Learning Japanese while programming: My memory sucks!
So, as stated... my memory sucks. Turns out, this makes me, largely a very terrible candidate for most traditional training regimes in learning a new language. Which, also, I think, bodes well for my app I'm building, at least as a personal training tool.
I'm running through an app/training course in the form of Human Japanese on Android, I also AnkiDroid, MemRise and a few others I use far less. I also watch anime and have now added listening to what little Japanese music I can find on Groove into the mix.
I try to make time for a half hour to 2 hours a day for learning Japanese. And while it is paying off, as I said, my memory is clearly something most apps and training tools didn't take into account. Frankly, given the rave reviews I must be in a minority.
To sum up the problem... the real learning apps like Human Japanese start out well paced. But, as the fundamentals get assimilated, it becomes list after list of new verbs, adjectives and sentence forms. Apps are terrible to scroll back and forth through, so you try and commit as many to memory as possible and plod on. Keeping paper to check back on isn't any better than a dictionary.
The other apps are worse. AnkiDroid for example... rams a handful of new words at me every day, and they are all VERY similar in meaning and the way they are mixed up, I'm going crazy. Today for instance, I got "real, certain, definite, true, actual" and probably another 1-3 I've missed. They are so similar I can't even remember the ENGLISH words they are trying to teach me, let alone the corresponding Japanese. And as I said, it doesn't ease into it either. When I tank a word, I won't see it again for another 5-10 cards so it doesn't get reinforced in my shitty short term memory.
I started lying to Anki droid with different lies for different words so that it would hopefully, start giving them to me a little more spaced out.
And don't get me started on Memrise. They somehow made the mistake of doing one of the very first things I noticed would be an issue when I started writing my app (with only about 1 week of learning under my belt at that). They make you type responses, but often those responses will contain multiple variants of the same word, spaces, placeholders and punctuation marks... and you have to respond EXACTLY as they expect it. First time I hit one of these I smacked my head... it asked me to type in the Hiragana for "What", so I put in "nani". Nope! I need to put in (exactly) "nani (nan)". Oh, and they somehow screwed up multiple choice as well. I keep getting multiple choice where I need to select the correct answer for "Goodbye", but they have boxes with BOTH the romaji and the hiragana for the word and one it "right" and one is "wrong"... BRILLIANT!
Anyway, that was a long rant. Point is, I hit this memorization problem just before I stopped working much on my app as well. But all of the words I had problems with, which I had put into the app and played with prior to stopping, I either still know now, or are easy to "fix up" in my mind with a quick review.
What is it I'm doing differently? Well, to start, it isn't just a mindlessly increasing wall cards like AnkiDroid. I can turn on all, or some of the cards. Broken out by Course, Topic and finally individual items. So, if I want to focus on the words before I test myself on phrases with conjugations and the likes, I can do that. I generally mix new words in smaller sets until I'm comfortable again. Then I crack out the full arsenal.
The app also weights each question based on how new it is and how many times you've gotten it wrong, so even if I have everything enabled, new words pop up with increasing frequency until I start getting them right. Next, there is no fixed session length that screws with calculations if you try to get in some additional training. And lastly, because there is no fixed session length, it has no real effect on future sessions aside from adjusting weights if you choose to go shorter or longer.
Beyond that, there are other tools as well for assisting with ramping up learning. For instance, under numerous settings, it will generate multiple choice responses from related items. Or, if more comfortable, it can say, show a word or sentence in English and make you input it in Hiragana using a custom keyboard I added to the app.
Oh and for the MemRise style issue... I don't consider spaces when comparing an answer. Nor do I used punctuation in my expected answers. I never prompt for more than one variant at a time and instead opt to leave a hint as to exactly which one I want. As an example, I have "hajimemashita" and "douzo yoroshiku" both meaning "nice to meet you" but when I prompt for either, I supply the first syllable. In other cases I drop other hints. I also let ha's and wa's be treated interchangeably. While this might technically result in invalid Hiragana in some cases, it allows for a response to be entered as it is spoken or as it should be written, reducing cases where I knew what I was talking about but get told I'm wrong anyway.
Needless to say, when I got started with this, I figured it would mostly just be a training tool for me. The more I work with other tools though, the more I feel like, if I polished this app up at the end, that I could very well turn this into something worth posting. And indeed, if I spent even more time, I could see actually selling this. So there is that.
The only thing I lacks is audio. And while I agree this is a bit of a bummer, I also think it is less so than many people think. Maybe more on that another day.
I'm running through an app/training course in the form of Human Japanese on Android, I also AnkiDroid, MemRise and a few others I use far less. I also watch anime and have now added listening to what little Japanese music I can find on Groove into the mix.
I try to make time for a half hour to 2 hours a day for learning Japanese. And while it is paying off, as I said, my memory is clearly something most apps and training tools didn't take into account. Frankly, given the rave reviews I must be in a minority.
To sum up the problem... the real learning apps like Human Japanese start out well paced. But, as the fundamentals get assimilated, it becomes list after list of new verbs, adjectives and sentence forms. Apps are terrible to scroll back and forth through, so you try and commit as many to memory as possible and plod on. Keeping paper to check back on isn't any better than a dictionary.
The other apps are worse. AnkiDroid for example... rams a handful of new words at me every day, and they are all VERY similar in meaning and the way they are mixed up, I'm going crazy. Today for instance, I got "real, certain, definite, true, actual" and probably another 1-3 I've missed. They are so similar I can't even remember the ENGLISH words they are trying to teach me, let alone the corresponding Japanese. And as I said, it doesn't ease into it either. When I tank a word, I won't see it again for another 5-10 cards so it doesn't get reinforced in my shitty short term memory.
I started lying to Anki droid with different lies for different words so that it would hopefully, start giving them to me a little more spaced out.
And don't get me started on Memrise. They somehow made the mistake of doing one of the very first things I noticed would be an issue when I started writing my app (with only about 1 week of learning under my belt at that). They make you type responses, but often those responses will contain multiple variants of the same word, spaces, placeholders and punctuation marks... and you have to respond EXACTLY as they expect it. First time I hit one of these I smacked my head... it asked me to type in the Hiragana for "What", so I put in "nani". Nope! I need to put in (exactly) "nani (nan)". Oh, and they somehow screwed up multiple choice as well. I keep getting multiple choice where I need to select the correct answer for "Goodbye", but they have boxes with BOTH the romaji and the hiragana for the word and one it "right" and one is "wrong"... BRILLIANT!
Anyway, that was a long rant. Point is, I hit this memorization problem just before I stopped working much on my app as well. But all of the words I had problems with, which I had put into the app and played with prior to stopping, I either still know now, or are easy to "fix up" in my mind with a quick review.
What is it I'm doing differently? Well, to start, it isn't just a mindlessly increasing wall cards like AnkiDroid. I can turn on all, or some of the cards. Broken out by Course, Topic and finally individual items. So, if I want to focus on the words before I test myself on phrases with conjugations and the likes, I can do that. I generally mix new words in smaller sets until I'm comfortable again. Then I crack out the full arsenal.
The app also weights each question based on how new it is and how many times you've gotten it wrong, so even if I have everything enabled, new words pop up with increasing frequency until I start getting them right. Next, there is no fixed session length that screws with calculations if you try to get in some additional training. And lastly, because there is no fixed session length, it has no real effect on future sessions aside from adjusting weights if you choose to go shorter or longer.
Beyond that, there are other tools as well for assisting with ramping up learning. For instance, under numerous settings, it will generate multiple choice responses from related items. Or, if more comfortable, it can say, show a word or sentence in English and make you input it in Hiragana using a custom keyboard I added to the app.
Oh and for the MemRise style issue... I don't consider spaces when comparing an answer. Nor do I used punctuation in my expected answers. I never prompt for more than one variant at a time and instead opt to leave a hint as to exactly which one I want. As an example, I have "hajimemashita" and "douzo yoroshiku" both meaning "nice to meet you" but when I prompt for either, I supply the first syllable. In other cases I drop other hints. I also let ha's and wa's be treated interchangeably. While this might technically result in invalid Hiragana in some cases, it allows for a response to be entered as it is spoken or as it should be written, reducing cases where I knew what I was talking about but get told I'm wrong anyway.
Needless to say, when I got started with this, I figured it would mostly just be a training tool for me. The more I work with other tools though, the more I feel like, if I polished this app up at the end, that I could very well turn this into something worth posting. And indeed, if I spent even more time, I could see actually selling this. So there is that.
The only thing I lacks is audio. And while I agree this is a bit of a bummer, I also think it is less so than many people think. Maybe more on that another day.
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