Week Eight, Accomplishments

Thesis

After the very steep decline last week, this week started with the revelation that moving the object in space, or equivalently choosing a different origin, resulted in very different eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Not all to be complex. The configuration is numerically very unstable and I do not yet have not yet had a creative idea on how to circumvent this. I will have to see what the coming weeks bring.

Language Learning

As mentioned the other week, I started to add new vocabulary to the deck. It feels good to make progress but at the same time the daily reviews start to become an unwelcome chore. This is a very bad sign as it signals the beginning of the imminent failure.

But not all is lost, I have learned a lot along the way and I am certain to be capable of overcoming the current situation. What did actually happen? I’ve been studying whole sentences for a while and started to add all the chapters vocabulary to the deck as well, adding a few new cards each day. Recall and memorizing sentences is easier then to remember single words on their own, especially with a language that bears mo resemblance to any I already know. The overwhelming amount of single word vocabulary started to take it’s toll and their fail count just kept rising. The repeated failure to remember is painful to the point where I started to hate doing it. At this point learning new vocabulary turned from a fun adventure into a chore. That is precisely not what you want to happen.

Essentially what I learned is this: read foreign material for the sake of reading and curiosity and keep adding new sentences to your vocabulary deck. That way you know the sentence, invested a serious amount of time in studying it and know it’s use in context. Using a SRS (spaced repetition system) like Anki then gives you repeated coverage and exposure of the studied material–keeping it fresh in your memory. That is precisely what SRS is good at: reminding you of facts your are about to forget.

Others

During the last week I also spent a considerable amount of time rewriting the survey backend for one of the startups I am involved in: www.emendio.de. We do surveys within companies questioning managing and non-managing personal to compile a comprehensive report on company culture highlighting difficulties within the company. Much of our expertise lies in analyzing the gathered data, drawing conclusions from it and summarizing our results in applicable suggestions that can directly benefit company culture and increase productivity.