Thursday 28 August 2008

Pic of the day: Determination will eventually change us, but for now the only part of the upper text I recognize is the final "eru". -_-;

Learning my letters

Now at the tender age of 49, I have set out to test the outrageous claims of Supermemo and their free but simpler competitor Mnemosyne that one can learn 10 to 50 times more efficiently. It would be kind of hard to make or break these programs on random facts you may find in popular science magazines, as I sometimes randomly remember these after years or decades anyway. For putting the newcomers to an immediate test, the obvious answer was the arcane writings of Japanese, a language with which I am barely a little familiar and then only in its spoken form.

Trying to learn the Japanese scripts brought home quickly the fact that I was after all human, and furthermore that humans just barely scrape by on the test for "intelligent life". This, I fear, is even more pronounced here than in Asia, but it is surely a difference in degree only, and by percents rather than orders of magnitude.

On August 16, I installed Mnemosyne on my main computer. The same day, I installed a small set of ready-made cards (the default data format) with the Japanese hiragana "alphabet". It contains all the rarely used forms as well. I intend to put off the other phonetic script, katakana, until hiragana is so established in my mind that I don't even think about it. That way I won't confuse the two. Well, it may be a while before I start learning katakana. There are STILL signs I forget in hiragana.

On the other hand, there is a slowly growing number of characters I don't forget from one day to the next. A look at the small statistics page shows that the herd has spread out a bit now: Slated for repeat:
In 1 day(s) : 9
In 2 day(s) : 2
In 3 day(s) : 5
In 4 day(s) : 11
In 5 day(s) : 7
In 6 day(s) : 8
In 7 day(s) : 7.
It will probably soon spread out even more: There are a few characters now that I am likely to remember in a month, but I have to prove it to the program before it believes it. I can certainly see that. If I were to be judged from my progress so far, the machine has every reason to suspect that I am severely retarded, sometimes forgetting a card after two minutes.

With the workload now much less than in the beginning (when almost the whole deck came up each day) I have started adding a kanji a day. The excellent about.com has a smart and friendly Japanese woman who teaches all kinds of Japanese, including its writing. She has helpfully sorted the kanji by the grade where they are taught in school, so that the foreign reader can progress in the same way as the Japanese children. So I installed the Japanese input method editor that lets me write kana and kanji on an English keyboard. If I for instance type the letter "u" while in this mode, the computer will convert it to the hiragana character for u. (Vowels have their own signs, while consonants have not, except for n.) Once I have the hiragana, I can press space to get the kanji. It will first pop up a random (?) kanji (but will later adapt to your writing style by re-using your choice). If it is not the right character, pressing space again will bring up a list of all kanji that can be pronounced "u". That's a surprisingly long list, but I only need to pick the one I need, then cut and paste it into the flash card. Then I add the two different readings for it, and the translation.

Unless Japanese children are 10-50 times smarter than me, I should supposedly be able to learn one of these each day. OK, I actually only learn to read them, not to write them, so the kids probably ARE smarter than me. In the unlikely case that I will ever want to learn to WRITE Japanese, I hear there is a great program for the Nintendo DS that teaches this. But I hope I shall not go that far. (For one thing, it is not imported here to Norway, although it is to America. It is made for Japanese school kids, so obviously I first need to learn to read some Japanese to find out how to use it!)

It needs pointing out that the power of Supermemo and Mnemosyne is in long-time learning. I could surely learn all of the hiragana in a weekend by simply reading and drawing them over and over while pronouncing the relevant syllables. But I would have to use them daily to keep them remembered - something Japanese children can hardly avoid since there is writing all around them - whereas now I spend only a few minutes a day. Actually I spend so little time that it makes me feel kind of bad about it. But if it works, I will definitely feel better! I hope to be able to come back to you with updates on this project from time to time, so you can follow my progress (or regress).