After reading this post on Confessions of a Language Addict, I've started thinking a bit more seriously about "the commitment problem" with spaced repetition which I recently wrote about. To summarize the problem: Spaced repetition works great if you are committed to quizzing your flashcards everyday. But inevitably, you will have to stop for some period time.  When you come back, the number of expired cards could overwhelm you.

I was using Memorati™ religiously while I was reading the first Harry Potter book. It was fantastic. After finishing the book, I stopped doing flash cards for about 1 week. I needed a break. I have over 2.500 cards and I was on a very strict regimen. Several weeks have gone by and I have still been unable to catch up.

Last Wednesday, I was discussing learning and spaced repetition with a co-worker. A couple good things came out of this conversation.

Firstly, that I should blog more. This inspired me to finish up an introductory article on spaced repetition that I had been working on for Memorati™. I also decided to try and make Tuesday be blog-day. Since I spend so much time writing each entry, Tuesday will really just be blog-publish-day, but thats fine, whatever gets me to post more.

We also discussed my experience using Memorati with its algorithms and some things that have been unsatisfying about them. Those things are:

• The aggressiveness of the algorithm used should vary with the number of cards a user has decided to tackle. Aggressive algorithms work better for lots of cards but less aggressive is better for fewer cards.

Finally, the Memorati™ revamp is live! Now that the ground work is laid, expect lots of new community functionality! I'm also going to be begin setting up The Lingwo™ Project website so that I can begin separating the commercial and open source aspects of Memorati as I described earlier.

To follow-up on my dijit.Dialog comments (and here!), I ended-up abandoning my fork. I decided that the original positioning algorithm was acceptable, so my changes have simply boiled-down to:

// so I can use dialog.addChild(...)
dojo.extend(dijit.Dialog, dijit._Container.prototype);

// Called after first showing the dialog, to disable the ability to move it
dialog._moveable.destroy();

The title of this post is very misleading... I could already speak Polish at an intermediate-ish level before I started reading Harry Potter. However, this experience has really taught me alot!

What and why?

First, some background. Along with my own evolving ideas about language acquisition I've recently (maybe over the last 6 months?) become interested in the ideas of Stephen Krashen and Steve Kaufmann. They both emphasize "comprehensable input" as the primary means to language acquisition. This means reading and listening.

So, I decided that I wanted to read more in Polish. I had two primary goals:

• To expand my vocabulary.
• To read something interesting that I would enjoy.

I chose Harry Potter for the following reasons:

I haven't posted in awhile, I apologize! Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, however, I didn't make it to mass because we were hit with a massive blizzard. I walked home from work, partly because the buses stopped running and partly because I'm bad-ass. ;-) It was good exercise.

Here are my projects as of late:

• Released POE::Component::MessageQueue version 0.1.8! I have to give most of the credit to Paul Driver who really did all the work this release. But its still exciting!