Howdy everyone!

I’ve been studying hard the last month, as the number in my Heisig Tracker indicates in the right sidebar, with it’s slow, but steady increase. After an initial glut of learning, where I placed my Anki new card rate at 35 cards a day, I came to the conclusion that a rate of 35/day is probably too much for me to reasonably sustain alongside a full time job. I started finding holes of dozens of cards in my memory where I’d rushed over too many cards too quickly and wasn’t able to recall a single thing about the keywords being presented to me. I’ve since toned it down to around 20 a day which while leaving me with the occasional several hour review session at the weekend, seems to be a much more acceptable and comfortable rate to learn at.

For those that don’t know, Anki is a program that, in it’s own words provides “…a spaced repetition system (SRS). It helps you remember things by intelligently scheduling flashcards, so that you can learn a lot of information with the minimum amount of effort.” Well! What does this mean to the language learner then?

Spaced Repetition Systems are a method of memorisation and recall that are built on the knowledge that there is an optimal time to attempt to remember a fact that you need to know, and this optimal time is at the point in time where you are just about to forget said fact. A piece of software like Anki (or Supermemo, to name another) organises facts that you are trying to learn into flashcards, and schedules their review intelligently to maximise on the above remembering/forgetting phenomenom. That is, in a nutshell, what a spaced repetition system is. If you would like to find out more, the following links give a far more detailed introduction to SRS’s for the curious out there.

I calculate that at this rate of learning, I should have Heisig learned to an acceptable level by around June/July time, at which point I can swap out my Heisig cards, and start focusing more on JLPT vocabulary study ready for December’s exam. A lot of the feedback I’ve recieved from recruiters and westerners in Japan has been that obtaining JLPT 2 or  1 is important in having a successful job search, so I’ll be aiming for this come testing time in December.

On a semi-related note, there is talk of both changing the structure of the JLPT to span 5 levels as well as provide bi-annual testing periods in certain countries. This seems to be a decent restructuring of the test, which is often criticised for having too large a jump between the current level 3 and level 2, and oppurtunities to take the test being too infrequent.

Anyway, I hope some of this has been of interest to some of you, and best of luck with your studies until next time. Keep on… SRS’ing!

Tags: 加dd 新ew 札ag

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.