A Brief History of ‘Pretty Darn Smart’
A professor of mine in college used to force his students to memorize Maxwell’s Equations before the final exam. We could write down anything else we wanted on a cheat sheet and use it during the exam. He explained his reasoning like this; if you never memorized anything, it’d be “like saying you speak German, just don’t know any words”.
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.
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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”.
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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.