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My shot at a pseudo-Iversen study tool.

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
9 messages over 2 pages: 1 2  Next >>
ura
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5151 days ago

3 posts - 4 votes

 
 Message 1 of 9
20 February 2010 at 1:50pm | IP Logged 
Hi, this is my first post to this forum. I've been idling along here for quite some time and read many posts. My
biggest issue is that I have yet to find a method that
provides me with a tool to acquire new vocabulary. The most promising to me was Iversens word list approach.
I've had quite some good results with Heisig's
visualization, and logical compound construction method as well. Mainly using the Review the Kanji
(http://kanji.koohii.com) site.

I've tried very hard to get into the groove with http://smart.fm but using their provided tools there just doesn't
stick. I've sure invested quite some time to try.
So I'm left with Iversens method, which resembles quite a lot the way I think I learned English at school. Writing
down the vocabulary in a book and learning it, one side
covered top to bottom.

I've never been a good learner, when it comes to learn stuff by heart what is often approached by rote
memorization. And English started to work for me once I was in
the US for a short period of time. Enough to get the feeling for the language and make me sufficiently fluent.

Ok, now why all this? Good call. Over the last two days I've constructed a tool that is based around Iversens
method of learning vocabulary. And I got quite good with it
for my set of a little less then 200 Vietnamese-German pairs. And I'd like to get some input on the approach,
ideas and what not.

You can give it a try here: http://angerman.github.com/jqstudy.html

It's using JQuery at it's core so I hope it quite portable, but I have only tested it so far with Safari on Mac OS X.
Please bear with me. At first you will be prompted with a
screen of 7 (default) items to study. Once you press the right arrow key [->], the left part will be hidden and you
are supposed to write down the translations. Once all
translations are in place (background goes green), it swaps, and you are supposed to enter the inverse
translations. (Iversens method, part 1) This will cycle once again
(which can be customized with the threshold value) and thus imply the first repetition column of Iversens
method. The numbers at the very far right are supposed to
indicate a box (Leitner) like system. They increment by 1/2 for each direction and fall back to 0 on failure.

At any time hitting the Escape [esc] key will show the solution in a lightbox like style.

For now the vocabulary is hardcoded. And it's a single file. There is no "deeper" logic in there yet and the whole
tool is contained in that one single html file.

I'd be very glad if you would share some thoughts on this. Specifically weather or not it's pointless or should be
improved, what features would make it better, etc.

- ura/angerman

EDIT: had to unlinkify the URLs as I'm still to green behind the ears :/

Edited by ura on 20 February 2010 at 1:56pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



Hashimi
Senior Member
Oman
Joined 6018 days ago

362 posts - 529 votes 
Speaks: Arabic (Written)*
Studies: English, Japanese

 
 Message 2 of 9
20 February 2010 at 2:38pm | IP Logged 

Very nice. Thank you ura for this great tool.

But can't you make an offline version which can be customized so we can add vocabulary in other languages?


1 person has voted this message useful



ura
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5151 days ago

3 posts - 4 votes

 
 Message 3 of 9
20 February 2010 at 3:04pm | IP Logged 
Hashimi wrote:

Very nice. Thank you ura for this great tool.

But can't you make an offline version which can be customized so we can add vocabulary in other languages?

Thank you!

Basically that's as simple as clicking "save as". Just download the html file. The vocabulary start on Line 58. Should be pretty straight forward to edit.
To make it completely offline (as in working when no internet connection is available) you would have to downlaod the jquery javascript file and alter the src attribute of the script take two lines
higher accordingly.

Think i'm having on my mind to implement:
- persisting of the statistics. (e.g. when reloading the page, all Box information is lost as of now)
- some kind of list backend. So that lists can be retrieved dynamically. Hooking it up to smart.fm though their json API shouldn't be too hard I think.


- ura/angerman


1 person has voted this message useful



Sprachprofi
Nonaglot
Senior Member
Germany
learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6229 days ago

2608 posts - 4866 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese

 
 Message 4 of 9
20 February 2010 at 8:53pm | IP Logged 
Nice! I was hoping to have something similar as an Anki plugin, even offered to pay the
developer, but nobody bit and my Python is too poor.

Edited by Sprachprofi on 20 February 2010 at 8:53pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Splog
Diglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
anthonylauder.c
Joined 5428 days ago

1062 posts - 3263 votes 
Speaks: English*, Czech
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 5 of 9
20 February 2010 at 9:06pm | IP Logged 
ura wrote:

Think i'm having on my mind to implement:
- persisting of the statistics. (e.g. when reloading the page, all Box information is lost as of now)
- some kind of list backend. So that lists can be retrieved dynamically. Hooking it up to smart.fm though their json API shouldn't be too hard I think.


- ura/angerman



I can propose a solution that will give you:

1: The ability for people to download this and have it running on their own machines
2: The ability for them to modify their lists without having to change the source code
3: The ability to have a persistent storage for lists and statistics without a database or any kind of back-end

The proposal is that it runs as a freestanding dynamic HTML page (in the user's local browser), and is self-modifying, so that as users add data through the user interface it becomes part of the actual HTML body (with a save button to make the modified HTML persistent).

It will be quite a bit of work, but much of this has already been done - albeit in terms of a freestanding Wiki rather than language learning. In particular, you may want to take a look at Tiddly Wiki for inspiration.
1 person has voted this message useful



jerrypettit
Groupie
United States
Joined 5785 days ago

79 posts - 103 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 6 of 9
20 February 2010 at 11:43pm | IP Logged 

Sprachprofi, I have had some success getting cheap programming done through freelancer.com. Free to sign up as I recall, then describe your problem (in my case I needed help with an Excel spreadsheet to do a web query on stock data) and post it. When I woke up the next morning I had a couple of dozen bids--lots of great minds in Eastern Europe, India, China...although I ended up with a guy here in the USA as the low bidder anyway.

Just a thought.
1 person has voted this message useful



Ocius
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5349 days ago

48 posts - 77 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Ancient Greek
Studies: French, Latin, Sanskrit

 
 Message 7 of 9
21 February 2010 at 6:48am | IP Logged 
This really has great potential. Thanks for the work you've put in thus far and especially
for sharing!
1 person has voted this message useful



ura
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5151 days ago

3 posts - 4 votes

 
 Message 8 of 9
21 February 2010 at 10:12am | IP Logged 
Hi. Thanks everyone for the kind comments. For the persisting of data I think that a HTML5 solution using the
storage API is a better solution than to modify it all by itself and it's supported but pretty much every modern
browser so far. Data input is definitely something that's not easy to overcome. Though a CSV reader should be
sufficient for most. Everyone knows how to export to csv, right? :D

Concerning the Anki integration. I'm not an anki specialist. I know my way around python pretty well and stuff. But
after all Anki uses Webkit as the rendering engine for the dispay, hence it should be possible to just run the
DrillMachine inside anki sans the databinding. Though the specific plumbing that would be required still needs to
be researched here a little bit more.

-ura/angerman


1 person has voted this message useful



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