I just created a cool little flash card app to help me (re-)learn German.
The app's main layout lets you enter a German and English translation. Then, in the "Flash Card" layout, you only see the (in my case) German word unless you click the English tab to see the translation.
Clicking "Next" randomly takes you to another record until you have marked all the records with "Yes" for "I know it!" (word).
This flash card layout was really easy to do in FileMaker and it works really well.
Small programming mental exercise:
Instead of "yes" you could use "easy, medium, difficult".
If you know the correct translation of a word quickly, click "easy". If you had to think about it, but got the right solution in the first try, then "medium". If you don't know a word, mark it as "difficult".
Difficult words are then asked again very quickly, medium words are asked again at a slightly longer interval, and for easy words it is sufficient to ask them again after 14 days.
You gain faster and more lasting learning success - and at the same time you have an exciting programming task ...
By the way: Great that you want to relearn German!
Thanks...right now, all the words are difficult so each word has the same weight. Once I know the word, I'll just click the "Yes" and it won't be asked again. I would consider adding something like you're suggesting, but ironically that effort would take time away from learning German. LOL.
@OliverBarrett, the idea behind this is that we always need reminding. Some things are so burned into our brains that we only need reminding once a decade, other things are so new that we need reminding once a day.
As you gather more words to practice with, the words that you remember easily will be a nuisance if they always appear in your flash card list. Using @mipiano 's suggestion you can control the frequency that words appear. The ones that you remember easily can appear less often than the ones that you are still learning.
Yep, I got what he was saying, but I don't want to waste hours on FileMaker development when I can be learning instead. Vocab is only about 30% of what I'm doing to re-learn German.
The real challenge is that German is really not spoken in the US making practice speaking it (unless you want to pay for a coach) a real challenge.
I understand you. I just thought my suggestion was a nice little challenge for us FileMaker developers. Maybe I'll give that a try soon.
By the way, here you can find an App based on this principle: https://apps.ankiweb.net/.
You can use it directly. There are also dictionaries for different languages - so called "decks" - for download. Definitely worth a look!
I downloaded it a few months ago for me and my son. It’s a very useful app in my opinion! Not only for languages. You can learn totally different things with it!
I lived in Munich as a kid. Played with the German neighbors' kids.
Later, got straight A's in German in high school and college.
But .... actually trying to speak German is never really taught beyond learning grammar (they can't give you a test on that). So, trying to become conversational is really like starting anew.
I could do fine in Germany right now with what I know and would get up to speed MUCH more quickly if I were there, no doubt. Just one German neighbor here would be so cool also.
When I visited Germany a while back for just one week, I was thinking in German on the flight home.
I live about 70 kilometers from Munich in the Augsburg area. So we are quasi neighbors with a temporal offset.
If you occasionally feel like it, we can have a conversation in German via Zoom. Or take part in a virtual German FileMaker regulars' table if it works out in time.
Or the soup opens a German channel ... There are a few German speaking noodles in the soup.
There are a few German speaking noodles in the soup.
Was Suppe angeht, stehe ich mehr auf Maultauschen … also keine Sorge!