I’ve been thinking for a long time about utilizing Memrise’s spaced repetition system for Japanese writing practice. It’s something that I’ve been neglecting for way too long now, and I’d like to take a shot soon at setting up a course that will give me regular reminders to practice each of the characters.
So my idea is this: Each Japanese character gets an entry in the course, as if you were answering a vocabulary prompt, but obviously, since you’re doing the writing practice itself outside of Memrise, the ‘answer’ would have to be something unconventional. I was thinking of making the ‘answer’ to everything something like " ** ". So in theory, you could judge yourself on how well you did by either entering " ** " to get a green for a good result, " * " to get a yellow for a so-so result, or nothing at all to get a red for a bad result.
The problem is that this would clearly be exploitable for ‘easy points’, as you could just copy the " ** " to the clipboard, then ‘answer’ everything by pasting it in. I can’t think of any practical way to make it more complicated without getting in the way of the course’s intended purpose: to let the user easily judge their own writing skills. I don’t especially care about people getting ‘easy points’ off of it in itself, but I’m worried that it could potentially get the course deleted.
So what do you guys think? Should I just keep such a course for personal use, in order to keep it away from potential cheaters? I think it could benefit others if I made it public, and it would provide additional incentive for me to work on it, but I don’t want my hard work to get thrown away simply because some bad apples decided to abuse the course and get it deleted as a ‘point farming’ course. Any opinions would be welcomed, and I’d especially appreciate if any staff members could offer some insight as to whether or not such a course would really be in danger if it were abused, seeing as it would actually be a real course, intended for helping with learning, albeit an easily exploited one.
Seems like a reasonable idea, but if you want to test yourself on writing the character, what are you planning to use as a prompt? If you use the character itself, then that might lessen the effectiveness of the test, since you would have seen the character before you began writing it.
I think a way to accomplish something similar to what you’ve proposed but in a way that would be more difficult to cheat on would be to make a course that prompts on something, like the English definition, and then has you type the Japanese character as the answer. Then, to use the course, you could start the course, see the English (or whatever) prompt, then write the Japanese character, and then, if you remembered how to write it, type the character and hit “enter”. If you didn’t remember how to write the character, you would just hit “enter” without entering an answer, so that the answer would be counted as incorrect.
If you wanted to prompt on the character, then I think making the answer be the same as the prompt would probably work okay. Sure, it would still be fairly easy to cheat by copying and pasting the character, but I think that would be slow enough that it would probably make the course not terribly attractive to cheaters.
It’s true that with this way, marking answers as partially correct probably wouldn’t work well, but I don’t see a huge loss there. Marking the character as totally incorrect seems to me like it would probably still work fine.
No need to game it. Just make a note for users ‘Mark wrong if you don’t write it correctly’ and leave it at that. Even Anki does that.
I created two types of Kanji courses. One is the standard Heisig Keyword to Kanji while the other is technically Kanji to Yomi or Yomi to Kanji using words from Core 2k Optimized. It’s easy enough to cover up the multiple choices, write out the kanji first, see if you got it write (you almost always know it on sight) then make the call to purposely choose the wrong answer.
@neoncube: I was thinking of using the English definitions of the kanji as the prompt, so as to not give the user a reminder of what the kanji looked like at testing time, along with some of the readings as tags, to try to clear up any ambiguities. It might be reasonable to add that small extra step as you suggested. It would still be fairly easy to answer, but not ‘efficient’ enough to become a target for point farming. Maybe I could also set it up so that you copy and paste the English prompt for the answer. Something for me to think on, anyway.
@Nukemarine: Setting the course to multiple choice only is another interesting idea I hadn’t considered. I could perhaps make the kanji the answer, set it to multiple choice, and expect the answers to not get looked at until after writing it out. That would also make it harder to cheat without passing much extra burden on legitimate learners. Thanks for sharing the courses. I think I’ll give those a look before I get to seriously building my course, since I might end up being able to use one of them for the same effect.
Thanks again for the ideas. It’s a big help. I have some more to think on for it now. If anyone else has any opinions though, they’re always welcome.
I hardly ever use mobile devices, to be honest, so I couldn’t really say. lol
I did take a brief look a while back, and I found a nice app called “Obenkyo”, which let me draw the kanji and pick which ones to include in each session, but there was no spaced repetition system in place. It remembered which characters I had trouble with, and included those more often, which I thought was a nice feature, but nothing would ever be ‘due’ for review. It made no difference to the app whether it had been a day since my last review or several months.
What I’m looking for is something that will remind me on a schedule to practice certain characters, rather than something where I just practice in general, whenever I have the time, since realistically, I never end up getting to things like that. It would be ideal for me to have it integrated with Memrise, since I’m already going through my reviews there every day.
While I would personally prefer to do my writing practice on paper/dry erase boards, if there are any apps that you would recommend, I’d be happy to try them out, assuming they work on my old tablet.
I simply set Memrise to a handwriting font on both my smartphone and the website, and every time a kanji word came up I wrote it down on paper while copying the font. So if I wanted to learn to write specific kanji I’d make a single-kanji course (to memorize the meaning or whatever), but if I wasn’t in a rush then I’d just write kanji exactly as they came in any of the courses I was learning Japanese from.
You didn’t really learn to write that many kanji, though - correct? I thought you weren’t that concerned because your teacher had said everything was digital nowadays. Handwriting is definitely not something I practice that much for that very reason.
Not knowing how to write any isn’t a fault of the system I was using to practice, it’s the fault of my laziness (I stopped using the system after I double-checked with my teacher that we never had to learn how to write kanji again for the rest of the degree, starting in 3rd semester). I was learning really fast when I did do it though, there were clear improvements from day to day.
I’m going to be an exchange student in Japan now and THEY’LL be forcing us to handwrite kanji so I’m gonna have to start up again just to ensure I’m not that one idiot who can’t even write 生. Sigh.
