Jonathan's Japan(ese) Journal • ジョナサンの日本（語）日記

So I've been hearing about a method of learning called spaced repetition lately. The gist of it is that you study individual facts and, the better you can recall a certain fact when quizzed on it, the less often you study that particular fact. The result is that you're spending more time studying unknown material and only getting occasional reminders for things you've already gotten down pat.

The person to bring these systems to my attention was Khatzumoto. Frankly, it seems to be a decent system for building vocabulary. However, I think that it's also important to do it right to maximize efficiency, so I've spent some time thinking about (1) which software to use and (2) how to design my question-answer cards for it. (There are premade decks available, but I have found each one unsuitable—usually because they are chock full of English. Bad.)

As for the software, there were three big choices: Mnemosyne; Khaztumoto's own version optimized for cell phone usage, Khaztumemo, and Anki. I toiled with this one, but I've gone with Anki for the time being, as it seems to fit my needs best. It's still a young program, but it can be run portably (off of my external hard drive) and has a nice online component as well that syncs with your local deck. (In fact, I don't believe that the software is even necessary.) The software is a bit RAM-heavy and not the speediest sometimes, but you can't have everything.

As for my cards, I've decided up the following setup: The question is just the word on which I'm being tested; the answer section holds the readings of kanji words, brief definitions (often in just Japanese, but sometimes with both, if neccesary), and then good representative example sentences followed by any necessary notes about usage. For definitions and example sentences, I use WWWJDIC, the Japanese-Japanese dictionaries (大辞林 第二版 and デイリー 新語辞典+α) at Goo Dictionaries, and Eijiro at SPACE ALC.

Most of the words that I've got in my dictionary (over the past couple of weeks, I'm up to over 500) are words that I encounter in class. Thus, my intentions include not only the vague goal of building my vocabulary, but also the concrete goal of doing better in class as well. I've been using this software for several days now and I can say that I've seen a definite short-term improvement, and I managed to breeze through recent quizzes and this morning's test in a way that I've not breezed through one in some time. Which is quite nice, yeah, but do I know these words? Can I remember to use them? Can I at least recognize them in conversation?

To some extent, yeah. But it's only been a few days that I've been using this method, so I can't gauge yet just how effective it is. For now, however, I'm pretty pleased. It certainly beats the pit of near-inactivity that I have been falling in recently.

Of course, the hardest part about things like this is keeping up with it.

Check out the discussion about this post and SRS'es in general at Tae Kim's site too!

Labels: english