On Greek goddess and Japanese language
Tuesday, June 24, 2008Posted by
Barts
0 Comments
As I have written last year, I am studying Japanese. Since I am a lazy and my memory is not perfect, I have managed to fail JLPT Level 4 if only by extremely narrow margin. Nevertheless, I am a stubborn bastard and I am continuing my study this year.
On my way, I have managed to find some new tools. And since good part of traffic volume on my blog resulted from people coming to read the post on little programs useful for studying Japanese (thanks to Demencia who put it on StumbleUpon!), I have decided to share them with you here.
The programs that I will present in this post all serve to memorise Kanji (I assume that if you are reading this, you already know what Kanji is). They all apply same approach, namely "spaced repetition" in order to maximise learning curve. In short, a program using it is throwing at a user more often the questions to which they don't remember the responses well, while the questions that are dealt with well occur less frequently. The purpose is to strenghten weak memory associations by increasing the number of repetitions and maintain strong ones by only occasional reminders.
The programs in question are Anki, Mnemosyne and SuperMemo. Out of the three, I've only heard earlier about SuperMemo - my brother used it to great effect when he was studying French. However it's poor user interface design reminding me of Windows 95 times was putting me off from using it. I know it's irrational, but something looking so primitively is for me less credible.
I actually started with Anki, the program with most features. I've found it thanks to my friend Guillaume, who is living happily in Nippon (you can read his blog here) and has contributed to Anki's development by creating custom JLPT-oriented sentences and vocabulary. The problem was, I somehow didn't fall in love with Anki. One or two annoying glitches spoiled the fun for me, I got lost with its many options and strange terminology and I stopped using it.
I started looking for some more user-friendly alternative and I have stumbled upon this great discussion and comparison of all three programs available at Nihon-go Pera Pera. I am not going to rewrite it here, just follow the link in question, but I have finally found what I was searching for. The answer was: Mnemosyne.
While more advanced users might need more options that Anki provides and some retro-maniacs will have a ton of fun using SuperMemo, for me Mnemosyne is the golden middle: useful, not overly complicated with simple interface. Okay, the plain UI might be prettier, but it's still nowhere near as fugly as SuperMemo. Plus it has a cool Greek name.
Your opinion may be different , so please read the article in question and make your own decision - I just wanted to point out the existence of these tools to you and provide the link to the very informative discussion of all three of them.
Now, the question remains if I will have enough willpower to use Mnemosyne regularly...
On my way, I have managed to find some new tools. And since good part of traffic volume on my blog resulted from people coming to read the post on little programs useful for studying Japanese (thanks to Demencia who put it on StumbleUpon!), I have decided to share them with you here.
The programs that I will present in this post all serve to memorise Kanji (I assume that if you are reading this, you already know what Kanji is). They all apply same approach, namely "spaced repetition" in order to maximise learning curve. In short, a program using it is throwing at a user more often the questions to which they don't remember the responses well, while the questions that are dealt with well occur less frequently. The purpose is to strenghten weak memory associations by increasing the number of repetitions and maintain strong ones by only occasional reminders.
The programs in question are Anki, Mnemosyne and SuperMemo. Out of the three, I've only heard earlier about SuperMemo - my brother used it to great effect when he was studying French. However it's poor user interface design reminding me of Windows 95 times was putting me off from using it. I know it's irrational, but something looking so primitively is for me less credible.
I actually started with Anki, the program with most features. I've found it thanks to my friend Guillaume, who is living happily in Nippon (you can read his blog here) and has contributed to Anki's development by creating custom JLPT-oriented sentences and vocabulary. The problem was, I somehow didn't fall in love with Anki. One or two annoying glitches spoiled the fun for me, I got lost with its many options and strange terminology and I stopped using it.
I started looking for some more user-friendly alternative and I have stumbled upon this great discussion and comparison of all three programs available at Nihon-go Pera Pera. I am not going to rewrite it here, just follow the link in question, but I have finally found what I was searching for. The answer was: Mnemosyne.
While more advanced users might need more options that Anki provides and some retro-maniacs will have a ton of fun using SuperMemo, for me Mnemosyne is the golden middle: useful, not overly complicated with simple interface. Okay, the plain UI might be prettier, but it's still nowhere near as fugly as SuperMemo. Plus it has a cool Greek name.
Your opinion may be different , so please read the article in question and make your own decision - I just wanted to point out the existence of these tools to you and provide the link to the very informative discussion of all three of them.
Now, the question remains if I will have enough willpower to use Mnemosyne regularly...
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