Pretty Darn Smart

About two weeks ago I started an experiment to see how much Spanish I could learn over the course of two weeks studying 20 minutes each day.  I just finished up a few days ago and tested my recall.  Here are the results:

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.

A new feature has just been added that lets users track their progress with a chart that looks something like this:

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.