Monday, December 03, 2007

Flashcard Hell

Damn. For a few months, I got sucked into the flashcard trap thanks to the great Anki application. I was so impressed, I went and made flashcards for all the Korean and Japanese vocab and grammar I studied. Inputting all that took a lot of time and effort and could lead to a debilitating case of carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyways, after things cooled down, I realized that I ignored my own advice about relying on flashcards. They are good for learning the building blocks of any language, ie the alphabet/characters, but beyond that, they serve little purpose since it doesn't provide context. It would be far easier to randomly stick my finger in a dictionary and see if I know the definition; at least I wouldn't have to input anything. Anyways, unless there is a big test I'd need to study for, I think I'll have to limit my flashcard use to individual Chinese characters.

2 comments:

Dayo said...

Hi,

I'm interested in learning all of the languages you have had experience with. Why? The short story is I got into Japanese manga (typical) and I decided I wanted to speak Japanese to really understand it. Then I decided I wanted to go to Japan but the recruiting agency said it would be easier to go to Korea - so I'm working on that. And I want to study in HK and I have a great friend there.

Soo . . . question please. What is it about Anki and flash cards that you've learned and how else do you build your language skills? I actually found your blog trying to find out how to enter Korean into Anki. Microsoft IME doesn't look anything like the text book.

Hope you are well.

Mak said...

Hey, I saw your blog and I liked what I saw because it was Cantonese based. I was wondering if you had any interest in trading links between our blogs? (My blog is a Cantonese culture blog) If you are, please contact me through my site and let me know. I look forward to hearing back from you! :)