Thanks for elaborating your example gwern, I hadn't quite understood it the first time either. I absolutely agree with you that the multiple approach is much better, but what has surprised me over the last 6 months of using mnemosyne is how efficient my brain is at parsing out all extraneous information related to the flashcard in order to remember the minimum required to correctly answer the card. And even a multiple card approach is not as effective as I had imagined. That is to say I have found that I'm quite capable of remembering that "Is Foo X?" = no, from context alone, and "Is Foo not X?" = yes also from context, quite seperately and without any connection being made between the two. They are just two unrelated flashcards for my brain. As I'm not learning the two flashcards in the same instance, my brain does not make a choice to combine the two and learn them as one unit of "Foo is not X" but just (very effectively I might add) learns the answer to each flashcard seperately. I've noticed this particularly with flashcards that are simple and that I have memorised very easily and quickly and am now having long gaps between repetitions. Basically I have found I still have to make sure I make an actual effort everytime to contextualise the flashcard, flesh it out as such in my head when reviewing otherwise I find it just too easy to do it on autopilot (which when I first started mnemosyne paradoxically seemed to be the goal). Finally when it comes to accessing this information in the real world there is always this strong feeling of a seperation between this information and other information that I have learnt and know well via other means. I guess this is not surprising as I have just "memorised" the info with mnemosyne and "learnt" other info by other methods. I think part of this gap is also due to underestimating the amount of small brief "factoid" style sentence/questions that are required to fully flesh out the meaning of even a simple flashcard such as "Is Foo X?". For example all the understanding related to the nature of Foo, the nature of X, and what it means for Foo to be X etc.
As far as Chinese characters go, I recently started revising the kanji (Chinese ideographs) for Japanese in mnemosyne. I've started off by the old-fashioned (and possibly unnecessary?) way of having the question as the character and the answer as all the onyomi (Chinese readings) of the characters, and a seperate card for all the kunyomi (Japanese readings) of the characters. Something that really surprised me here, is that when reading a text in Japanese, I noticed a word that I didn't know containing a character that I recognised but had forgotten the reading of. I copied pasted it into a dictionary and when the reading came up I immediately realised it was a character whose readings I knew very well, that I had reviewed many times in mnemosyne, and had never forgotten it in that environment. What was interesting is that the flashcard itself contained a minimum of context, the character itself, nothing else from which I would have to remember the readings. Yet I did not recognise that same character when it was placed in a word in a sentence. It wasn't the fact that I was relying on extra contextual clues to remember the flashcard in one instance and so could not recognise it when those clues were gone, it was the simple fact that the "decor" as such was different that threw me off. I have no doubt that if someone had told me, hold on a second you do know that character, you've learnt it as a flashcard, I would have been able to visualise it in my mind and remember it after some reflexion, but it was interesting for me to see, how a veil had been placed between the mnemosyne memory and real life usage and I needed to make an extra conscious effort to combat that. I guess along with these more specific problems is the fact that you recall memories best in the environment in which you learnt them. I remember being told a long time ago to study for an exam in an environment that most closely mimicked the environment in which you would take the exam. I think this is fairly accepted now, I seem to remember reading recently about a study which showed that people remembered facts learned at the bottom of a swimming pool best when they were tested at the bottom of the swimming pool! This would make it particularly difficult for someone like Dougie who presumably reviews his flashcards in a very un-nature-like office or room but wants to make use of this knowledge in a completely different environment, outdoors with the wind, the sounds, the smells of the forest for example. Now once we hook up SRS with a bit of Virtual Reality, replicating senses of touch and smell and everything, that could be very effective! I wonder what will come first, that real life simulation approach, or the directly write data bits to the brain approach. I vote the former. Well to sum up my thoughts so far, I think that to a certain extent, while the action of whittling down, dividing up information, basically the process of formulating flashcards together with the unchanging, strict and defined memorisation process using SRS always in the same environment allows for a great increase in efficiency in memorisation it also results in a certain lack of flexibility, applicability regarding that "knowledge". -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en.
