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January 30, 2013

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Tutorials

Automating your Japanese study schedule

Introduction

Pre-Japanese, I tried to optimize my self-study schedule with my PC. It was a cyberculture thing—the prefix ‘cyber’ comes from the Greek ‘to steer or pilot’. Better DIY through circuitry. With language learning, the same desire crept in; I discovered Getting Things Done and related scheduling software. Discarding the trendy cult stuff, I found a quaint program called MyLifeOrganized. I mention MLO for historical purposes. We won’t be using it.

I made my first attempt at an automated schedule, factoring in both deliberate study (e.g. Anki), and spontaneous periods of incidental engagement with media. After all, only a would-be guru or novice either/or learner would treat efficiency and fun as mutually exclusive. (See Paul Nation’s Four Strands for more on this idea.)

While cruising for Litestep skins I discovered a far superior program for automating my study schedule: Rainlendar. Once I realized the epic potential of this freeware, everything changed. I updated my puny regimen with all the new strategies I’d come up with.

Now, each day I simply look at my desktop to see, sleekly designed and neatly organized, everything I want to do.

Interested? Let’s begin.

寿 - Longevity - Yoriko Yoshida

Rainlendar

  1. You can procure Rainlendar here. I am using the StaticaEN skin, myself.
  2. Take some time to familiarize yourself with Rainlendar.
  • (Unrelated to language study, once you’ve installed Rainlendar, you might also want this weather widget (you can mix and match widgets from various skins), using it with the relevant Yahoo woeid.)

You’ll notice Rainlendar differentiates between Events and Tasks. Arrange and tweak the appearance to your liking (e.g. transparency, size). What we’re going to be using is the To Do list, for day-specific tasks—a flexible idea I took from GTD where you schedule tasks for any time on a day rather than a specific time. For non-Japanese study, I also use Events for time-specific tasks.

  • Personally, I arrange the calendar at bottom right, typically keeping the To Do List closed, clicking the star on the calendar to open it as necessary.
  • My To Do list is positioned at the top right, and stretches down above the calendar as a long column if necessary, running along the right side of the screen.
  • Primary Sort Order for the list is by Category, Secondary Sort Order is by Due Date.

Schedule

Now then. I simply began adding new Tasks with Japanese as the category. You can add tasks gradually over the course of a week or so, no need to pressure yourself to build the schedule wholesale in one go. I suggest you use the Four Strands as a guiding principle.

I have a set of task types that go as follows: Media Input, Downloads (e.g. films, written media, music), New Cards, Expired Cards, Preparation, Games, Template Switch, &c.

  • For example, every day I have Expired Cards as a task. I set the start and due time to 12 am and 11:30 pm, generally. I have a brief description typed in a provided space, telling myself to review expired cards in all decks, and there I list the decks I’m currently using as well. You can edit the description for any of these tasks as often as you want as your aims change or as you make adjustments. Under the Recurrence tab, I set it to repeat every day, forever.
  • Template Switch refers to Production cards and Recognition cards in decks with a vocabulary focus, or Vocabulary cards and Comprehension cards for my subs2srs deck, so in those cases I have a task for Template Switch: Extemporaneous (my vocabulary deck), and Template Switch: Subs2srs deck. These are set for different days of the week, usually recurring once a week. In the description I usually type in ‘do x cards’ (e.g. ~15). This refers to doing new cards.
  • Media Input is as you would imagine. Each week I try to simply engage in different types of media, a different type on a different day, so I will have Media Input: Film one day, Media Input: Books on another, et cetera. I tend to add notes specific to strategies I have for the media; for instance, for films I might make a note about reviewing corresponding Subs2srs cards to prime the movie, or using various tools to supplement the experience (e.g. Kage Shibari), etc. I also have a task for ‘extemporaneous’ media, which is primarily web-reading supplemented with Realtime Import.
  • Downloads just keeps me current on media, so I download different types on different days, every week. Of course, I only download free stuff, or buy digital downloads. I would never, ever pirate media when I could wait ages for it to be officially subtitled and then import it at exorbitant prices.
  • New Cards is also divided by different decks; recurring each week on different days. With a description of how many cards I’m adding to it, what strategies I’m using, etc.
  • Preparation I use for text and video, processing them with Subs2SRS, extracting lists of words, creating decks using audiobooks with transcripts, finding collocations, etc. Examples are Preparation: Books, Preparation: Subs2SRS.
  • Games simply refers to doing crosswords, word searches, typing games (e.g. FlickFan), whatever comes to mind.
  • I also have a few other tasks set up, such as Delocalization, which refers to my periodically finding a webpage or whathaveyou and replacing English with Japanese where useful. See also.

So as you can see, the schedule in toto has me regularly acquiring Japanese media, processing it with various tools for various strategies, and simply watching or listening or reading. It also has me consistently reviewing expired cards and adding new cards from all templates of the decks I’m studying. All this is spread out over the course of a week so that no particular task type or deck or medium is clustered together. We want to spread out the workload to complementary tasks, and make sure everything gets its fair share.

  • I have Hide Upcoming and Completed tasks checked for my To Do list, and each day as I finish a task, I right-click it and check Completed, so that it vanishes from sight until its next occurrence. Under Options→Advanced→Task List I have ‘Number of days the list shows’ set to 1.
  • I also have End of Day Retrospective and Weekly Review tasks set up. See this post (look for the later sections on motivation and the L2 self) for what I do there (review what I have or haven’t accomplished, examine goals, &c.)
  • I also have a task for Limitless, reminding me of various strategies I mentioned in those posts here on scientific meditation, n-backing, exercise and diet (including omega-3 supplementation), et cetera.
  • If you have similar tasks set up as I have listed, you can set up tasks and subtasks – Media Input as a task, with Media Input: Films, etc. as subtasks. The subtasks are indented so it might make it easier to peruse the list. If you need to turn tasks into subtasks, then temporarily set the Primary Sort to Custom, and drag the tasks onto and slightly to the right of the main task you want to organize them under.
  • It’s worth noting that for tasks involving deliberate study, I tend to treat the schedule as setting the maximum work per day, but for incidental study, e.g. media, I tend to use it as a minimum.

I have been using the above for a long while now: It revolutionized my study, making it streamlined and removing a lot of the stress of trying to keep track of everything, and I could never go back.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Output. You can figure a lot of that out based on your own output strategies and how you’d work them into Rainlendar tasks, but rest assured, my next post is devoted to comprehensible output.