SRS: Cloze Minded

If you don’t know wtf timeboxing is all about, I have prepared the following links for your benefit. Please send thanks in the form of unusually-flavoured KitKats.
Intro to Timeboxing: (1) (2) (3)

Timeboxing has served me well during my language pursuits, dividing up my study time into easy-to-schedule chunks and helping me to get the ball rolling on some of the lengthier (but eventually rewarding!) tasks, like plucking apart audio files or sentence mining TV shows. Taking those longer activities and splitting them up into 10 or 15 minute blocks makes stuff go a lot more quickly.

But sometimes I have stuff to do that (FAIL) gets in the way of studying. This blog post, for example, needs to get written. There will be future blog posts, and unless I farm them out to blog gnomes, I’ll eventually have to write them, too. Not that I don’t like you guys or anything, but I just rented a couple Naruto DVDs, and…

Of course, timeboxing works fine for these jobs, just as it does for studying, and it helps to have some Japanese or Mandarin playing in the background to keep the immersion environment rocking.

But, partially inspired by AJATT’s Nested Timeboxing post, I’ve started using L2 media, like podcasts, albums, or movies, as the timebox, instead of an actual timer.

A couple example scenarios might go something like this:

Scenario 其の壱 (1)!

I have to write a blog post in English. This takes between 30-60 minutes, depending on how wordy I feel. I find some L2 media of approximately this length (a CD or a news podcast or something) and try to finish the post before the media finishes playing. I sometimes attach a timer using smaller increments (10-15 minutes) to break things up a little bit and create smaller goals for myself. This way my English life and my Japanese/Mandarin life are both catered to.

Scenario 其の弐 (2)!

I have some SRS reps to get done, and just don’t feel like doing them. Sure, you can argue that “All your cards should be totally the funnest shit ever!”, and that might be so, but sometimes Super Mario 3D Land is looking just a shade sexier than Anki, and I have a hard time sitting myself down at the keyboard. So as a compromise, I might throw on a Japanese album that I like, and try to finish my reps in, say 3 or 4 songs. Immersion, check! SRS reps, check! And after that, it’s game time.

I’ve found this type of timeboxing to be a good way to both squeeze more L2 media into my day, and to give me the motivation I need to do those less-than-pleasant L1 jobs (cleaning my flat also falls into this category, but I guess that would be L0 since it involves neither Japanese nor English). And with a decent amount of media at one’s disposal, there should always be a song or movie handy that fits the time needed to finish the job.

Photo by huntz@flickr

Not being an alphabetic language is one of the charms of Japanese for me, but it also renders new words occasionally unreadable. Take the following word:

寿

Yep, that’s a whole word right there. If you’re a Heisig graduate, you probably know what the word means, roughly (longevity). But do you know how to read it? じゅ, perhaps?

How about ことぶき? You like your single kanji readings with 4 syllables, boy?!

Not being the most common word in the world, you might have a rough time remembering how to read this thing. Even SRSing it might not let it sink in quickly enough. This is precisely the problem I found myself running into.

So, when Lt. Anki gets shot in the kneecap and Private Heisig is off trading his pistol for another pack of smokes, when you have no one left to help you beat back against the armies of the United Alzheimer Emirates, where can you turn?

The answer is in our trusted friend, the simple mnemonic. And actually, to give Heisig his due, RtK2 contains a framework for this. A lot of people (including me) ignore the second volume, so this tip gets ignored a lot.

Sometimes I like to tease Japanese for its dearth of phonemes. This sort of syllabic paucity, however, results in a ton of homonyms. And those homonyms are like fertile, dung-rich soil for growing mnemonics. Take our friend from earlier, 寿(ことぶき). By know, you probably looked that thing up and realized it has to do with long life, or offering congratulations to somebody when they get married. So if you can hold the rough meaning of the thing in your mind, you just need to find some homonyms for the syllables of the readings, and go from there. Watch:

ことぶき
こと・ぶき
こと→琴→a koto harp
ぶき→ふき→吹き→blowing, maybe windy

So I just imagine a wedding, where there’s a harp in the background, and as the wind blows through the strings, it plays music for the happy couple.

Bam. Done.

I also take some liberties with voiced/unvoiced stuff if it gives me more flexibility (see ぶき→ふき).

I could also have used 武器 for ぶき, and had a more violent story. They key is to do whatever makes it stick for you. It’s taking what works with the Heisig method and applying it to remembering particularly difficult readings. Benny, in his Language Hacking Guide, talks about this very technique as well, and reading his examples helped nudge me towards doing the same thing here.

Hi guys! Been a while.

In the last few months, I’ve been neglecting Mandarin, and Japanese has definitely been center stage again, thanks to a newly developed obsession with manga (facilitated by the sudden ability to rent these comics at my local Tsutaya).

At first I felt a little bad about slacking on Mandarin, but Japanese got super fun again, and I didn’t want to throw off its groove, so instead I just rode said groove through about 80-odd volumes of manga. That amount of epic sword battles requires a huge time investment.

Anyway, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve started back up with the ol’ Chinese again, began picking up Bopomofo, and acquired enough Mandarin media to immerse myself a little more effectively.

I’ve also spent the last month watching a shit-ton of L2 movies, which I’ll discuss a bit later.

Finally, I’ve been programming a new site… not a blog, but an actual study tool, that I hope to have running in some sort of beta form in the next month or so. A lot of time that I would have normally spent blogging got sunk into that project, but I think it’s been worth it. I hope you will agree. When it’s done, I will make mention of it here.

Look for more frequent posts here in the coming weeks.

As I mentioned last winter, I recently took the JLPT N1. This wasn’t because I thought I could pass, nor was it because I felt like the test is particularly useful. I just felt like throwing myself a challenge.

So back in February I got the result: Pass.　合格。 Barely.

So how exactly did this happen?, I asked myself. How did I go from squeaking by Level 2 last year, to squeaking by Level N1 only a year later? After all, even though I bought a decent book, I only went through a few dozen sample questions before realizing things were probably hopeless and just going back to playing Dragon Quest 9 (this is true… I actually did spent most of the runup to the exam playing DQ).

I think the answer lies in the score breakdown.
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A common question when discussing SRS goes a little something like this:

SRS is awesome! I love it! Uhm… do I have to write all this crap down? It’s going to take me, like, hours.

Ok, so that’s a question sandwiched by some patronizing comments, but that’s more or less how it goes.

In any case, I have good news for you. I’m here to tell you “No! You don’t have to write everything down! Live free and die free!”

… that is until I remember to tell you “You should write down some stuff though! So like, don’t go anywhere just yet!”
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