Comments on: goldlist

By: Viktor D. Huliganov

Viktor D. Huliganov — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:22:33 +0000

Nice to see you again here. I remember our brief conversation.

I do know Anki, and I know that it is a good method. It is like a free version of Wozniak’s supermemo, and it follows a similar algorithm.

It doesn’t really handle your stats very well, and it doesn’t have all that many decks. If you want to use it for anything there is no deck for you have to make your own deck, which isn’t easy. I also found it was difficult to get Kanjis to show up at a readable size.

If we are talking about Japanese, then there is another Supermemo/anki style tool at http://www.readthekanji.com and I do use this, in addition to my goldlists. I bought a subscription, and I think it delivers value for money and has even recently been improved to match the new Noryoshiken exams, the JLPT’s. If you are thinking of taking the JLPT, then http://www.readthekanji.com is an excellent use of money, in my opinion.

All these methods are closer to Ebbinghaus’s findings than Goldlist is. Goldlist is a simplification, a working approximation to Ebbinghaus. However, it has three advantages over Anki and Supermemo and other computer-based methods:

1. You are not tied to a computer. If you work all day at one, you need to do something else when you relax. With Goldlist you can sit in the sun and do it, you can take it for a walk in the park. You can plan your distillations even while the plane is taking off and the fasten seatbelt sign is on. You can even do it sitting on the toilet seat.

2. Handwriting seems to stimulate memory more than kepboard typing, and in any case we don’t handwrite enough and then our handwriting looks bad when we need it because it is underexercised.

3. You can put whatever you like into it without having to either find a deck or make one, and will always be free to use.

But it isn’t all or nothing. You can have one book going through Goldlist and use Readthekanji or Anki at the same time. You don’t have to choose between the methods, you can mix and match.

Hope this helps.

David

By: Alicja

Alicja — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:35:06 +0000

Hello.
I’d the pleasure of listening to your lecture during Summer Research Practicals ’11.
I got a smartphone last week and I’m using it to improve my language skills. I was wondering – have you heard of Anki decks? I use them to learn Japanese and Arabic and they’re quite similar to your method. I haven’t found any references on your page, so here’s the link: http://ankisrs.net/.
You can create your own decks and then schedule the learning process.

By: Viktor D. Huliganov

Viktor D. Huliganov — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:04:25 +0000

There are numerous ways in which imperfective verbs become perfective. Most commonly it is by the addition of a prefix, like po- s- vy- etc. The second most common is that the verb will change class. More verbs in the it’ class are perfective and the at’ are imperfective. However sometimes that works the opposite way. et’ infinitives can go either way. The third way is that the aspectival pair will not even resemble each other. For example govorit’ and skazat’ – where again the it’ verb goes against the norm in being the imperfective and skazat’ is the perfective. Lovit’ and poymat’ is another good example. You simply need to learn the verbs as an aspectival pair, which is how they are given anyway in all good dictionaries.

By: anurag

anurag — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:13:52 +0000

how we make imperfective verb perfective??

By: anurag

anurag — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:15:31 +0000

thanks…….

By: Viktor D. Huliganov

Viktor D. Huliganov — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:13:06 +0000

Reflexive verbs are a form of verb whereby a transitive verb acts like an intransitive verb by making the subject the object of the action. They exist in almost every language, the difference between Russian and English is that English is more implicit about the reflexives. Let me give you an example. If I say in English “I shave” then it’s implicit in that that I’m shaving myself. If it turns out that the object is not myself then that’s unexpected and as such can be material for jokes a bit like “My dog’s got no nose/How does he smell?/terrible!” which hinge on the unexpected change in object from transitive to intransitive. I can imagine a similar joke about shaving in English going something like this “My Dad is really annoyed that I’ve started shaving./ Really? Is it because you’re not so much his little boy any more?/ Well, the final straw was when I took his eyebrows off”. Do you see the hinge there? In Russian, shaving is not implicitly reflexive but explicitly, so you simply wouldn’t be able to make that kind of joke. In Russian you say “I shave myself” Ya breyus’ and the s’ is the reflexive participle, tacked on as a postclitic part of the verb. You don’t just say “I shave”. If in English you say “I shave myself” then it would suggest that the context was that someone had suggested that you shaved another person and you wanted to emphasise that it was yourself and not anyone else. To make that emphasis in Russian, you’d say ya breyu sebya. The postclitic s’ or sya becomes a full ‘sebya’ (oneself) which is what it is short for in the first place.

By: Viktor D. Huliganov

Viktor D. Huliganov — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:02:59 +0000

Well, it’s a feature of the language. Basically the idea is that of hard and soft. You can learn about it through the RL101 series in YouTube.

By: Viktor D. Huliganov

Viktor D. Huliganov — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:34:05 +0000

It marks a consonsonant which is soft if there’s no soft vowel after it. That’s why it’s especially found at the ends of words. It also can be found in front of ye and ya and other soft vowels showing additional softening, where it works like a shorter version of “i”. Sometimes these are words which had alternatives with i in Old Church Slavonic, and it marks the non-pronunciation of the extra syllable, in those cases.