Skritter @ IALLT
- 1. A Better Method for Learning Chinese Characters
- 2. 30 minutes: The problem Current study methods Our study: method & results What we’ve built to fix the problem Future efficacy studies 15 minutes: Questions, comments, suggestions
- 3. Nick Winter Chinese, Mathematics, Computer Science George Saines Cinema Studies and Economics Scott Erickson Computer Science
- 4. Chinese is really hard to learn Speaking > Listening Writing > Reading Basic literacy: 2000+ Full literacy: 4000-5000
- 5. 5 characters a day ~550 characters a year learning through writing out character sheets
- 6. Literature: more than 70+ methods Memorization isn’t well-respected Recent empirical research on vocabulary acquisition via other means
- 7. Method our fellow students used:
- 8. Theory: current study methods don’t work and lead to poor long term retention. How poor?
- 9. Test 1 st , 2 nd , and 3 rd year Oberlin students Administer “known” character test 85% participation
- 10. Sample sizes: 1 st -semester: 30/35 students, 200/200 chars 3 rd : 16/20, 150/727 5 th : 5/5, 150/1161 Write character from definition, pinyin, and example words’ pinyin ~9 seconds per character
- 11. 39%! 1 st -years 2 nd -years 3 rd -years Score 62% 39% 38% Std. Dev. 22% 9% 14% Characters 123 / 200 284 / 727 441 / 1161
- 12. Not correlated with Number of strokes Recency of study Frequency of use
- 15. Easy long term review Instantly accessible practice No vocabulary management Efficient, active recall
- 17. www.skritter.com
- 18. How it works:
- 19. Pinyin and definition practice allow users to learn all aspects of prompt user-corrected definitions Improved scheduling Japanese support
- 20. Contextual, level-appropriate sentences Teacher tools Mobile phone version
- 21. Fall 2009: outline how the study will be set up outline how we’ll gauge success we’re looking for institutions interested in helping us perform the study
- 22. Thank you very much for your time.
Editor's Notes
- #2: Thank you to everyone that has shown up, we appreciate you being here. Our talk this afternoon is about improving the way students of Chinese learn and remember characters.