Tuesday, July 13, 2010

On a minor roll...

Been fighting off a slight backlog of flashcards in Anki, pretty much due to downloading two French card decks as a refresher before heading to a conference in France next month.

After about 25 minutes going through some of the French cards, I had to leave them and pay some attention to the Chinese deck I've been building for a couple of years now. The cards are about 25% single characters (production), 40% multiple-character words (recognition) and 35% sentences (recognition), after switching sometime in December/January from production-only words/characters to make things more practical.

For some reason, it went really well today and I was on a roll, correctly answering some 83 cards in a row. No new cards, but a few recently-added ones which weren't completely familiar. Usually I'm happy to get 80-90% right, depending on tiredness.

It seems most efficient (at least if you occasionally create backlogs by not reviewing all of the cards on the day they're due) to review cards in order of their interval (i.e. if I don't finish all my cards today, at least I'll have dealt with the ones that were most in need of revising - seeing a 1 month card two weeks late is better than seeing an 8 day card four days late), so quit while I was ahead when asked to write the character for ginger (with an interval of around 2 months)*.


Minor arbitrary happy moment!




* I've been told that I should use less parenthesised clauses when writing. Makes sense... Actually thinking about it now, if I extracted the bits in parentheses from that sentence into footnotes, and then saw how silly the result looked, it might make refactoring the text more obvious. On the other hand, it's 2am and I'm supposed to have a meeting at 9:30am :/

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