Encouraging results
August 16, 2006I’ve learned katakana in two hours while lying in bed, using digital flash cards freely downloaded in my PDA and the Harry Lorayne method of mnemonics. I encountered Lorayne back in college to help me memorize eng’g concepts. While it didn’t work out (memorizing eng’g concepts doesn’t mean you UNDERSTAND them), I developed a quick way of creating passwords. Farber’s glowing recommendation of Lorayne encouraged me to reemphasize his approach (unsurprisingly, I still remember it).
The program lists all 40+ katakana characters for me to memorize. I used associations. Afterwhich, quizzes were held to test my knowledge. My first try was 68/100. My second was 68/71. My third was 71/71.
The results are encouraging, especially since its my first time outside the roman alphabet. By the third test, I was naming the multiple choices and selected via processes of elimination.
I will now finish reading Farber and proceed with Hiragana. And I will try to find a kanji tutorial from the web.
Stay tuned.
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5:25am
Holy Mother!
I’ve proceeded to kanji and I got 68/70 right the first time! I perfected it the second time. I can now recognize the kanji for gold, ten, eye, and shellfish.
These are symbols without the phonetic version. I am on a roll here. And I don’t feel drained from using my brain, unlike with other taxing subjects.
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1:31pm
After proceeding to the second batch of kanji (I’m not even to the verbs and adjectives yet, hmmmm), I went back to the first lessons. My results dropped by 10%. Let’s see how I do with the sazme test after a week.
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