Field notes
Learning Kannada with spaced repetition (and shameless mnemonics)
Living in Bengaluru gives you two options: stay inside the English-Hindi bubble forever, or learn Kannada. I picked the second, and because I can't do anything without turning it into a system, it arrived with Anki decks, review metrics and a backlog.
What goes in the deck
Three kinds of card, in this order:
- Core vocabulary: the few hundred words that carry most daily conversations.
- Grammar suffixes: Kannada does with suffixes what other languages do with entire clauses.
- Real-world sentence chunks: full phrases you actually say at the market, not textbook sentences nobody has uttered since 1974.
The mnemonics are not dignified
The single biggest retention boost came from absurd mnemonics. The dumber the mental image, the better it sticks: this is documented memory science and also a personal embarrassment. I will not be sharing examples. My review stats will speak for me.
Streaks are a vanity metric. Retention rate is the KPI. The auditor in me insists on this distinction; the human in me still checks the streak first.
Same instinct, different project
The same itch gave me QuizForge, which turns any document into flashcards: reading twice is inefficient, and forgetting is worse. Autorickshaw negotiations are going better. I am not saying by how much.