kangmi: learning korean

Supermemo

I’ve started Supermemo collections. I’ve deleted Supermemo collections. I think about making Supermemo collections. I’ve yet to dream about Supermemo collections, but I’m sure it’s coming.

What I’ve learned
I’ve learned a lot about Supermemo in the last few weeks. My most significant findings (available here as a primary source):

• Supermemo is not about learning new material. Supermemo is a tool to remember material you have already learned. This is extremely important, and not understanding it caused me to get hung up for a while.

• Creating good question and answer pairs is essential. It’s best to make the question and answer focus on one piece of information, rather than several.

What I use
I use the free online version of Supermemo, which uses the QA format. I haven’t tried (and currently don’t intend to) either the desktop or handheld versions. The QA format can be created in any plain text editor, which is a lot easier than entering them online.

How I’m using it
As I am learning Korean, and not English, as far as possible, all of my Supermemo questions and answers will be in Korean.

Understandably, this is not a simple process, and it’s certainly not speedy. It’s not a matter of creating a QA pair like this:

Q: Wednesday
A: 수요일

It’s more along the lines of creating a pair like this:

Q: 일주일의 넷째날을 뭐라고 하나요?
A: 수요일이예요.

How I’m doing
You’ll remember that it’s neither a simple nor a speedy process. I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out the best way to create question and answer pairs. Language is not some hard list of facts. It’s ethereal, transient, growing, changing, dynamic. It’s clay, and Legos, and sticks and stones and boxes...never the same thing twice.

So you can understand why integrating my foo-foo perspective with Supermemo has been a long, slow process. These resources have been useful in giving me ideas for creating better Supermemo language items.

The future of Supermemo at kangmi
My orderly heart likes Supermemo, and it also likes what it’s doing for my retention. In the interest of furthering Korean language acquisition worldwide, I will be adding a Supermemo blog here at kangmi. Most posts will be lists of QA items that you should be able to use in your own online Supermemo account. You may wish to use some, but not all, items in any given post. You may wish to edit items for your own purposes.

And once I figure out this whole membership thing, you should be able to add your own Supermemo QAs.

Posted by kangmi on October 6, 2004 at 8:00 AM0 comments