Flashcard Reunion
In early 2007, my desktop hard drives repeatedly crashed simultaneously with the Palm that they were backing up, costing me my data for the last time. I stopped using Palm for personal info management, switching entirely to Google and giving up having it in my pocket.
I had been using the Supermemo flashcard program to memorize Lojban vocbulary since August of two thousand four. I faced a backlog of hundreds of flashcards, when I had just finished slogging through all of them when the same thing happened a month or so earlier. Enough was enough. I gave up the flashcards for more than a year.
But then I received a free Palm OS computer that conserves memory even when the battery runs out, and with backup to SD cards. Last month I re-installed Supermemo at Jen's urging. I'm at 260 words. Committing thirty flashcards a day, by the end of the month I'll catch up to my 1,500th word, in the soaring altitudes of words like "bavmi: barley" and "dzipo: Antarctican". Then I can focus on the remaining 500 to the summit, climbing over craggy precipices such as "ru'o: Cyrillic alphabet shift-key".
The root words and tags will be complete. From that mountaintop I will start building a tower of Babel. That is to say, I'll make my own new flash cards to test me on the most useful of the eight thousand compound words that have been invented so far.
I'm tremendously pleased with the success of the spaced-repetition method, that I still know so many of them. Hello, "banzu: suffice". Hello, "cipni: bird". It feels like a reunion.
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