Postby rateoforange » June 15th, 2007 7:22 am
Here's a little bit more information on the DB from the readme.
Present methods for learning Japanese kanji are daunting and imprecise. Any student of the language is aware of the numerous well constructed efforts to make this task easier, but it remains that a student has to manually keep track of a huge amount of data. For most students this takes the form of thousands of half forgotten flashcards strewn about the room. Even students who have been studying Japanese for many years sometimes sheepishly admit that they know less than a thousand kanji.
I decided to learn Japanese late in life, and I witnessed more than a few students of the language beach themselves. The massiveness of the undertaking of learning the 1945 kanji considered to be in common use was only one part of the puzzle. I’d seen these same students surmount academic odds greater than this. As I started my own studies I began to look for a different way. Mostly because I knew enough about myself to know that if I tried it their way, I’d never make it.
Flashcards remained the best method of recalling arbitrary information, so I decided to look for better ways to pose and organize them. Having seen the disorganized piles of cards my friends had kept, I knew that the major problem faced here was organization. The system they were using, if there was one, wasn’t very cohesive. I’d always looked to computers when I see the task is organizing discrete chunks of data like these cards.
After a few afternoons of research I decided that the best way was to use a computerized system of flashcards based on spaced repetition, a method of posing flashcards that claims to be able to minimize redundant learning. Minimizing redundancy is a big issue with a task this large, since a student could waste immense amounts of time reviewing things he already knows. After looking into a number of different programs that offered spaced repetition, I settled on Supermemo. There were two major programs: Supermemo and Vcard. Supermemo was simple and managed the spaced repetition passively, unlike Vcard which was a little confusing and demanded the user’s constant attention. The reason for this was that Supermemo was a computer program from the ground up while Vcard was just a computerized representation of a traditional method of managing spaced repetitions.
There were commercial databases available for the Supermemo program that claimed to be able to teach kanji, but after looking into them I saw that they presented too much information on one card. There is generally a lot of information a student needs to know about a single kanji, and placing it all on one card leads to a lot more redundancy and forgetting than dividing it up. Placing the information on one card seemed like a relic. I decided to make my own Supermemo database. Over the next month I transcribed the entirety of P.G. O’Neil’s ‘Essential Kanji’ into a database, and designed a report to output 6 cards per kanji: the on reading, the kun reading, kanji to meaning, meaning to kanji, and the two example phrases.
Having used the system to learn about 150 kanji so far, I can vouch that it accomplishes what I set out to do. The best thing is that it is a carefree system that removes the vagaries of when and what kanji to review. A human can’t effortlessly keep track of 12,000 flashcards, nor could he or she perform a simple algorithm on each to determine when they should be reviewed. At a fairly leisurely pace (for a foreign language student) of 3 a day, a student would be able to learn the 2000 in two years, and they would not have to worry about it at all. Most students I know who have spent 2 years studying Japanese barely know 500, and they probably haven’t spent any less time on it. If they have, they would probably be more willing to give more time to it if they had a concrete way of tracking their progress and knew they were using their time effectively. Most students learning kanji are more daunted than lazy.
Hopefully this database will take the weight off students who have had trouble organizing and regimenting their kanji learning system.
