In preparation for going abroad, I decided to tackle memorizing a ton of Japanese kanji, those alien little picture-characters that turn Japanese from an easy, gramatically regular language into a frustrating, foriegn stone wall. Whether you study in the US or in Japan, kanji just don't naturally absorb the way vocabulary, grammar, and conversational ability do. They take hours of boring alone-time, trying to figure out mnemonics and little stories for the weird heiroglyphics (安い? Women under your roof are cheaper than the ones you have to take out. Okay, the politically-incorrect explanations are kind of fun).
Fortunately, I've discovered a tool that makes learning these things a heck of a lot easier. It's called Mnemosyne, and it's based on the theory of memorizing facts through "spaced repetition." According to the authors:
When you have memorised something, you need to review that material, otherwise you will forget it. However, as you probably know from experience, it is much more effective to space out these revisions over the course over several days, rather than cramming all the revisions in a single session. This is what is called the spacing effect.
During the past 120 years, there has been considerable research into these aspects of human memory (by e.g. Ebbinghaus, Mace, Leitner and Wozniak). Based on the work of these people, it was shown that in order to get the best results, the intervals between revisions of the same card should gradually increase. This allows you to focus on things you still haven't mastered, while not wasting time on cards you remember very well.
It is clear that a computer program can be very valuable in assisting you in this process, by keeping track of how difficult you find an card and by doing the scheduling of the revisions.
The program is extremely elegant and zen in its operation: a card shows up, you guess, click "show me," and rate the card based on how difficult it was to guess. A zero is for if you've never seen it before, one is for when you've missed it this time but need to see it again soon, and a five is for cards you have completely memorized and never need to see again. 2,3, and 4 are in between. All you need is the spacebar, the number pad, and your brain. The way you can mark cards as "memorized" and have them completely go away is great, because the 2,3,4-kyuu compilation includes plenty of elementary vocabulary that even students with a few months of study will have down pat.
I'm using it with a compilation of 4300 vocabulary, which includes all the 1-kyuu, 2-kyuu, and 3-kyuu words and kanji. There are ways to make multi-sided cards with all the readings, bushu, and technical crap of the characters, but my cards have a single reading- the 訓読み for a single character, and the singular reading for any multi-character vocabulary words. I forget where I got the vocabulary pack, but e-mail me and I'll send it to you.
I've been using the program about a week now, for somewhere between half an hour and an hour a day. While I've got an intimidating ass-load of kanji to get through, I'm definitely making progress- characters that were completely unknown to me a week ago are starting to become familiar, and just the fact that I'm reviewing kanji I kind-of-know is rooting them deeper in my memory.
