Day 24 has dawned on the French Revolution. The French Revolution is my quest to learn as much French as I can in 30 days, spending just an hour or two a day studying. On day 1 I knew almost nothing about French. Now as the project stalks toward its climax, I know a lot more.
SKILLS AND METASKILLS
I'm not doing the French Revolution because I'm particularly interested in French, but rather because I'm interested in the whole process of learning languages, and even just learning in general. I'm particularly interested in self-teaching, or being an autodidact. So, I'm studying a specific skill to gain insight into a more general skillset. Reflecting on this, I became aware that what I'm really interested in are metaskills, abstract skills which deal with other skills. I wrote a whole article, Skills and Metaskills, exploring these interesting master skills.
STILL TIRED TODAY
Last night I got very little sleep, and the night before, even less. I wonder whether I'm short on melatonin or something-- I have undergone a pretty big diet change recently, and I wonder whether that is effecting my sleep, although in every way I can think of the diet change is for the better.
AUDIO PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE
Yesterday I skipped my audio pronunciation deck because it took me two and a half hours to do my sentence deck, because I was so tired. It was torture, I was really too tired to study, but the Revolution must go on!
I'm studying pronunciation by doing flashcards where one side has a French word or sentence, and the other side plays an audio file. This is done using Anki, a sophisticated Spaced Repetition System. I try to read the word or sentence aloud, and then grade my answer, and Anki uses my gradings to optimize the whole flashcard process.
I started the pronunciation practice at 7:57PM. There were 111 cards scheduled; that's two days worth, since I skipped the pronunciation deck yesterday.
For some reason, if Anki is started with cards in the failed pile (which was the case tonight since last time I ran this deck, I left some cards failed), Anki will go through the whole failed pile before touching any other cards. This is the exact opposite of what Mnemosyne does. It seems to me like the failed pile should come after the cards which are just regularly scheduled. After all, if I didn't have time to do all the cards in the deck, it would be much less disastrous to leave a failed card failed, than to risk forgetting a known card. In fact I feel so passionately about this, I cheated and just clicked through the whole failed pile without looking at the cards, just to force the program to go into the non-failed pile. I hope that doesn't screw with the spacing algorithms too much.
When doing that, I noticed a quirk with Anki's audio system. It queues up the audio files to play, and plays them all fully, no matter how far ahead you are. It seems like, if I click through five cards while the first one is still playing its audio, when that first audio ends, Anki should skip the ones I clicked through and start playing the audio of whatever's in front of me right now.
I think it was a mistake to mine all these sentence audio flashcards in one fell swoop. Because they're much longer than individual words, they're much easier to fail, and now the audio pronunciation deck is really very difficult to go through. But I guess that's language learning for you.
This sentence seems pretty crazy hard to pronounce: "En juin, une huître muette fuit les huées." Maybe once I have it mastered, I'll stop whipping it out at parties and impressing people with my elite tongue :)
Anki definitely has a problem with putting too much emphasis on the failed pile. Even when you do get to the non-failed cards, the program keeps putting up failed cards. Some of these failed cards, the program has put up 3 or 4 times, while it hasn't even gone through half of the non-failed pile. It might have something to do with how long these failed cards take; I've noticed in the past that if you let a card sit in the failed pile long enough, it'll be given priority over all non-failed cards regardless of what you've reviewed; you could theoretically see the same card every other time, if you kept failing it and not failing anything else and doing the review slowly enough.
I finished the review at 8:59 with 9 sentence flashcards still in the fail pile. These sentence flashcards are a little frustrating because they're much harder to pronounce (of course) than individual words-- but at the same time, I do feel like I'm making a lot of progress in my pronunciation :)
SENTENCE CARD DECK
Next, I switched decks to my sentence deck, which is the meat and potatoes of my study. There were 238 cards scheduled, I started the review at 9:04. I finished at 10:10. Efficiency: 3.6 cards per minute. This is in part because I was very tired, in part because I was doing laundry between cards, and in part because the sentences are longer and harder in the tense-mood chapter that I mined them from.
SOME LIGHT SENTENCE MINING
I did a little light sentence mining. I didn't really feel like it, but there are only a few more days left and it would be good to at least finish mining Tex's French Grammar. I mined all of the future tense sections (five sections in all), mining 70 new sentences.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 23
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 25
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
How To Keep A New Years Resolution
Leadership In Relationships
A Modern Lord's Prayer
Prescriptive Linguistics Vs. Descriptive Linguistics
Short Story: The Juggling Balls Of Destiny
SKILLS AND METASKILLS
I'm not doing the French Revolution because I'm particularly interested in French, but rather because I'm interested in the whole process of learning languages, and even just learning in general. I'm particularly interested in self-teaching, or being an autodidact. So, I'm studying a specific skill to gain insight into a more general skillset. Reflecting on this, I became aware that what I'm really interested in are metaskills, abstract skills which deal with other skills. I wrote a whole article, Skills and Metaskills, exploring these interesting master skills.
STILL TIRED TODAY
Last night I got very little sleep, and the night before, even less. I wonder whether I'm short on melatonin or something-- I have undergone a pretty big diet change recently, and I wonder whether that is effecting my sleep, although in every way I can think of the diet change is for the better.
AUDIO PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE
Yesterday I skipped my audio pronunciation deck because it took me two and a half hours to do my sentence deck, because I was so tired. It was torture, I was really too tired to study, but the Revolution must go on!
I'm studying pronunciation by doing flashcards where one side has a French word or sentence, and the other side plays an audio file. This is done using Anki, a sophisticated Spaced Repetition System. I try to read the word or sentence aloud, and then grade my answer, and Anki uses my gradings to optimize the whole flashcard process.
I started the pronunciation practice at 7:57PM. There were 111 cards scheduled; that's two days worth, since I skipped the pronunciation deck yesterday.
For some reason, if Anki is started with cards in the failed pile (which was the case tonight since last time I ran this deck, I left some cards failed), Anki will go through the whole failed pile before touching any other cards. This is the exact opposite of what Mnemosyne does. It seems to me like the failed pile should come after the cards which are just regularly scheduled. After all, if I didn't have time to do all the cards in the deck, it would be much less disastrous to leave a failed card failed, than to risk forgetting a known card. In fact I feel so passionately about this, I cheated and just clicked through the whole failed pile without looking at the cards, just to force the program to go into the non-failed pile. I hope that doesn't screw with the spacing algorithms too much.
When doing that, I noticed a quirk with Anki's audio system. It queues up the audio files to play, and plays them all fully, no matter how far ahead you are. It seems like, if I click through five cards while the first one is still playing its audio, when that first audio ends, Anki should skip the ones I clicked through and start playing the audio of whatever's in front of me right now.
I think it was a mistake to mine all these sentence audio flashcards in one fell swoop. Because they're much longer than individual words, they're much easier to fail, and now the audio pronunciation deck is really very difficult to go through. But I guess that's language learning for you.
This sentence seems pretty crazy hard to pronounce: "En juin, une huître muette fuit les huées." Maybe once I have it mastered, I'll stop whipping it out at parties and impressing people with my elite tongue :)
Anki definitely has a problem with putting too much emphasis on the failed pile. Even when you do get to the non-failed cards, the program keeps putting up failed cards. Some of these failed cards, the program has put up 3 or 4 times, while it hasn't even gone through half of the non-failed pile. It might have something to do with how long these failed cards take; I've noticed in the past that if you let a card sit in the failed pile long enough, it'll be given priority over all non-failed cards regardless of what you've reviewed; you could theoretically see the same card every other time, if you kept failing it and not failing anything else and doing the review slowly enough.
I finished the review at 8:59 with 9 sentence flashcards still in the fail pile. These sentence flashcards are a little frustrating because they're much harder to pronounce (of course) than individual words-- but at the same time, I do feel like I'm making a lot of progress in my pronunciation :)
SENTENCE CARD DECK
Next, I switched decks to my sentence deck, which is the meat and potatoes of my study. There were 238 cards scheduled, I started the review at 9:04. I finished at 10:10. Efficiency: 3.6 cards per minute. This is in part because I was very tired, in part because I was doing laundry between cards, and in part because the sentences are longer and harder in the tense-mood chapter that I mined them from.
SOME LIGHT SENTENCE MINING
I did a little light sentence mining. I didn't really feel like it, but there are only a few more days left and it would be good to at least finish mining Tex's French Grammar. I mined all of the future tense sections (five sections in all), mining 70 new sentences.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 23
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 25
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
How To Keep A New Years Resolution
Leadership In Relationships
A Modern Lord's Prayer
Prescriptive Linguistics Vs. Descriptive Linguistics
Short Story: The Juggling Balls Of Destiny
Posts
1 comments:
Anki shows you failed cards again because that helps you to acquire them. Sometimes it can take seeing a card 3-4 times at ten minute intervals until it starts to click.
If you don't like that behaviour, set the failed time to something like 3 days, and Anki will act like SuperMemo does.
But before doing that, consider the fact that Anki shows failed cards first for a reason. You don't have to spend ages thinking about them. They're there to refresh your memory - if you can't answer it quickly, fail it again and it'll keep popping up until it sinks in.
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