The chart above shows my progress studying Mandarin Chinese since July 12, 2007, until now. I punched some of the numbers into the calculator and figured that if indeed all the words that I’m calling ‘easiest’ I have indeed ‘learned’, I’m learning more than 30 words per day over an extended period of time.

That’s pretty good. If I keep it up for a year, that’s about 10,000 words. It’s difficult to figure out how many words are in the average adults vocabulary, but one number I’ve read is 60,000. That puts me within striking distance of an adult vocabulary.

Of course there are numerous mitigating factors to temper my excitement. Words can be learned. Words can be forgotten. The law of diminishing returns comes into play, too. Even now, I’m finding it’s more and more difficult to find good new words to learn, even though I know they’re out there.

Also, out of those 30 new words I’m learning a day, some of the words have already been ‘learned’ (in other words they already exist somewhere buried in the deck of over 5,000 flashcards).

So maybe numbers aren’t the only way to assess progress. After all, I’m not studying Chinese so that I can tell people I recognize 10,000 Chinese characters. I’m studying Chinese characters so I can understand Chinese and be understood in Chinese.

I don’t have any more numbers to prove that my Chinese comprehension is improving as much as my handy chart above suggests, but I can tell you that I certainly feel like I’m understanding much more of what I hear and read in Chinese than I did six months ago.

Finally, there is one thing I can say for sure. There aren’t shortcuts to learning a foreign language. Don’t trust anyone who makes outrageous claims (e.g. “Learn a foreign language in an hour!”).

Well, now we have a new development environment set up.  We found a few beta testers to kick the metaphorical tires, and things are looking good.  This is the kind of site I wished I had when I was studying abroad.

But, we need more testers.  So, if you somehow stumbled on this post why don’t you stop over at www.prettydarnsmart.com, create an account, start learning something new, and tell us what you think?

Out of the 562 words I tried to memorize, I learned about 182 of them.  That works out to about 13 words per day.  Keep in mind I haven’t studied Spanish in the past.

The following graph shows my progress day by day.  I started with about 110 words in each difficulty level (eg easiest, easier, easy, hard…).  As time passed, I categorized more and more of the words in the easiest, easier, and easy difficulty levels.

When I tested myself, I tried recalling half of the words by looking at the English and trying to recall the Spanish.  The other half I did the other way.  I remembered slightly more, about 35%, of the words where I saw the Spanish first and recalled the English.  Out of the words that I saw the English first and tried to recall the Spanish, I recalled about 30% of the words.

I was not very strict in terms of spelling, gender, and verb conjugation.

This experiment gave me confidence in this method for studying new material.  I would like to find a better way to manage the words learned between days.  A word that I thought was ‘easy’ today, might not be ‘easy’ tomorrow.

Additionally, I think investing an extra 10 minutes a day (30 minutes per day instead of 20 minutes a day) would reap big benefits.  I also think it would be productive to cut back on the number of words studied per day, cutting back from 100-120 words per day to 50 or 60.

Along the x-axis, you can see all the dates since the deck was created.  Along the y-axis, you can see the total number of cards.  The data is broken down by card difficulty level.

What you want to see when you’re looking at this chart is a steady slope upwards from left to right, indicating that overtime, you are learning more and more cards.  The more cards you classified as ‘easiest’ the better.

What you don’t want to see is a bunch of flat lines, indicating that nothing is being done at all.  You also don’t want to see an increase in cards classified as ‘hardest’ without a corresponding increase in cards classified as ‘harder’, ‘hard’,'easy’, and so on.

For those who are interested, this site is built with Ruby on Rails and the Ruby gem that renders these charts is Gruff.  Thanks to all the the Rails developers developed these very useful gems.

My only formal foray into Spanish was one (or two) days of class the summer after my freshmen year in college. I dropped the class and chose to work instead. Since they, I’ve learned little more than one can pick up from a Pedro’s menu.

I’ve already prepared a deck with 562 words and grouped the words arbitrarily into ‘easier’, ‘easy’, ‘hard’, ‘harder’, and ‘hardest’ groups.

Every morning, I will study for 20 minutes, beginning with the ‘easier’ cards. After seven days I will evaluate my progress. I’ll continue for seven more days and then evaluate myself once more.

I’m doing this experiment for three reasons:

1) to demonstrate how well this method works

2) to find out where the method can be improved

3) to learn Spanish

The idea of dog earing cards is that users need the ability to mark where they stopped studying so they can pick up where they left off the next time they resume.

The way that it was implemented was that users could dog ear one card. The next time they started studying a deck, they would pick up where they left off.

But I study like this. Every day I review some of the ‘hardest’ cards. I usually don’t finish all of them, so I dog ear the card I stop at.

Every two or three days, I review the ‘harder’ and ‘hard’ cards. It used to be, I could easily finish all these cards, so I never worried about dog earing anything for later.

Today, however, I couldn’t finish all the ‘harder’ and ‘hard’ cards. I wanted to dog ear where I was, but if I did, I would lose the dog ear from when I was studying the ‘hardest’ cards.

What I needed was the ability to dog ear one ‘hardest’ card, one ‘harder’ card, one ‘hard’ card, and so on. So that’s what I did.

The challenge is explaining how this works to the user. This is not necessarily intuitive. In fact, the basic idea of dog earing cards might not be intuitive.

But, I have faith that users are smart and can figure this out. I believe the ability to dog ear many cards is a valuable feature. I hope you agree. Please let me know if it’s working or if you’d like to see changes to how dog earing cards works.

Like any other, Pretty Darn Smart benefits from a well designed web browser. In this case, a browser designed for tiny cell phone screens is particularly difficult to design.

It seems that Apple rose to the challenge. Once I gained faith in the device’s ability to discern which characters I was trying to type, I was able to use it quite efficiently.

(Although, a couple times it did register my n’s as m’s and, when that happened, it was a little difficult to detect since n and m look similar in such small fonts.)

The font-size on the browser was legible even without rescaling. Then, when the Apple guy demonstrated how to zoom in, the site looked like it was designed for the iPhone.

There were at least two improvements I noticed I could make to improve the Pretty Darn Smart experience for iPhone users. First, the “forwards” and “backwards” buttons might be better situated below the flashcards, so that they don’t move when they size of cards change.

Second, it might be a good idea to make the cards a little wider to take advantage more of the iPhone’s precious screen real estate.

Not only are people worried that this is a step backwards from Vatican II, but there is language during the Tridentine Mass on Good Friday before Easter calling for the conversion of Jews.

So why the change? One reason might be to normalize relations with a group called the “Society of St. Pius X” started by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

If you’d like to learn more about the Catholic Church and all the popes, take a look at the new flashcards I created.

That made a lot of sense to me. I studied German throughout high school and college. During my junior year, I studied at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria. My pronunciation was tolerable. I had a fair grasp on the grammar. But operating in a German speaking environment was still difficult.

What threw me off was the words. Statistically speaking, there are relatively few words that make up a relatively large percentage of the words people use day to day. What those numbers don’t reflect, however, is that even though someone might know the meaning of a large percentage of the individual words, they might still understand nothing at all. Sometimes not recognizing just one word can be the difference between complete clarity and utter confusion.

I studied Electrical Engineering and while I was in Vienna, I took a course in circuits. The first time I opened the textbook, I barely understood anything. I was worried. Class hadn’t even begun and I was already having trouble.

I reread the material, this time with my dictionary on hand. It was slow at first. There were a lot of new words. When I studied German in the States, I never learned the German words for “voltage”, “resistance”, or “current”.

Was the rest of the course going to be that difficult? Was I going to struggle through each chapter every day?

No. The class got easier. Much easier. Those three words: “Spannung” (voltage), “Widerstand” (resistance), and “Strom” (current) were the difference between comprehending almost nothing and comprehending almost everything.

…

Years later, I became more interested in Chinese. My experience learning German convinced me of one thing: it is possible to learn a foreign language. I was determined to learn Chinese using whatever methods or tools I could find.

I checked out books from the library, watched Chinese movies and television, ate dim sum in Chinatown, bought CD’s, and scoured the Internet for useful websites. Eventually, I wound up in China studying Chinese at Yantai University.

The class was almost entirely Asian and the other students had been dealing with Chinese characters much longer than I had. It was very stressful to be asked to read in front of class because, unlike in English, if you don’t recognize a character, there’s no way to sound it out. You just have to confess your ignorance to the class.

The list of words I was learning was growing too quickly. Pen and paper wasn’t an effective way to manage all the new material.

I took out my laptop and wrote up a little PERL script. Nothing fancy. It would simply show me a word, and, when I was ready, show me the word’s definition. Those are the humble origins of “Pretty Darn Smart”.

…

I’ve written and rewritten this script several times since then. I’ve added features. I’ve taken features away. I’ve experimented with a few other languages (like Javascript and php) and frameworks (like Yahoo’s Widgets).

When I stumbled on Ruby on Rails, a popular framework for developing web applications, it seemed like a perfect fit. The implementation went much smoother than anything I tried before. Finally, I’ve been able to realize my vision of how this flashcard program should work.

Please feel free to send me a note. I appreciate all the feedback I receive and, time permitting, try to incorporate that feedback into the website’s design.

Thanks for reading.