Sorry for the extremely late reply to this discussion. I studied Japanese for about 4 years and now I'm learning Mandarin Chinese.
I think that memorization is only part of the process of internalizing vocabulary. Other parts of the process are learning how to use the words effectively. Many words, especially verbs, can represent many different things. For example, the Chinese verb '開' (kai1) can mean 'open' (a door), 'turn on' (a machine), or 'drive' (a car). Some words may refer to a concept that is unknown to the learner or cannot be describe succinctly with a single word. Additionally there are a host of rules that govern the appropriateness of each word in various cultural contexts. All of this adds up to much more information that must be memorized. It's surely an order of magnitude larger than the log of the number of words. A friend of mine who has studied Chinese for many years recommends using the SuperMemo program for memorizing vocabulary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperMemo It builds a model of your memory and presents content at the minimum frequency necessary to maintain retention. Apparently it works well for vocabulary and other information that can be memorized. I think that language acquisition is a very interesting application for software-assisted learning, and there are a lot of folks working on language education. But I think that technical skills are more suited to software-assisted learning than human language. For example, programming languages can be learned in a short amount of time and contain large "vocabularies" of standard library functions that are ideal for rote memorization. When I was hired at Amazon, I spent several months mostly learning how to use their custom modules and tools. This knowledge became stale over the next 3 years and I had to continually learn as systems were upgraded or replaced. Plus I saw folks waste time reinventing the wheel because they refused to learn how to use existing modules. I believe that Amazon and other tech companies could save money and increase efficiency by deploying software-assisted learning and retention tools. And I think there is a business opportunity for a company to build and support software for this. --Michael On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Dave Long <dave.l...@bluewin.ch> wrote: > > Le 25 mars 10 à 08:37, Kragen Javier Sitaker a écrit : > > This curriculum would need to be administered by a piece of software >> that statistically modeled the current state of your knowledge, so as >> to be able to drill you on what needed drilling at that moment, and >> kept drilling you at the edge of your competency continuously for many >> hours a day. >> > > cf http://www.quisition.com/ for a similar piece of software. > > off the top of my head, my guess is that your bit rate estimate may be > right for learning but very optimistic for retention. > > -Dave > > PS have you seen Europanto? > http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html > > -- > To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss > -- Michael Leonhard michael...@gmail.com
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