Space Repetition Ideas

02/02/15

So, I am finally developing a good, daily spaced-repetition habit, and I'm liking it a lot. It's mostly composed of Japanese-based flash cards (and those are basically only kanji cards), but there are also random programming-based ones in there that I have already found useful. And, as with any system I play with, I am thinking how to gamify the setup and also how to create a web app that improves upon the physical system.

There's lots of variation on the spaced-repetition wish (a goal without a plan is a wish): both of a generally applicable tool and of a Japanese-specific tool. Just recently, the Japanese specific tool has begun to take a more solid shape in my mind. I think a good way to discuss this idea is to talk about Duolingo.

I want to preface this by saying I like Duolingo a lot. If they had Japanese, I would be using Duolingo everyday for at least some small amount of time. When I eventually return back to studying Spanish, I will probably use Duolingo.

But....

Duolingo is just missing something. Maybe something fundamental. Yeah, I'm getting words, and I'm getting sentences to learn how to string those words together, and so I start to internalize both these things a little. There isn't this layered unlocking of capability. I feel like, going down the path of Duolingo, I'd have to grok it all before a real drive to go read literature or attempt conversation would reveal itself. Something like that.

It plays like the tuorial of a game that never ends, where I never get to the actual game. The tutorial is the game, but it is clearly a tutorial.

Part of the problem, I think, is its tall hierarchy of unlockable lessons. That seems like it should be much shorter, much flatter. The vocabulary I'm interested may not be particular varieties of food right now. I see no reason why my vocabulary can't grow out of a necessity of use while playing a game (which Duolingo is) that revolves around me learning to use a language.

And so I wish. I wish I had a tool that somehow tracked how well I was grokking vocabulary and grammatical concepts and tested me on these things at increasingly distant times. I wish, once I grokked some necessary subset of the language, that it would link me to content I might find interesting and that I might now be just capable of understanding. I wish it would encourage me to create in the language well before I knew how to do anything in that language. I wish that it would link me to resources where native languagers would be able to correct my attempts.

And I wish that this tool existed for Japanese. That it included stroke-order kanji teaching, as well as the beginner hiragana and katakana alphabets.

And you know what, Stephan, maybe I should start working towards this wish.