Mandarin Deck Changes
Hey all!
So I survived the massive earthquake, tsunami, power outages, lack of running water and (so far!) the nuclear nonsense in Japan. I did, however, temporarily move from Fukushima to Yokohama.
So I’m alive. And that’s enough of that.
I also have been making a lot of changes to my Mandarin deck, so since it’s been a while since I gave an update on my progress in that language, I thought I’d share a few points.
The deck is dead, long live the deck!
I deleted my original deck. It was small, so the pain was slight. A couple of reasons:
I started using the Pinyin Toolkit, which I’ll talk more about below, and retrofitting my old cards to work with it was proving to be a pain in the arse. So I thought it better to start over.
I had too much overlapping in the first deck; that is, too many cards made of one sentence, which caused too much repetition, and some boredom. So rather than weed out the problem cards, it just seemed easier to wipe the whole thing.
I originally had the audio for each sentence on the front of the card, but (thanks to a post on the AJATT+ forums) I realized if I just copied the same file to the back of the card, too, I would instantly double my listening time
. Sadly, the way I had the card format set up, it wasn’t easy to retrofit the old cards… so again, rather than actually exert effort, deletion seemed a better option.
This is music!
In order to help combat deck boredom, I started making cards to learn some pop song lyrics. This is a really new thing for me… I’ve only been at it for a week or two, so I can’t tell yet how well I’m retaining stuff. I can say, however, that I’m having fun having 30 seconds blasts of pop music sandwiched in between sentence cards!
The Reconstruction
I’ve also massively retooled the card layout of my sentence cards, both to accommodate the Pinyin Toolkit and also to make adding cards faster and easier.
I’ll go into more detail on all of these in later posts! If any of you have had any luck learning lyrics with SRS, I’d love to hear about it.
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