Comments on: Whatever Happened To Boiling Water?

By: Areckx

Areckx — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:10:31 +0000

「…」As long as you are above the critical frequency, as long as you are above a certain sampling rate, as long as you have 24 or more frames per second…the heat might as well be constant.
「…」

カッツ先生

By: Mind-strings and Learning « Celestial Celsius

Mind-strings and Learning « Celestial Celsius — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 18:57:47 +0000

[…] matter what the methods are, language acquisition boils down to this: keep […]

By: The Lazy Way Out, Khatz may be on to something… « Japanese On A Dime

The Lazy Way Out, Khatz may be on to something… « Japanese On A Dime — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:58:55 +0000

[…] Now that I have power back, I was checking out AJATT, and I saw an older post I thought was interesting here. […]

By: Maya

Maya — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 04:59:09 +0000

This post kind of answers my question from the previous one about language learning and frequency 🙂 Thanks Khatz!

By: kendo

kendo — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:27:24 +0000

Pretty much what Drew said. Here’s what makes me pretty sure it doesn’t count as input: If you take any two people, one who SRS’s hours a day, using lots of pre-made decks. And one who SRS’s moderately, maybe a single hour a day, reviewing things they found on their own, and then devotes those remaining hours to input. The second person will advance much quicker, and be less likely to burn out. The second because all that input is a lot more fun than hours and hours of working through shit someone mined from a JLPT study guide, the first because real media from native sources is absolutely essential to growth. The SRS just can’t replace. Smart.fm, using subs2srs, things like that which get multimedia on the card brings it closer, but it still just doesnt seem to have the same overall effect as kicking back and watching a few hours a day of unsubbed anime, reading a book, and listening to japanese music as often as possible while you go about your business. Fortunately, its not an either/or, and they compliment each other perfectly. Almost like…insulation and a pot of boiling water.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 02:45:11 +0000

I’ve been thinking about experimenting with this for a while.

The one part that might work, I’m thinking, is that if you shuffle these bits and pieces (coming from different places; such as 2 minutes of Japanese one hour, and 2 minutes of Cantonese a little bit after that in the same hour, and repeat for every hour after that), you could possibly master a couple of different languages at the same time in the same process.

Although I’m not sure if they’d just interrupt each other. Guess it’ll be mine and your task, as well, to experiment with this to the best of our abilities?

(Critical Frequency: The Science of Little and Often, and How I Used it to Conquer Cantonese/Korean) Like the title? You should write it.

By: Drewskie

Drewskie — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:06:56 +0000

The SRS simply maintains input you’ve already received. It does a really good job of reinforcing things you luckily caught in an easily understood context, but using the SRS doesn’t cause any growth. I think the insulation example is pretty solid.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:44:52 +0000

Kendo, isn’t doing your repetitions just another form of input?

By: kendo

kendo — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:26:53 +0000

One element missing in your metaphor is the SRS. Keeping up with your daily SRS reps is like buying more insulation for the pan. Nope, it will NEVER make the water boil on its own. But it drastically decreases the amount of heat and the amount of time needed to bring the water to boil in an almost indirect way. Sure, for example, you could just do input, frequently looking up words you don’t know in the dictionary, and eventually, with enough input, close enough together, for a long enough period of time, the water will boil. But, by keeping those words you look up in the SRS, and keeping them in long term memory through your reviews, you only have to look that word up the first time. And you benefit from that single look-up more immediately, getting more out of your input right away. The SRS can’t ever replace good old fashioned books, audio and video, but it damn sure supplements the process nicely.

By: Mattholomew III, Esquire

Mattholomew III, Esquire — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:18:19 +0000

^ In this case, wouldn’t leaving it on be better anyway? The surest way to win is to flood your house with flammable Japanese gasses.

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:54:24 +0000

I think this is how many poor people without heat keep warm in the winter.
Be careful with all this turning on and turning off though, if you have a gas stove. But then again, if you’re coming back to the stove frequently anyway, you’ll notice if you forgot to turn it completely off earlier.