Sacred Games Glossary; Supermemo

[Jef]

Vikram Chandra, for his Bombay crime novel _Sacred Games_, has for a
long time had excellent glossaries available online for his novel at
http://vikramchandra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=174 He just wrote me
today to tell me that the Sacred Games glossary is now available in
Excel / OpenDoc format, see the XLS link on referenced page.

I highly recommend the glossary as a good resource for contemporary
Bombay and urban Hindi, slang, street gaalii, Hinglish with
considerable Marathi and other India language references. I plan to
use the Excel version, which I recommended he create, for use in my
own Supermemo ( www.supermemo.com ) Hindi study program. The
spreadsheet can easily be adapted to Supermemo use.

I would be interested also in hearing if anyone else is using
Supermemo or Flashcardexchange ( www.flashcardexchange.com ) for their
Hindi study. I have integrated many flashcardexchange card sets into
my supermemo database and use supermemo every day. I am slowly
building up to a thousand cards and hope eventually to have a 3000+
card database, which will be a very substantial working vocabulary.
Hopefully eventually I will have something worthy of publication.

I have two years of undergraduate study Hindi at University of
Wisconsin-Madison, as well as two years of study in Varanasi and New
Delhi. I am interested in contemporary urban and technical/engineering/
IT Hindi.

Jeffrey

[KellieJF]

Jef wrote:
> Vikram Chandra, for his Bombay crime novel _Sacred Games_, has for a
> long time had excellent glossaries available online for his novel at
> http://vikramchandra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=174 He just wrote me
> today to tell me that the Sacred Games glossary is now available in
> Excel / OpenDoc format, see the XLS link on referenced page.

Thanks, Jef, for posting this. I'm actually reading _Sacred Games_
right now, and was meaning to go check out the glossary. I was able to
guess the meaning of many of the Indian language references in SG but
there are also a lot that I couldn't guess.

<snip>

> I would be interested also in hearing if anyone else is using
> Supermemo or Flashcardexchange ( www.flashcardexchange.com ) for their
> Hindi study.

I am fairly useless with rote learning of vocabulary. If there is to
be any chance of any of it 'sticking', I have to learn it in context.
Does anyone else have this problem? Is it simply a case of
perseverance? The way it tends to stick is to translate texts and keep
lists of vocabulary in a column next to the source text. Then I carry
that around with me and read it on the train.

Cheers
Kellie

> Jeffrey

[Jef]

I personally cannot imagine a better way of developing a vocabulary of
several thousand words than using Supermemo. Supermemo, featured in
last month's Wired magazine [ http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak
], is more than just rote flashcard drilling. It uses a time-based
algorithm to bring back cards at the proper moment so that you retain
the information permanently. Traditional memorization techniques only
allow retention of about 40% of the information studied. In the late
1800s scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the "spacing effect":
the idea that memorization needs to be done on intervals that follow
an exponential-like curve.

If I could currently be immersed in a Hindi-speaking environment, that
would be ideal. But that is impractical for me now. With Supermemo I
can study all day long using my Palm Treo. By the time I get back to
India I want to be beyond intermediate fluency and since I already
have several years of college training, and am working with Shapiro's
Primer and Jain's Introduction to Hindi Grammar, I think by next year
I will have attained my goal without returning to classes. I am an
autodidact by nature.

Even if I were in an immersive language environment I still would want
to supplement that with a disciplined vocabulary-building program. But
some of that suits my temperament, and might not work well for others.
It works for me.

[KellieJF]

Interesting! I think the Pimsleur method worked using a similar time-
based mechanism...The repeating of information at the right spacing
might well overcome the problem I have had of material losing its
meaningfulness out of context. If I'm being reminded of the content at
appropriate intervals I might retain the context too.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm just about to load up with a bunch
of vocabulary I've captured from translating texts and trying to make
some of it stick over the next few weeks, so will read the Wired
article.