It’s been a while since I used the flash card feature here on CPod. I’m trying it again now and I’m noticing an interesting pattern develop. I’m sure the academics in the group won’t find my findings very surprising, but here they are:

For those of you who don’t have a Premium subscription, the flash card player has a few options. One of those is that it allows you to review your vocabulary either randomly or in the order you added it.

I started with the latter, reviewing the characters in the order I added them, starting back from the first characters I ever learned almost a year and a half ago. A few dozen characters in and I had a 100% accuracy rating.

When I hit the little “random” button, my accuracy rating plummeted to around the 42% mark. That number fluctuates, of course, but that’s the average.

Obviously, repetition is key here. I’ve simply seen the earlier characters more often. I’ve also notices that those earlier characters had fewer radicals and were easier to decipher, even when I didn’t immediately remember the meaning. A few seconds spent deciphering the components made them easier.

I would love love LOVE to see some Flash-based character recognition tool wherein you could hover your mouse over the different parts of the character and see the individual radicals light up, complete with a pop-up for their meanings. How much would that rock?

Another thing I’m discovering is that my retention on the characters is lower than my memory on the words themselves. Once I see the Pinyin, I usually smack my forehead and it all comes back to me.

Well… not all.

Anyway, back to the grind. I surely do miss the days when I was doing the Practice Plan (codename The Octagon) and I was spending a few hours every day studying. I remember making real progress there. I think I’m backsliding a bit. Can’t be helped, though. My life is busier now than it was then.

Still, moving forward by inches is still forward motion. As long as I don’t start going backward, I’ll take it.