7 comments for “The Three Laws of Language Acquisition”

1. 

   HC

   January 16, 2011 at 11:06

   Short. and. Sweet.

   Reply
2. 

   adshap

   January 17, 2011 at 02:45

   The 3 Ps of AJATT?

   Reply
3. 

   Tyler (Brokenvai)

   January 17, 2011 at 09:48

   I’m gonna write this on my liver.

   But no, seriously; I’d say this perfectly boils All Japanese (At) the (Right) Time(s). Which happens to be all the time you have.

   Reply
4. 

   Ken

   January 18, 2011 at 00:52

   This past week, I tried a new spin on my kanji SRS reps. I’d been doing the same 2000 kanji (Heisig vol 1) for a month and it was starting to get boring (anti-#1). I noticed that I either knew it right away, or I thought that I “should” know it and racked my brain for a whole minute before giving up.

   So I decided that was stupid (anti-#1): if I didn’t know, I shouldn’t waste 60 seconds on it. I shouldn’t waste 10 seconds on it! It’ll be back. So, new rule: you have 2 seconds to answer (#3). Even for kanji I knew pretty well, this switched me from “walk through the story”-mode into “quick, what’s the first thing you think when you see this?”-mode.

   The time needed for SRS reps, of course, went way down. Surprisingly, the percentage-correct didn’t go down at all (#2). It turns out that, most of the time, even for kanji where I was consciously using the story, it had somehow unconsciously made an association straight from shape to idea.

   And since I can get through more kanji in less time, I’m seeing all of them a lot more frequently now (#3). I don’t know that this can work for sentences, or for learning new kanji, but it makes review of old kanji much easier for me.

   Reply
5. 

   serge

   January 18, 2011 at 17:37

   Question: can you load mnemosyne files into Anki?
   My mnemosyne is busted for a while, first it had me rehearse 900 sentences all of a sudden, then it only gives me 5 sentences to practice a day…

   Reply
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