Language Learning - An Update

It's been quite a while since my last post, two and a half months to be more precise. Back then, I mentioned I was heavily relying on Spaced-Repetition Systems (SRS) for learning and retention.

In the intermediate weeks I found that with increasing competency in a language - after reaching a basic comprehension of at least 5000 words - SRS become less and less effective. At this point, I've completely stopped using Anki for Spanish; instead I'm listening to random podcasts on my way to and from work, as well as watching TV shows in Spanish. My comprehension seems to have gotten …

An Anki experiment

More and more, I'm starting to rely on Spaced-Repetition systems (SRS) for learning. That's WaniKani for Japanese Kanji and Vocab, Memrise for good courses they have (like the one on Morse Code) and Anki for everything else I want to remember, like Spanish Vocab, books I've read, Latin expressions or the Nato phonetic alphabet. Once I've mastered a course, it will also be migrated to Anki for maintenance.

At the moment, I'm only have thousands of cards, but I'm quite curious how long-term maintenance is going to work once I reach tens of thousands and more. For one, reaching a …

Fighting Link Rot

Gwern's post on [cached]link rot got me thinking. Periodically checking links to see if they are broken is nice, but not really an adequate solution - content might already have disappeared by the time I realize. Besides, websites change a lot, in a year a site might look very different from what I linked to originally. This might be acceptable if I'm linking to the site in general, but unacceptable if linking to a very specific post.

Since I had a free Sunday morning anyway, I set out to create a [cached]Pelican Plugin that would automate this process for …

New Backend, New Style

After being fed up with the intricate dance necessary to set up Ruby to get Octopress to run for quite some time, I decided that it was finally time to migrate to a better blogging system. A replacement was quickly found: [cached]Pelican. It's based on Python, quick and easy to install (no annoying version incompatabilities) and has a lot of nice plugins and themes.

Which gave me the excuse to go hunt for a nice clean theme - I had been jealous of all those minimalist blogs. So here it is, new blog, new theme, and - next post in a …

Our minds are slaves to our bodies

Just now, I was practicing Spanish on Memrise. I used to speak each word aloud while writing it, but I had stopped doing that over the summer to not annoy other people in my hostels. So imagine my surprise when I started doing it again and my mood completely changed within a minute - from kind of meh and relaxed to full of energy and happiness.

Why full of energy? I tend to move through words pretty fast, thus speaking at that speed is quite energetic and fast too. This looks like a promising approach to alter my own mood, to …

Travel and your normal goals

I'm sure there's a lot of you like me, traveling at every possibility you can find, trying to explore all there is of our small and yet so large planet. And just like me, you probably have a lot of other goals too - trying to learn that new language, working out more, spending half an hour every day practicing this new skill.

The thing is, at least for me, it's very hard to combine the two. Being away from home almost every single day for the last two months, I've noticed that I hardly studied Japanese or Spanish - maybe a …

Finding myself by going away

It's been a month now since I've started traveling, all on my own. To be honest, I hadn't given it much thought before I set out - I was just too busy with exams and moving out of my flat in Vienna. Even on my flight to Tokyo I didn't really think about it, I was too busy sleeping and reading guidebooks, being all excited about going that far away.

Even for the first days, I didn't really notice - I was too busy meeting people, even got quite a crush on my second day here. But when things didn't work out …

Japanese Again

It's been a week since I've started using [cached]TextFugu and so far, it's been awesome. I also started using it's sister service [cached]WaniKani but can't report much yet because the spaced repetition algorithm hasn't given me any kanji yet (it takes a few days to start).

I can't read proper Japanese texts yet, but I was delighted when I managed to deceiver the text on the chopsticks during my last visit to a sushi restaurant ("arigatou gozaimasu"). Not much, but it still felt awesome.

So, if you want to learn Japanese, give [cached]TextFugu a try and make …

Learning Japanese

I've been studying Japanese for a few weeks, but so far it was only [cached]Hiragana and [cached]Katakana. Basically Japanese syllabary.

That's the easy part though, actually learning [cached]Kanji (the main part of the Japanese writing system) and of course the vocabulary is the hard part. Now I've evaluated quite a few services, but I'm still not sure which one too use.

• for learning Hiragana and Katakana, I used [cached]memrise. It's basically a fancy flashcard system for spaced repetition, with the advantage that a lot of courses have already been created and filled with memes. Sadly, it …

Units of Measure for Real

I'm almost done with my thesis now, as you might have noticed it's about a Units of Measure system in Scala. I will do a more detailed post on it sometime in the future, but I figured I might at least release the pdf of the thesis now. So here it is!