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Emile comments on What are you learning? - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: Viliam_Bur 15 September 2014 10:50AM

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Comment author: Emile 16 September 2014 08:49:56PM 2 points [-]

I speak (some) Chinese, but I've always had a problem with remembering tones. So I found a list of characters sorted by frequency, wrote a python script to parse it and massage it a bit to generate an anki deck of "character -> pronunciation (definition)" mappings (and for characters that have several pronunciation, it's "character (definition) -> pronunciation"; so far I've been reviewing that deck for the past couple of months, but as it has several thousand entries it'll be years before I'm done with it (if I feel like it's getting old I'll stop reviewing it). When I encounter a character I don't know how to write I also add it back as a separate entry in another deck.

For studying German and Japanese, I have a Grooveshark playlist with a few Disney songs, and I also have some google docs with the lyrics which I occasionally read/try to translate (I haven't put much time in this apart from listening to the songs while I work; I haven't entered anything into Anki yet).

We used to have a regular German lunch on thursday at work, but the organizers quit and nobody picked up; I would usually add a few entries to Anki each time (and I still review them). I might organize a Japanese lunch eventually.

I have a "Mafalda" comic book in Spanish in the restroom, along with a Spanish-French dictionary, and usually read one strip (looking up unknown words) each time. Nothing in Anki, and I don't study any Spanish outside of that.