Memorization

I wrote a piece previously about using JavaScript in Anki cards. Although I haven’t found many uses for employing this idea, it does come up from time-to-time including a recent use-case I’m writing about now.

After downloading a popular French frequency list deck for my daughter to use, I noticed that it omits the gender of nouns in the French prompt. In school, I was always taught to memorize the gender along with the noun. For example, when you memorize the word for law, “loi” you should mermorize it with either the definite article “la” or the indefinite article “une” so that the feminine gender of the noun is inseparable from the noun itself. But this deck has only the noun prompt and I was afraid that my daughter would fail to memorize the noun’s gender. JavaScript to the rescue.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

Memorization has a bad reputation in education today, but it underpins the abilities of all sorts of high-performing people. I often refer to this article from 1999 about how to better organize information for memorization.

My favorite pieces of advice:

• Do not learn (memorize) if you do not understand.
• Stick to the minimum information principle.
• Use imagery
• Avoid sets and enumerations
• Use mnemonic techniques.