Back At School

I’m back at school, but classes for me don’t begin until Thursday. Today I spent a whole lot of time with a new memory program for my handheld computer.

I’ve been using a program called Stackz for more than a year now. The process for learning new words is pretty complex. I see a word that I want to know, I look it up, and then I add it to an Excel spreadsheet – the word, the kanji, and the definition in English. Then, once in a while I load all the words into Stackz, and memorize them when I get the time. There are more than 5000 words in Stackz, and so even as I learn new ones, there are old ones in the background that are slowly being forgotten.

With Stackz it was a chore just to stay on top of the words that were going stale – not to mention remembering the new words.

I converted to another program called Supermemo. It is a seriously hardcore program for the computer, but thankfully much simpler for the handheld PC that I have. I was in front of the computer for the longest time trying to get my data converted over to the Supermemo format, and finally it’s all in there. Now I have to review every one of those almost 6000 words so that Supermemo can get an idea of how well I know each one.

Until that happens I’ll be busy cranking through words. Just today I went through around 900 words, and I was surprised how many I had forgotten already. Hopefully Supermemo will do a better job of keeping them fresh in my head.

Kuniko has a school New Year party tonight, so I stayed home and cleaned up taco leftovers from the fridge and played around with the memory program. It seems like it will work out – I’m looking forward to using it more.


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