Katakana Chart 2…

This one won’t be as pretty as my original one, but I’m posting it to share the gaps in my memory - I’m not sure if it’s due to lack of sleep, or to reading them more often than writing them, but when I first tried to produce the chart, I got 34/46 characters only. 

Trying to remember all the katakana from scratch after ages since writing them - ku is wrong, and 4 are still missing.

Since, I’m trying to remember the rest myself, I suppose some of the 34 could be misshapen, as I haven’t checked them yet. Not sure how well the colours come across on the photo/computer screen, but the ones in dark green were the first crop of 34 (although wa took me a second - I remembered the unused wo before it, which is ridiculous!).  The light blue ones are the ones that I had to slowly cudgel out of my memory. I tracked those at the bottom so I know which ones to drill on most. When I finally give up and add the last few, I will use a third colour to mark the ones I most need to study… 

I’ve been trying to remember them because I read a study (on studying, very meta ;)) that said that if you can’t remember something, then struggle to remember it and actually recall it, you will remember it a lot better in future. 

As opposed to instantly hopping on google and looking it up… one flexes your memory muscles and makes/reinforces connections for looking things up and accessing them, the other tells your brain it doesn’t need to remember anything, the internet is right there at its fingertips… 

Getting something wrong is supposed to do something similar, at least, so long as you actually see the correct answer (& understand it when you get it ;)).  Probably why duolingo lets us blunder around in the dark so much, making mistakes… But my point about getting the correct answer and understanding it are really important there.  They’re lacking that closing of the loop part.  They give the correct answer, but don’t explain wy this is right and yours was wrong.  Some of their questions have an awful lot of discussion about them (there’s one I saw recently about “my wife and I have three children” and the number of questions about “why is it ni wa?”, “should it be no or is ga acceptable?” And the order of the “sannin” and whether or not it can/should have particles too, plus people that have evidently misread the correct answer and think that was what they typed shows very clearly that they need extra information on some of their questions/grammar points.

Their algorithm also doesn’t know what is actually harder or not - part way through a lesson, it says “great work, now let’s make this harder!” (& I usually think “no, please, let’s not!”, often having just had a question like the niwa one I mentioned…) and then it gives you two or three really softball questions, and it makes no sense.  

In addition to that nonsense, our brains don’t like to make mistakes, even in private.  Apparently, mistakes are bad, evolutionarily speaking, so we are hardwired against them.  Makes it hard to experiment and take risks, even if you consciously know that making mistakes helps you learn and is part of the process of learning, subconsciously your brain is going “nope!  No mistakes!  Can’t!  Won’t!  And don’t make me look stupid in front of others!” So that might be an additional downside to the Duolingo model too… especially without closing the understanding loop to reduce those mistakes in future.

It is possible to approach something with the mindset that a mistake is actually progress - some of the harder puzzle games that I do, you can reach a point where you have to pick between two or more equally likely paths, and start filling in the consequences of that choice, until you either reach the end of the puzzle, or you get to a point where no move is possible (some of the higher sudoku puzzles can be like that - too many dependent loops to solve on inspection).  In those cases, it is not a mistake, but a branch eliminated and progress made.  It’s hard to hold that attitude towards a language, and speaking and practicing it in class though.  Our new sensei told us on Monday to make lots of mistakes in class because that is how we learn (& otherwise, she will have nothing to do ;)).

Back to memory reinforcement - when I hit my gaps, I tried other ways to recall them, such as in words, which is how I got ni (from Kenya), and su (from ice cream).  Strangely, Kenya was enough to give me ni, but not ke, which is still stubbornly missing in action.  Nepal & Norway gave me ‘ne’ and ‘no’ respectively, and fast enough to not count as a gap.  After a gap, mekishiko and roshia gave me me & ro, respectively.  I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t remember ya - it felt like it was right there, on the tip of my tongue, so to speak, and that it was similar to the hiragana for it.  I think that was part of the problem, it was so similar to it that it was getting lost and my brain kept giving me the hiragana ya instead.  Finally, visualizing it small, for the glides, got past that block & out it popped.  It was indeed similar to the hiragana and easier to draw :). Kanji gave me chi and ha and hi (I had momentarily blanked on hi, and I had been doing some early kanji recently and hi is alternately called the katakana hi radical, ha from hachi, and chi because when I was practicing thousand, I kept having to remind myself of how the curves go - like chi).

So although I will practice the light blue ones, the ones I am most concerned about are the gaps - ke, nu, mu, and ru.  Because at this point in time, I am going to stop writing this post and go look them up, and then they won’t have that “I managed to remember it eventually” reinforcement of pathways.

ETA: ku was plain wrong, and I would have realised if I could have remembered ke (& they are tied together in my head because they are so similar, so not surprising that it was wrong).  I had a vague feeling that one of the ones that I was missing was similar to fu, and it was nu…. Evidently, I’m going to have to try writing katakana more often, either as a chart like this, or as words/sentences of english (the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, anyone? 😉),