Today is day 16 of the 30-day French Revolution. This is my quest to teach myself as much French as I possibly can, in an hour or two a day for 30 days. I'm learning so much, not just about French, but about languages in general, self-teaching in general, self-discipline in general, and all sorts of other things on the side.
REALITY EXPANSION IS ADDICTIVE
I wrote in a previous day about how this French challenge has been forcing me to do a lot of Reality Expansion: becoming aware of lots of things I never knew existed. Things which were "never in my reality" before. As they enter my awareness, they enter my reality, and my reality expands. A 30-day challenge is a great way to expand your reality in general, because the time constraint will really force you to become aware of a lot of new things quickly. (EDIT: Check out my new article on Reality Expansion, where I go into this phenomenon in much greater detail.)
Reality expansion is so addictive, today at the gym I just felt compelled to try out some machines I never tried before. I tried two new machines (overhead press machine and biceps curl machine). I also looked at a lot of other new machines and realized how little I know about weight lifting and how much more I want to know.
A lot of people go through an average week or even month without really expanding their realities at all. Some peoples' realities are completely compressed to fit inside a particular job or field of study. That's not how we're meant to live, our realities are meant to be sprawling mansions, castles, cathedrals.
MY DREAM LAST NIGHT
Last night in my dream I met up with my old best friend from junior high. In the dream, he offered me a drug which would raise my productivity. It looked like a little yellow cough drop. The drug had the effect that it would make you work at max productivity and not need sleep, with the effects lasting on the scale of days. So if I took it, I could start getting things done with a furious pace. For example, if I worked on the blog, my fingers would be a blur, publishing new articles so fast that the main limit would be how fast I could type. If I went to lift weights, I'd just be slamming through the weights like The Hulk.
Of course, no such drugs exist (although the dream did make me think of Paul Erdos, a famous and prolific Hungarian mathematician who spent his entire career tweaked out on meth). I think the dream was a reflection of my thirst to fashion lots more value and output. At any given time, I have a dozen or more articles flying around in my head, and yet it takes me so long to type them up. I'm only gonna live eighty more years or less, I've gotta get my rear in gear!!
TIMEBOXING
I might not have any little yellow cough drop of atomic performance increase, but I do have the next best thing, timeboxing. This is my third day of experimenting with this cutting edge time management technique I learned of from the Japanese self-study community. Basically, you constrain your study with short arbitrary time limits, like 10 minutes to study flashcards. Somehow, it makes you much more efficient, like a psychological kick in the pants or something.
5:13 PM
I worked for 10 minutes on sentence flashcards. (By the way, I wrote an epic article about the whole Sentence Mining process!) Initially, there were 379 cards scheduled (228 old, 151 new). At the end of the 10 minutes, there were 316 cards scheduled (29 failed, 183 old, 104 new). That's around 6.3 passed cards per minute. Next run, I'll give myself 5 minutes and see how that changes the speed. Incidentally, this run I initially had music on. When the song ended, I was about to put another one on, but I decided to go silent. That probably raised my efficiency (see my article, Reviewing Flashcards Without Music). I'll do the next 5 minute run without music as well. Anki is computing an ETA right now of 37.9 minutes.
6:18 PM
I did another 5 minutes of sentence card reviewing. This time, I started with 322 cards (in other words, 6 new cards came up for review between this and the previous run). When the dust settled, there were 282 cards left. So I passed 40 cards in the 5 minutes, or 8 cards per minute. But, that's partly because the failed cards from the prior run all came up in a row, and it's usually pretty easy to comprehend a sentence that I've already reviewed once today. The ETA is currently 32.3 minutes, which is close to 5 minutes shorter than the ETA at the end of the first run, so Anki's calculations are good. Next run, I'll try 15 minutes.
7:00 PM
I did a 15 minute timebox. There are now 167 cards left to review, meaning in 15 minutes I passed around 115 cards, or 7.7 cards per minute. A lot of these cards, I am contemplating in French, and then not even bothering to think about the English translation. It takes too much time to verbalize an English translation in my head. And there's no reason to anyway, since native French speakers do not do that when they read French.
7:40 PM
After the previous run, I finished an article I've been working on: Six Reasons to Study a Language Together. I'm trying to integrate the disparate themes of Glowing Face Man, and this latest article intertwines language and relationships, two of the things I write about here. The article was basically inspired by how my own girlfriend and I share the two languages of English and Japanese. Anyway, at 7:40 I did another 15 minute run of sentence card reviews, bringing the total left to review down to 79 and Anki's ETA down to 9.3 minutes. One more 10-minute run should finish this deck... today this deck has been a real beast. Obviously because yesterday I mined a ton of new sentences very quickly, without even giving them much attention as I mined them. I guess that's not such a good idea.
8:33 PM
It took about 11 minutes to finish off the last of those cards. All in all, I spent 56 minutes reviewing these sentence flashcards. That's about 6.8 flashcards per minute, if we go by the 379 cards originally scheduled during my first run; actually a little more efficient, since Anki kept adding cards between runs. It seems like a lot of time, but today I had 379 sentence cards to review, which is quite a lot!
8:47 PM
I gave myself 10 minutes to do the 48 scheduled audio pronunciation cards, but only ended up needing 6 minutes. I should really mine some more of these. But I don't feel like it tonight ;) Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I'm not gonna do any mining. That's the beauty of being self-taught, you get to play by your own rules.
REMARKS ABOUT TIMEBOXING
After today, I think timeboxing is more appropriate for tasks which don't involve a lot of thinking. While timeboxing really makes me motivated to plow through reviews or sentence mining, I'm finding I'm doing less good of a job at it. To cut down time in reviews, I wasn't spending enough time considering how to rate cards: when I passed a card, there was a pretty high chance it would get passed with whichever passing button the mouse pointer was currently over :P The ratings are important, it doesn't matter so much what strategy you use to assign them, but you shouldn't just assign them without thinking, or it ruins the whole benefit of using an SRS program.
I don't think I'll keep using timeboxing for French studies. It definitely seems to cut the time down, but at a high price. It also feels a little more stressful. It doesn't mesh well with Anki's realtime spacing of reviews. And, rather than just get the study over with, it feels like I have these studies constantly interrupting other stuff throughout many hours of the day.
I'll experiment with timeboxing on other projects, maybe if I have some projects which are more tedious (like, next quarter when I'm grading students' math quizzes).
UPDATING ANKI
I'm updating to the latest version of Anki, 0.9.9.4. This is neat: with Anki's auto-updater, you can apparently continue studying while it's downloading the update! Impressive!
This update is supposed to adjust how the sound support is handled. You'll remember from earlier days, I was having trouble with Anki freezing when I tried to add mp3's from Tex's French Grammar. Well, it looks like that's fixed! Hurrah! Talk about fast updates, most commercial software doesn't update this fast, and Anki is free. If you haven't checked it out already, check Anki out here.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 15
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 17
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
The Evolution Of Handwriting
30-Day Workout-A-Day Challenge Complete!
The Solution To The Money Game
Activism Goes Away After Graduation
Introduction To Toastmasters
REALITY EXPANSION IS ADDICTIVE
I wrote in a previous day about how this French challenge has been forcing me to do a lot of Reality Expansion: becoming aware of lots of things I never knew existed. Things which were "never in my reality" before. As they enter my awareness, they enter my reality, and my reality expands. A 30-day challenge is a great way to expand your reality in general, because the time constraint will really force you to become aware of a lot of new things quickly. (EDIT: Check out my new article on Reality Expansion, where I go into this phenomenon in much greater detail.)
Reality expansion is so addictive, today at the gym I just felt compelled to try out some machines I never tried before. I tried two new machines (overhead press machine and biceps curl machine). I also looked at a lot of other new machines and realized how little I know about weight lifting and how much more I want to know.
A lot of people go through an average week or even month without really expanding their realities at all. Some peoples' realities are completely compressed to fit inside a particular job or field of study. That's not how we're meant to live, our realities are meant to be sprawling mansions, castles, cathedrals.
MY DREAM LAST NIGHT
Last night in my dream I met up with my old best friend from junior high. In the dream, he offered me a drug which would raise my productivity. It looked like a little yellow cough drop. The drug had the effect that it would make you work at max productivity and not need sleep, with the effects lasting on the scale of days. So if I took it, I could start getting things done with a furious pace. For example, if I worked on the blog, my fingers would be a blur, publishing new articles so fast that the main limit would be how fast I could type. If I went to lift weights, I'd just be slamming through the weights like The Hulk.
Of course, no such drugs exist (although the dream did make me think of Paul Erdos, a famous and prolific Hungarian mathematician who spent his entire career tweaked out on meth). I think the dream was a reflection of my thirst to fashion lots more value and output. At any given time, I have a dozen or more articles flying around in my head, and yet it takes me so long to type them up. I'm only gonna live eighty more years or less, I've gotta get my rear in gear!!
TIMEBOXING
I might not have any little yellow cough drop of atomic performance increase, but I do have the next best thing, timeboxing. This is my third day of experimenting with this cutting edge time management technique I learned of from the Japanese self-study community. Basically, you constrain your study with short arbitrary time limits, like 10 minutes to study flashcards. Somehow, it makes you much more efficient, like a psychological kick in the pants or something.
5:13 PM
I worked for 10 minutes on sentence flashcards. (By the way, I wrote an epic article about the whole Sentence Mining process!) Initially, there were 379 cards scheduled (228 old, 151 new). At the end of the 10 minutes, there were 316 cards scheduled (29 failed, 183 old, 104 new). That's around 6.3 passed cards per minute. Next run, I'll give myself 5 minutes and see how that changes the speed. Incidentally, this run I initially had music on. When the song ended, I was about to put another one on, but I decided to go silent. That probably raised my efficiency (see my article, Reviewing Flashcards Without Music). I'll do the next 5 minute run without music as well. Anki is computing an ETA right now of 37.9 minutes.
6:18 PM
I did another 5 minutes of sentence card reviewing. This time, I started with 322 cards (in other words, 6 new cards came up for review between this and the previous run). When the dust settled, there were 282 cards left. So I passed 40 cards in the 5 minutes, or 8 cards per minute. But, that's partly because the failed cards from the prior run all came up in a row, and it's usually pretty easy to comprehend a sentence that I've already reviewed once today. The ETA is currently 32.3 minutes, which is close to 5 minutes shorter than the ETA at the end of the first run, so Anki's calculations are good. Next run, I'll try 15 minutes.
7:00 PM
I did a 15 minute timebox. There are now 167 cards left to review, meaning in 15 minutes I passed around 115 cards, or 7.7 cards per minute. A lot of these cards, I am contemplating in French, and then not even bothering to think about the English translation. It takes too much time to verbalize an English translation in my head. And there's no reason to anyway, since native French speakers do not do that when they read French.
7:40 PM
After the previous run, I finished an article I've been working on: Six Reasons to Study a Language Together. I'm trying to integrate the disparate themes of Glowing Face Man, and this latest article intertwines language and relationships, two of the things I write about here. The article was basically inspired by how my own girlfriend and I share the two languages of English and Japanese. Anyway, at 7:40 I did another 15 minute run of sentence card reviews, bringing the total left to review down to 79 and Anki's ETA down to 9.3 minutes. One more 10-minute run should finish this deck... today this deck has been a real beast. Obviously because yesterday I mined a ton of new sentences very quickly, without even giving them much attention as I mined them. I guess that's not such a good idea.
8:33 PM
It took about 11 minutes to finish off the last of those cards. All in all, I spent 56 minutes reviewing these sentence flashcards. That's about 6.8 flashcards per minute, if we go by the 379 cards originally scheduled during my first run; actually a little more efficient, since Anki kept adding cards between runs. It seems like a lot of time, but today I had 379 sentence cards to review, which is quite a lot!
8:47 PM
I gave myself 10 minutes to do the 48 scheduled audio pronunciation cards, but only ended up needing 6 minutes. I should really mine some more of these. But I don't feel like it tonight ;) Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I'm not gonna do any mining. That's the beauty of being self-taught, you get to play by your own rules.
REMARKS ABOUT TIMEBOXING
After today, I think timeboxing is more appropriate for tasks which don't involve a lot of thinking. While timeboxing really makes me motivated to plow through reviews or sentence mining, I'm finding I'm doing less good of a job at it. To cut down time in reviews, I wasn't spending enough time considering how to rate cards: when I passed a card, there was a pretty high chance it would get passed with whichever passing button the mouse pointer was currently over :P The ratings are important, it doesn't matter so much what strategy you use to assign them, but you shouldn't just assign them without thinking, or it ruins the whole benefit of using an SRS program.
I don't think I'll keep using timeboxing for French studies. It definitely seems to cut the time down, but at a high price. It also feels a little more stressful. It doesn't mesh well with Anki's realtime spacing of reviews. And, rather than just get the study over with, it feels like I have these studies constantly interrupting other stuff throughout many hours of the day.
I'll experiment with timeboxing on other projects, maybe if I have some projects which are more tedious (like, next quarter when I'm grading students' math quizzes).
UPDATING ANKI
I'm updating to the latest version of Anki, 0.9.9.4. This is neat: with Anki's auto-updater, you can apparently continue studying while it's downloading the update! Impressive!
This update is supposed to adjust how the sound support is handled. You'll remember from earlier days, I was having trouble with Anki freezing when I tried to add mp3's from Tex's French Grammar. Well, it looks like that's fixed! Hurrah! Talk about fast updates, most commercial software doesn't update this fast, and Anki is free. If you haven't checked it out already, check Anki out here.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 15
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 17
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
The Evolution Of Handwriting
30-Day Workout-A-Day Challenge Complete!
The Solution To The Money Game
Activism Goes Away After Graduation
Introduction To Toastmasters
Posts
3 comments:
I've a quick question a little off topic but i noticed a few times you have mentioned that you have e.g. 100+ new cards to review aswell as normal cards to renew.
In anki its set to only show 20 new cards each day is it recommended to change this to a higher number?
Also i'm enjoying the revolution series as its giving me some great insights into language learning in general.
Definitely set it higher. The only time I can think of that you'd want any limit at all, would be if you were importing cards from another file and didn't want them all to be added in one giant flood. If you're manually making cards, and you only want 20 new cards, then... only make 20 new cards. Seems pretty simple :)
Yeah it does seem a bit common sense when you think about it lol or whats the point in adding so many sentences like i did the other day.
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