I was reading Lifehacker today and one of the featured articles was about a program called Supermemo. Supermemo boasts a sophisticated algorithm applied to flashcards that keeps track of how often each card needs to be displayed. Well, I looked at Supermemo and it didn’t appear to be outstanding for the price, so I instead found this other program called Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne does the same thing for free, and it allows Asian characters. I’m going to give Mnemosyne a week’s trial run to familiarize myself with the algorithm. My goal is to learn to recognize all of the Kangxi radicals with 2-6 strokes by next week; if I can write them by memory, all the better. In addition to the radicals, I’ll be adding a few random vocabulary words (like 电子人 (android)) to see how effective Mnemosyne is for learning and retaining vocabulary. I’ll get back to that in a week.
Tonight I worked on the audio project and got some feedback from Chandler. I’ve determined that getting 40% of the tones and pinyin on the first try will be a pretty acceptable outcome for my first attempt. To calculate that I’ll add up everything I get correct and divide it by the number of possible correct letters/numbers.
I’m looking forward to the progress I see from Mnemosyne.
