The Flash Card Project (Supermemo and Beyond?)

Language Learning Chinese
1

OK, here’s the separate post for the Supermeo Database Project. The reason it’s titled Supermemo and Beyond is because since they will be made into spreedsheet files they should be able to be used a number of different ways (like making physical cards, used in other programs, etc.)

Here’s my loose idea on how things could progress. Some people choose a topic/book to make cards for. Parts of the topic/book are assigned to each person. The person then works on the database from home. Then, when all the pieces are don, they are uploaded to Google Spreadsheets to be put together, then that file will be downloaded, converted and posted somewhere for all to see (a separate website?)

While on GS everyone can check the file for errors.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the original spreadsheet files for the Shida Book 1 and 2, but I probably don’t need them. I’d recommend completing the Shida series. Next book being Book 2 (下 .)

We would first have to agree on what fields go where and how things would be split up.

There’s me rough outline. How does that sound?

[quote=“scomargo”]Perhaps we need to make this a separate thread?

There’s two minor problems that I can see this project having:

  1. we need somebody in charge to manage the list of people that have read/edit access to the file.
  2. It’d be nice if we could have people contribute something before they get access so as to encourage people to work together. However, people would also need to know what is already there, so that they could know if there’s something they could contribute. I don’t know how this could be done, though.[/quote]

To #1 I think multiple people could be in charge of multiple projects (eventually.) I’ll be in charge of these Shida ones (and will only be in charge of one at a time) but if someone wanted to start on TLIs books right now, there you go.

That reminds me, I wouldn’t want to limit these to just Chinese. I’ll be starting my Taiwanese quest soon, so that will be a project I’ll want to complete.

To #2, I suppose it should eb up to the project leader to decide who does what. For the Shida books it would be easy to assign things chapter by chapter. It’d be harder for something more abstract, but I’m sure something could be figured out.

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I’ll contribute the vocab from the Maryknoll Taiwanese Book 1, when you get this show on the road. Good plan, MTK!

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I’m willing to start working on ShiDa2 下 if someone else is. We could split it up, one person doing even chapters and one person doing odd – I think Miltownkid suggested this earlier.

I like that we’d be uploading the original database as opposed to an already supermemo-ready file, because I want to be able to mess around with the databases (for English-Chinese vs. Chinese-English practice…because there are 3 fields, I can’t get the “reverse” feature to work the way I want it to).

I’m also doing Taiwan Today right now. I just finished my first chapter (after much playing around with Open Office Calc), and I think I can start punching these databases out efficiently. Anyone want to start with Shida 2 下 or Taiwan Today?

4

In Supermemo, if you want to review Eng-Chi or Chi-Eng, you don’t need to use the “reverse” feature in Supermemo. All you need to do is duplicate your database, and change the template used to display the cards.

For example, in the Chi-Eng drills, make your template show Chinese in the question display, and both Chinese and English in the answer display.

For the Eng-Chi drills, go to the dupicate databse you made, and change the template so that the question display shows English, and the answer display shows English and Chinese.

If you want to, you can then combine these two databases by changing the “category” names in your duplicate database so that they are no longer the same. (You could use C01 and E01 for the two different sets of flashcards for lesson 1). This is what I do, and combining the databases reduces the clutter nicely.

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Also, I have spreadsheets a good deal of Taiwan Today and most of Shi-Da Book 3. I can post these databases to the Google spreadsheets.

I seem to have run into a roadblock since my kids were born, so if someone could help me with the last 4 chapters of Shi-Da Book 3, I would be very greatful. My kids are taking up all of my time now, and I don’t have much time to make databases. I havent’ done anything in the last month, unfortunately, and I’m afraid I may not finish book 3 anytime soon without some assistance with the flashcards.

The only thing is, I make my databases very personalized, and I usually skip vocabulary words that I already know well. Someone might need to supplement my vocab lists with the missing words to make them complete. I also sometimes add words that I encounter in a lesson that I don’t know, even though the words are not “official vocabulary”.

Due to my time contraints I mentioned above, I’d be happy to contribute to the spreadsheets, but I don’t think I can manage them. Once someone gets a spreadsheet up and running, please post a message, and I’ll PM you my google username.

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Yes please. Let me know what I can do to help.

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Yes please. Let me know what I can do to help.[/quote]
OK, that 2 people. And I’m a third. Doing the Taiwanese Book was going to be my next big project that I was going to see o completion (even if I had to do it army of one style.) I’ll try to get a post up this week outlining how we will go about subitting and putting the work together.

Someone has also shown interest to me (in the form of a PM) in making a database for beginners. I think vocabulary based off of a word frequency list would be a good one for beginners. I’ll talk about that one more later as well.

So Marynol Book 1 is a definite project.

8

I have the TLI Intermediate Chinese Dialogues book already finished (both the 上 and the 下). I have all of the vocab, including many example sentences, with pinyin and English (plus a fair amount of incidental classroom vocab) in Excel and Palm Supermemo forms.

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By the way, great idea pooling together all of the labour! I’ve become a bit of a slave to Supermemo, though. I would never have memorized as much vocab as I have without it but it has become my main way to learn and I don’t get enough real world practice and lack context in which to learn in an efficient, natural way. This is why I’ve been putting whole sentences into Supermemo to drill vocab and grammar at the same time and try to give myself a smidgen of context.
Maybe this is for another thread, but does anyone have advice on how to use Supermemo most effectively?
I love the program and now use it religiously and the memorization algorithm is fantastic and highly efficient. I’m just curious about people’s strategies using Supermemo and what works best for them.
I’ll share this: For characters I have a database for writing and a database for reading. If I can’t produce the written character I make myself write it 8 times. For the reading of characters I do the same thing but it’s much easier to recognize and I can handle a lot more characters. After 600 characters I’m now turning off the tap on trying to memorize how to write any more but will use Supermemo to keep those 600 active in my repertoire. It was taking up way too much of my study time to memorize those and it’s not often I’ll be writing characters anyway. More often I’ll be typing them.
Also, how do you handle supermemo overload? What do you do when you’re being asked over 1000 questions a day? Put aside a lot of time to catch up, cheat to catch up quickly or prune off a few databases or categories?

Your thoughts, strategies and tips are all appreciated. Keep up the study!

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It seems like you won’t need to do anything complicated to get the vocabulary lists for the first two Shi-Da books. I found text files that have words that can be copied and pasted into Excel. Get them while they’re still available:
ikotcha.com/documents.php?ty … &item_ID=3
It seems like cybern8 made these files, and I believe he used to post on Forumosa. Thanks, cybern8!

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Cheers Paddy Joe,
I’d be interested in seeing those TLI vocabulary lists.

As for Supermemo overload, I think as long as you do just a little each day (say test yourself on 50-100 words), you will eventually get through your backlog of words.

Even better, you might want to commit just one lesson at a time instead of committing a whole book of words all at once. That way you will have a nice steady stream of words to be tested on. That’s what I do, and I’ve never become overloaded with words to be tested on. It also helps if you don’t take more than 4-7 days off from using Supermemo.

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Was doing a little supermemo investigative work this morning and came across this:

[quote]XML (in preparation)

Data export/import in three formats (Q&A, XML, tab-delimited). Expected Q2 2006. Free for users of SuperMemo for Palm Pilot[/quote]

When the utility comes out, I’ll be able to convert all the databases I have now. I think a couple (a few) of us have started the Taiwanese Book 1 database file. That should be coming soon… (I’ll finally start some inputing today :smiley:.)

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scomargo, have you been able to get those shida book databases to work for you? I had seen that site before, and when I download it, it’s just garbage. I’m using open office calc, and no matter what font I use (I have like 10 to choose from) I can’t get the characters to show up.

Also, I’ve tried using multiple “field delimiters” (tab, //, etc) to get the fields seperated (like characters, pinyin, translation)…but I’ve only gotten them about 90% seperated, i.e. in about 10% of my fields I have characters and pinyin together, or pinyin and translation together or something.

You mentioned Excel…if I get excel, do you think I won’t have any problem?

To everyone else – I’ve been working on Taiwan Today and I’m on chapter 6, so almost half-way done. I know scomargo has a taiwan today file, but I wanted to make an authoritative one that covers all of and only the Taiwan Today words. Just letting you know that progress is being made =)

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Taffy, Mil

What’s the status of the Taiwanese vocab database?

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I could probably lend a hand. I have ten books from Beijing University Press (Elementary Spoken 1&2, Elementary Reading 1&2, Intermediate Spoken 1&2, Intensive Reader 1&2, and Extensive Reader 1&2) that I’ll be mining for vocab anyway, plus whatever they give me at NCKU.

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[quote=“Tianfu”]scomargo, have you been able to get those Shi-Da book databases to work for you? I had seen that site before, and when I download it, it’s just garbage. I’m using open office calc, and no matter what font I use (I have like 10 to choose from) I can’t get the characters to show up.

Also, I’ve tried using multiple “field delimiters” (tab, //, etc) to get the fields seperated (like characters, Pinyin, translation)…but I’ve only gotten them about 90% seperated, i.e. in about 10% of my fields I have characters and Pinyin together, or Pinyin and translation together or something.

You mentioned Excel…if I get excel, do you think I won’t have any problem?

To everyone else – I’ve been working on Taiwan Today and I’m on chapter 6, so almost half-way done. I know scomargo has a taiwan today file, but I wanted to make an authoritative one that covers all of and only the Taiwan Today words. Just letting you know that progress is being made =)[/quote]
Check your PMs regarding Taiwan Today. I’ll send you what I have and you can fill in the gaps.

I used Excel, and those Shi-Da text files seemed to work perfectly for me. Granted, I only checked the first one or two hundred words. The only (minor) problem is you’ll have to add another column to specify the lesson number of the vocabulary words if you wish to categorize them (at least thats how I do it). All in all, it should save you a lot of time if you get it working okay.

I think a lot of people would be happy to contribute some vocabulary, but we need to get at least one shared spreadsheet file set up for that to happen. It may not be necessary to have several separate files for the different topics unless you would just like to have the extra control over them. One file can contain different worksheets (I believe that’s the term) or tabs that allow multiple spreadsheets in a single file. Anybody up for setting one up?

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[quote=“Feiren”]Taffy, Mil

What’s the status of the Taiwanese vocab database?[/quote]

I’ve entered all the vocab for chapters 1-8. Google spreadsheets can’t handle some of the tone markings (particularly 8th tone) used in POJ so I’ve just used tone numbers. If you PM me with your email address I’ll add you to the spreadsheet permissions. I’m pretty busy at the moment so I think my progress in adding vocab will slow down for a while until I get through my current backlog of “must-do” stuff. :frowning:

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Hello all,

I am just about to start Shi Da book 2 下 and I am wondering if anyone has the Supermemo flashcard list for this book.

I downloaded the list from Ikotcha.com (great work!) and I am now trying to create the .pdb file … but it seems to be full of garbage. Some Chinese characters and PinYin, but mostly junk. I seem to export into notepad fine, using the drag/drop technique, export in one of the .txt formats … and then just junk.

Any help would be super appreciated as Supermemo is more like Chinese crack to me at the moment.

Super thanks,

Jonathan

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[quote=“heresjonny”]Hello all,

I am just about to start Shi-Da book 2 下 and I am wondering if anyone has the Supermemo flashcard list for this book.

I downloaded the list from Ikotcha.com (great work!) and I am now trying to create the .pdb file … but it seems to be full of garbage. Some Chinese characters and Pinyin, but mostly junk. I seem to export into notepad fine, using the drag/drop technique, export in one of the .txt formats … and then just junk.

Any help would be super appreciated as Supermemo is more like Chinese crack to me at the moment.

Super thanks,

Jonathan[/quote]
All I can tell you is use copy/paste. I’m not sure what your drag/trop technique is, but copying and pasting works for me.

Here’s how I did it:
I copied the text from those Ikotcha.com text files into Excel, got the vocab situated like I wanted it in Excel, copied selected rows of vocab from Excel into a new file in Notepad, saved the text file in Notepad, and ran the Supermemo conversion utility on the saved text file to create the Supermemo database file. Then put that newly created database file on your PDA, and your good to go.

Other than that, the only thing I can say is make sure your character encoding is correct.

Has anyone else made any progress on adding words to a shared database? I’d be eager to hear what there is, and possibly contribute some of my own vocabulary.

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heresjonny:

It seems like your text file might be lacking the tab information when you save it to sort the data into columns. In Excel you can save as “text - tab delimited” and columns A through G become your Supermemo data with column G being the category name. I think there’s another way to make this work if you don’t have Excel or a spreadsheet with the same saving feature but I don’t know how that’s done.

Scomargo:
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you mean but once you have your database in Excel and arranged neatly you can add whatever you want and then transfer over to Supermemo and merge with other databases if you so choose. I usually write new categories for my existing databases. I save them as new Excel (tab-delimited text) files, then convert and send to Supermemo with a new name, then merge together with an existing database (by renaming to the same name as an existing database). People should be able to share data together in a similar way as long as you use categories to keep things organized and avoid repeating flashcards. By merging you also save your current progress on your flashcards and don’t have to start afresh with a whole new database. Also I sort of promised you TLI databases a while back. PM me with your e-mail and I’ll happily send them to you.

Cheers,
PJ