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Learning to Learn

(kevin.the.li)
320 points jklm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.306s | source
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dinobones ◴[] No.41910980[source]
I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language.

In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277.

I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?

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mc3301 ◴[] No.41911098[source]
Give learning Japanese a try. It's a meta-learning adventure! There are 3 distinct classes of characters (two syllabaries that each have a perfect matching pair with the other, 46 each plus some compounds) and the third are (mostly) chinese Kanji characters. Fun stuff!
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supriyo-biswas ◴[] No.41911121[source]
I wonder if there is a similar "Pareto priciple"-esque approach that one could use to learn Japanese.
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opan ◴[] No.41911168[source]
There are the "radicals" which can help you to interpret a new kanji, since they're the kanji building blocks.
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1. drivers99 ◴[] No.41918055[source]
I highly recommend this site for that. https://kanji.koohii.com/ which goes along with the book "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig (strictly speaking, you don't need the book, but I think it will help understand the idea behind the process). But the stories (mnemonics) on the website are better than the ones in the book, but also let you put in your own stories. You can also vote and choose existing stories, so there are crowd sourced mnemonics that other people have said work for them. One interesting side effect of that is a lot of people decided to use Spider Man whenever there is a "thread" radical, for more memorable stories. I did it around 15 years ago and learned how to write all the 2000+ commonly used kanji in a few months (9 months for me; 2-3 months for a more diligent person). It uses a spaced repetition system (Lietner box method).