The Bilingual Career Forum Story

So, the way I even heard about this bilingual Japanese/English career forum is that my Japanese roommate from before I had considered studying Japanese, Ko-star, went to the Boston version. It both inspired me and made me jealous when I realized that “wow, Ko-star is totally fluent in two very economically valuable languages, and here…

SRS and Kanji Study: What Is An SRS? 2

OK, so I decided to write an extension of this explanation, which you might want to read first, if you’re not already familiar with it. Here’s the deal. What’s the usual way you try to remember, say a Chinese character (kanji, hanzi, whatever)? Write it out a kajillion times, right? Brutal, medieval, ineffective. That may…

Pure Pwnage: How Fluent Was I After 18 Months?

So, I have a BIG ego, and do LOTS of ego-surfing. I should make an RSS feed of my self-googling. And during my daily, no, hourly session of ego-surfing, it came to my attention that I had not quite made clear just what I meant by “fluency” after 18 months. In a word, my fluency…

Spaced Repetition Goes Mainstream?

Jon B at 無国籍/Mukokuseki links to this Wired Magazine article on SuperMemo. This is really exciting stuff. In my own little way, I’ve been trying to spread the word about SRS (spaced repetition systems) as tools since a man named Chris Houser first told me about SuperMemo way back in 2004. As one quite aptly…