Language Site Up!

Tower of Babelfish - A Language Learning Site is now up and running! In anticipation of my book, the site features free info about language learning, with resources for specific languages:

• Learn French
• Learn German
• Learn Italian
• Learn English
• Learn Japanese
• Learn Russian
• Learn Spanish

As well as video tutorials about various aspects of language learning:

• Learn English Pronunciation and the International Phonetic Alphabet
• How to install Anki, AnkiWeb and Dropbox

Enjoy!

Mostly final draft of spreadsheet, continued work on Anki

The final spreadsheet is here I've changed my Anki tests to teach me the order of the locations, and where I should jump if I want to skip to a specific year. I did this with two types of cards: 1. Given one location, tell me the next several locations. (Given bed, the next locations are nightstand, robe hanger, chair, bedroom door, piano, chair, desk) 2. Given a year range (1000-1099), which locations are within that range? (Bed, Nightstand) For all the special jump locations (The first location in the 1800s, for example, or 1875-, etc.), I've started to learn the exact date/images. (The first location after 1850 is #70, the front door to Billa, whose exact date/image is Flour/1854)

Anki Deck

Aaaand, the Anki deck has begun.

I'm going to be actually putting this into my head via Anki, my favorite spaced repetition software. It quizzes you daily and sets up a schedule for when you review each card, depending on how hard of a time you had remembering. If the facts are relatively easy to memorize, then you end up spending *very* little time on each fact, so it behooves one to split the data up across a great number of flashcards, and learn a few of them per day.

I'm going to be learning this in a bunch of stages.

Stage 1: Learning my journey in order (Front side of card: #1-2, back side of card: "Bed and Nightstand")

Stage 2: Learning the date image that goes with each stop on the journey (Front side of card: Picture of bed, Back side: Diskette (corresponds to 1071)

Stage 3: Given the date image and the location image (Bed+Diskette), learn the basic composer-related images (Front side: Bed+Diskette, Back Side: William Tell shoots apple off of someone's head, Danish pastry)

Stage 4: Decode the images into useful data (Front side: Bed+Diskette+William Tell+Danish Pastry, Back Side: William IX, Duke of Acquitaine, 1071 - 1126)

(Stage 5/6: Add additional images to each coded image to add more useful data, like important compositions, etc)