Art LE’s blog

Finally, I've managed to get The American Heritage Dictionary. In my opinion it is the best English dictionary for native speakers of English (and learners of English too).

Team Hoyt: An Inspiring Story of Courage and Dedication

Today I was reading an article in The Star named “Mastering the mind”. A good stuff to read and to take some notes. Some excerpts:

Little was known about how memory functions when Tulving's first breakthrough came in 1956, with the publication of his paper explaining why repetition helps memory. While the notion of repetition seems self-evident, it turns out that how the repetitions are spaced apart is crucial — the farther apart, the better. One repetition a day for six days is better than one repetition an hour for six hours.

…

"One of the hallmarks of good memory is that it is organized, Craik says of Tulving's work. "He looked at how we can measure organization and what does it mean."
Tulving used a method called free recall learning, in which subjects were given a list of words and asked to recall them in any order. In repeating the exercise with the same list of words in different orders, subjects typically started to form associations, grouping the words according to how he or she organized them. The more effectively a person organized, the more words were recalled. "That work remains highly influential. It's part of the classic core of memory theory still today," Craik says

So, repetition is important. Spaced repetition in the right way is more important. And don’t mess up things in your head. Keep it organized.

P.S. Canada seems to be very obsessed with its multiculturalism and free society. Even in an article on memory they highlighted a sentence about “happiness in Canada”. :)

After reading Steve’s posts about the importance of words reviewing, after using a lot of flash cards programs I’ve managed to write my own program for words reviewing. A couple of hours of thinking and a little of coding and I got what I’ve wanted for a long time. A simple words reviewing program based on modified Leitner System. The problem with other words reviewing programs was that they were too complicated and ate a lot of time to prepare words for them. This program is a console-based, only 1kb in size (70 lines of code), but I’m happy with what I got because it’s based on my needs.

Does anyone write programs for personal use to speed-up the process of language learning?