Good News

A lot of updates today.

First, I completed the first audio project session with Chandler a few days ago. I’m in the process of checking my success with the transcript, (Method: (Total correct pinyin and tones)/(Total number of pinyin and tones)) but from my estimates I’ll probably get about 45% correct, which is above my goal of 40%. That said, I still have a lot of work to do.

A few days ago I blogged about the learning tool Mnemosyne that features an intelligent algorithm based on exponential decay of knowledge. Since then, I’ve added about sixty flashcards to the pile. Some of my favorites are 电子人 (cyborg) 眼镜 (eyeglasses) and 应该 (should, ought to). About Mnemosyne I have both positive and negative thoughts. On the positive side, it’s a perfectly good flashcard program, and I wish I had started using something like it sooner. It’s also nice to have it split the flashcards up into different days based on my performance and rating. However, I’m not that impressed with the actual algorithm, or maybe I don’t understand it correctly. Today, when I clicked Level 2 for a card (out of 5 levels) it scheduled the next viewing for seven days from now. That seems a little long for a card that I’ve tenuously memorized, but we’ll see. Also, the flexibility of Mnemosyne isn’t that great. It doesn’t let the user manually choose how long he wants to wait before seeing the card again without deleting and recreating the card. The addition of that feature would increase the usability.

Finally, the Big News. Today I received word from NSEP, and I am happy to say that I have been awarded the scholarship. That means, yup! I’m heading to China There are still some items to take care of, such as the matriculation question and how much I’ll actually receive towards the program, but it’s definitely a momentous step in my life. From here on out, I’ll have to double my efforts to learn as much Chinese as I can in the coming months. That means…a lot of Mnemosyne.

 

A Learning Tool

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.