Remembering Kanjis

A few years ago, I decided to learn another language. English is not my first language and I remember fondly having to learn it. Learning English had been fun and challenging. It had also given me perspective on languages and thought processes.

For various reasons, my non-obvious choice was: Japanese. Japanese is an interesting language, but one of the most challenging aspect is definitively the writing systems. Japanese consists of 3 writing systems: hiragana (Japanese phonetic characters), katakana (Japanese phonetic characters - used for foreign words) and kanji (Chinese characters). Both hiragana and katakana contain 46 characters (or more, depending on how you count - the point is the order of magnitude) while kanji has ~50000 characters. But, you only need ~3300 to be a literate Japanese adult.

How do you go about learning ~3300 characters? Incidentally, maybe you don't... But you would be missing a whole part of the language. It all depends on your level of involvement.

I have seen too many too many books "throwing" Kanjis at me without a specific goal. Flashing thousands of Kanjis in front of me will not help me learn them. It's all about memory and learning techniques. The correct associations must be created in your head to retain the data. Some of the concepts I strongly believe in are explored here

Yesterday, I picked up A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. Worth mentioning:

• Detailed explanation of origins and meanings (interesting)
• Suggestion for memorizing (mnemonic)
• Components making up character (divide and conquer)
• school level of the character (track your progress)

The amazing part is that it was the only book, at least in the language bookstore I was in, that was taking this approach! I especially like the first point, learning where the characters are from and why the characters are like that -- which, to me, creates a whole new dimension to the problem.

Another recent example for me was Head First Design Patterns -- a really good book on patterns. The introduction also explains a bit about why the book presents material the way it does: an interesting mix of "cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology". I think there is much of to be learned about "how" to teach rather than "what" to teach.

Doing GTD

It's been a while since I wrote.

I've actually been doing what's in Getting Things Done. I started reading the book around Christmas and, ironically, it had been one of the things I couldn't get done. I put the book aside when it started to explain the high-level view of how to get organized. That would have been fine if I had known that we would get into specifics in later chapters.

When I finished the book, I knew what to do but there were 2 things I needed:

1. to reread the appropriate sections
2. to set aside a whole day to do my inventory

That's what I did. And I thought it was pretty painful. :)

I went around my apartment and my car writing down every single thing that needed doing. I tried not to "limit" my brainstorming, I wrote everything that sprung to mind. It took me 2-3 hours and I collected ~200 items.

At that point, I sat down and went completely through my "inbox". I decided on using plain .txt files and managing them with a TextMate (of RoR fame) project. Incidentally, I could go on and on about how great TextMate is, but that's not the subject of today's post.

I ended up dividing my items into the following files:

• waiting for
• agendas
• at home
• car
• errands
• phone
• read/review
• research
• projects
• someday

Tomorrow I'm doing my first weekly review and I might reorganize some of the categories. For example, "research" and "at home" are messy right now and might turn into "at computer" and "at home" when I'm done cleaning them up. I understand the need to "work" with the system a bit and iteratively make things better - I won't get it perfect the first time around. Consequently, I accept to live in my imperfect system.

I can testify that after you start using the system, your brain starts to trust it. But it doesn't happen instantly either... You keep checking your lists to see if you are not forgetting anything. Then you start realizing that some lists don't need you to check them constantly. Especially if you divided your actions appropriately.

Things that I want to address are:

• time required
• energy needed

I already have "context" taken care of. Maybe I also want to puts "tags" on my items. We'll see... that might require something more complicated than my current setup , and it might not be worth it.