Learning Toki Pona with Spaced Repetition

l3kn

I’m interested in using spaced repetition for learning languages of all kinds
(programming, spoken, constructed).

Over the past years, I’ve built / experimented with a number of tools,
https://github.com/l3kn/org-fc/ being the latest iteration.

I’d like to automate as much of the process as possible, scraping data from websites such as memrise.com and turning it into flashcards.

My ideal would be to press a button and upload a language / information of any kind to my mind.
While that’s not possible from a technological perspective, I think a SRS (spaced repetition system) like this is the closest we can get.

Learning Toki Pona is a good benchmark for this process because

it is a small language
it’s different enough from other languages that I can’t use context clues to guess the meaning of words

I’m using two flashcards for each word / sentence

Toki Pona -> English
English -> Toki Pona, typing in the answers to learn the grammar & spelling of words

I’m currently at 217 of the 450 cards I’ve imported,
once all of them are active, I’ll try to compile some statistics
with recall rates & review times of each word / sentence.

ice

l3kn My ideal would be to press a button and upload a language / information of any kind to my mind.
While that’s not possible from a technological perspective, I think a SRS (spaced repetition system) like this is the closest we can get.

Haha, that’s a pretty cyberpunk idea nicely downgraded to fit with our current technological abilities. I’ve never used SRS or flash cards before since I’ve stumbled on Anki and related concepts very recently, but it sure sounds interesting.

I’m wondering, how do you get so many cards compared to the number of Toki Pona words? I guess most of them are about grammar and words combinations?

l3kn

I think there are two cards (for both directions) for each of the 120 words,
the rest are example sentences & grammar.

ice

I’m currently working on a little database that I’ll probably use for some kind of interactive dictionary, and I’m starting to understand that while there’s only 120 words (officially, at least) this doesn’t include the languages, countries and major cities names. Not to mention glyphs and sign language. So yeah, even without grammar examples, I see how you get a much higher number of cards than 120.