This is Day 23 of the French Revolution, my personal quest to teach myself as much of the French language as I can in an hour or two a day for 30 days. Long has the French language oppressed the people, but liberty shall prevail!
Today I'm going on almost no sleep. There's plenty of time to sleep in the grave :)
NEW ARTICLE ABOUT SPACED REPETITION SYSTEMS
Today I wrote a killer article about Spaced Repetition Systems. I've talked so much about spaced repetition on this blog, I figured it was high time I put out an article devoted specifically to these programs. No more shall flashcards go forgotten!
If I haven't at least started to convince you of the awesomeness of spaced repetition systems, you must have a grudge against remembering things. What, did you get beat up by memories as a child? I shed a little tear every time someone loses all their high school Spanish when it could have been easily kept alive with an SRS.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED SENTENCE CARDS
Speaking of Spaced Repetition Systems, it's time for me to open up Anki and load my sentence deck. I had 294 sentences scheduled: 218 old sentences and 76 new ones. It was a little discouraging when Anki immediately predicted an ETA of 5 hours, but that's just because I paused a long time before answering the first card, and Anki based the ETA calculation on a sample size of 1.
I was really feeling the fatigue of sleep deprivation while doing these reviews. So I did something we were taught in Air Force tech school. I pushed my chair back and stood up, reviewing sentences on my feet for awhile. Standing up while studying or attending a lecture is a great way to keep from falling asleep, it's too bad it isn't generally accepted in classrooms outside of military training!
Reviewing these cards in such a sleep deprived state was really torture. After I couldn't stand and review any more, I layed down to review, and of course that kept involving "resting my eyes" on my arms... I could easily have lost it and fallen asleep, if I didn't have so much self-discipline. Anyway, doing these reviews in this state is actually giving me some hard-won insights. Like, in the midst of the excruciating agony of going through all these cards, it dawned on me that there are certain turning points during a daily review session. One of those points is when you see the last new card (whether you pass it or fail it). After that, there'll be no more new sentences, so every sentence you can either try to parse grammatically, or try to remember from earlier in the review. In such a sleep-deprived state, that's very encouraging because it means no more turning a card over, staring at it for a minute straight and realizing your sleep-craving mind can't make the least sense of it.
Lying down on my stomach to do the reviews, I'm not able to use my mouse, and I'm suddenly painfully aware of Anki's poor (or at least un-obvious) keyboard support. Mnemosyne, by contrast, the ratings for the card are numbered, and you can just press the number key. Anki doesn't seem to have a keyboard shortcut for rating cards... (Correction! It was pointed out in the comments that you can use keyboard shortcuts. Just press 1-4, just like in Mnemosyne. Not sure why I didn't try that, since it's quite obvious. To make it up to the Anki project, here's a nice search-engine-optimizing link to a great spaced repetition system.)
In the end, it took a good two and a half hours to finish that sentence deck, but that includes taking lots of time out to "rest my eyes", and so on. Conclusion: performance really, really tanks when you're sleep deprived! Somehow, though, I'm glad I went through that, because it has given me some new insight into SRS'ing. Normally when I'm in this state I would just skip the SRS for the day, but the Soldiers of the Revolution cannot afford such luxuries!
I will, however, skip the audio pronunciation deck today since I've already spent more time on just the sentence deck than I normally spend on both. And with that, I'm gonna call it a night. This will be my second-to-last night sleeping alone, and then I'll be reunited with my wonderful girlfriend :)
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 22
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 24
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
How To Keep A New Year's Resolution
Ergative Verbs
Air Force Core Values
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Western Pimps vs. Asian Idols
Today I'm going on almost no sleep. There's plenty of time to sleep in the grave :)
NEW ARTICLE ABOUT SPACED REPETITION SYSTEMS
Today I wrote a killer article about Spaced Repetition Systems. I've talked so much about spaced repetition on this blog, I figured it was high time I put out an article devoted specifically to these programs. No more shall flashcards go forgotten!
If I haven't at least started to convince you of the awesomeness of spaced repetition systems, you must have a grudge against remembering things. What, did you get beat up by memories as a child? I shed a little tear every time someone loses all their high school Spanish when it could have been easily kept alive with an SRS.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED SENTENCE CARDS
Speaking of Spaced Repetition Systems, it's time for me to open up Anki and load my sentence deck. I had 294 sentences scheduled: 218 old sentences and 76 new ones. It was a little discouraging when Anki immediately predicted an ETA of 5 hours, but that's just because I paused a long time before answering the first card, and Anki based the ETA calculation on a sample size of 1.
I was really feeling the fatigue of sleep deprivation while doing these reviews. So I did something we were taught in Air Force tech school. I pushed my chair back and stood up, reviewing sentences on my feet for awhile. Standing up while studying or attending a lecture is a great way to keep from falling asleep, it's too bad it isn't generally accepted in classrooms outside of military training!
Reviewing these cards in such a sleep deprived state was really torture. After I couldn't stand and review any more, I layed down to review, and of course that kept involving "resting my eyes" on my arms... I could easily have lost it and fallen asleep, if I didn't have so much self-discipline. Anyway, doing these reviews in this state is actually giving me some hard-won insights. Like, in the midst of the excruciating agony of going through all these cards, it dawned on me that there are certain turning points during a daily review session. One of those points is when you see the last new card (whether you pass it or fail it). After that, there'll be no more new sentences, so every sentence you can either try to parse grammatically, or try to remember from earlier in the review. In such a sleep-deprived state, that's very encouraging because it means no more turning a card over, staring at it for a minute straight and realizing your sleep-craving mind can't make the least sense of it.
Lying down on my stomach to do the reviews, I'm not able to use my mouse, and I'm suddenly painfully aware of Anki's poor (or at least un-obvious) keyboard support. Mnemosyne, by contrast, the ratings for the card are numbered, and you can just press the number key. Anki doesn't seem to have a keyboard shortcut for rating cards... (Correction! It was pointed out in the comments that you can use keyboard shortcuts. Just press 1-4, just like in Mnemosyne. Not sure why I didn't try that, since it's quite obvious. To make it up to the Anki project, here's a nice search-engine-optimizing link to a great spaced repetition system.)
In the end, it took a good two and a half hours to finish that sentence deck, but that includes taking lots of time out to "rest my eyes", and so on. Conclusion: performance really, really tanks when you're sleep deprived! Somehow, though, I'm glad I went through that, because it has given me some new insight into SRS'ing. Normally when I'm in this state I would just skip the SRS for the day, but the Soldiers of the Revolution cannot afford such luxuries!
I will, however, skip the audio pronunciation deck today since I've already spent more time on just the sentence deck than I normally spend on both. And with that, I'm gonna call it a night. This will be my second-to-last night sleeping alone, and then I'll be reunited with my wonderful girlfriend :)
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 22
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 24
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
How To Keep A New Year's Resolution
Ergative Verbs
Air Force Core Values
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Western Pimps vs. Asian Idols
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1 comments:
Did you watch the screencasts? You can use space and 1-4, as described in the docs.
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