards in a more realtime way, instead of just day-to-day. On the other hand, on any particular day, the fastest way (at least, the way with least cards) to review a deck would be to review it all at the earliest possible time in one sitting. I guess it's appropriate that the program behaves like this: the act of forgetting things, after all, isn't chunked into one big mass-forgetting once a day. Still, it seems like it would be logistically better to schedule cards by the day, like Mnemosyne. So that when I open Anki at noon, and see I have X cards to review, I'll know that I have X cards to review throughout the day no matter when I review them. The way it is now, X actually increases gradually until I go through all the cards!
7:38 PM
I gave myself 10 minutes. Anki's initial ETA was about 23 minutes. Actual time to clear the audio pronunciation deck: 4 minutes! I was really on fire, somehow my pronunciation was really on spot today.
9:46 PM
I timeboxed myself 30 minutes to mine sentences. I actually only ended up using 28 of them, because that left me at a pretty good stopping point. I mined the rest of the pronoun chapter in Tex's French Grammar, and the introduction to the conjunctions chapter.
I've stopped reading the grammar explanations at all. Noone ever reads grammar explanations to a baby. What's more, I find most of the new grammar "tricks" introduced in a chapter, will have already showed up in sentences from earlier chapters, so I've already had some exposure to them.
I wish Windows XP had an option to have two separate buffers for copying-and-pasting. Then I wouldn't have to switch windows as often, first copying the French sentence, then the English sentence. I wonder whether there's a Firefox application or something that would help.
I mined a total of 151 sentences. That's around 5.4 sentences per minute (5 sentences per minute if you count all 30 minutes).
By the way, I just wrote an entire article about Sentence Mining. The most elite, cutting edge technology in language learning. Sentence Mining. If only babies knew how to Sentence Mine, they'd be speaking by age 1.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 14
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 16
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote:
Studying Foreign Language Proper Nouns
Using Words Effectively
My Time In The Seduction Community
Models Of Reality
Short Story: The Juggling Balls Of Destiny
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