What's the deal with MCDs?

[Mike N]

And I don't mean McDonald's!

(I thought I made a post about this earlier but if I did I can't find it. Anyways, on to the good stuff.)

What are MCDs?

For those of you familiar with Khatzumoto (of All Japanese All The Time fame), he recently went on a huge rant about MCDs (primarily to sell his new stuff. I wonder how much money the dude makes?) and it got me wondering: just what the hell are these MCDs? Well, they appear to be a new way to study using the flashcards which by now most of us are probably bored to death of using.

It appears that MCDs are used to give context to words/sentences that you're trying to learn. By including the surrounding text (whether it's from a book or a TV show) and then omitting the items you want to learn you'll still be able to remember the context of that item days, weeks, and months down the road.

I found an active thread over on the Remember the Kanji forums (specifically about Japanese but the basic concepts still apply). It seems most of the users are recommending the switch to MCDs from standard sentence/word flashcards once you've reached the point where you can read the definition of words in your target language.

Note: Pay particular attention to the post by "howtosavealif3" on page one for good examples of how he takes screenshots of subtitles on TV programs he's watching and makes them into flashcards.

Who's doing this already?

Anyone on these forums using this method already? If so, what has your experience been like? What types of sources, methods, etc. do you use when making cards? I'm interested in testing this method out for myself but I don't fully understand it yet.

[imron]

Well, they appear to be a new way to study using the flashcards which by now most of us are probably bored to death of using.

Sounds a lot like Incremental Reading, which the Grand-daddy of SRSs, SuperMemo, has been doing for at least the last decade.

[drungood]

Khatzumoto is getting really annoying lately - having followed his site for a few months, he's basically marketed MCDs as a "secret technique" that's way better than everything else, but the information he's provided about it is vague, and you're advised to purchase his program to learn more about the technique. I was considering buying it anyway and getting an immediate refund (which he guarantees) but unfortunately PayPal doesn't work for my currently available debit card. If someone else would like to try that I'd really appreciate it if you could share it with me in a PM or something.

Anyway, despite his marketing of MCDs as a "revolution," it seems to follow straight from the tips from SuperMemo author's article "Tips for formulating knowledge," (Google it) which suggests to break knowledge into the smallest chunks possible while still avoiding information loss. So instead of reviewing every word in a sentence at the same time, you cloze delete every word in the sentence that you don't feel like you've mastered already. There is an MCD add-on for Anki that's quite useful for this.

I'm using a program called Virtual Audio Cable that captures audio from the input source, so you can record straight to Anki without going through a separate program. So using TV shows or podcasts, I capture the audio of a sentence and then add it to each MCD card. Actually, I suppose I don't have "massive context" since I just use one sentence at a time. I feel like I master every sentence that I put into the program. Because there's so many cards for the same sentence with audio, I get to listen to the same sentence over and over. But I can press "very easy" for the parts of the sentence that were easy for me to learn and concentrate on the difficult parts. I'm not sure if this method is more productive than sentences in terms of time spent, but the process is a lot less draining mentally so I can choose to do more in a day than before.

[laurenth]

what the hell are these MCDs?

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Cloze_test

Anyone on these forums using this method already? If so, what has your experience been like?

My Anki deck contains Cloze deletion, among many other things. I like the fact that they rely heavily on context. Language happen in context, duh. Therefore, when learning Chinese-French, I tend to avoid cards that contain just one Chinese word or character on the front, for which I have to provide the meaning or a translation (back). I prefer sentences or phrases, or series of words containing the same character I want to learn. Conversely, when learning to produce some new Chinese word or structure, my reasoning (and my experience) is that it's easier and more natural to put those new items within some sort of context. Cloze tests are, IMO, a good model for that.

Moreover, I like the fact that my Anki deck uses all sorts of different models for learning. When a card appears, I will never know whether it will be FR-ZH or ZH-FR, a series of words containing the same character, a sentence, a grammatical item, etc. It helps maintain the interest.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

Anyone on these forums using this method already? If so, what has your experience been like? What types of sources, methods, etc. do you use when making cards? I'm interested in testing this method out for myself but I don't fully understand it yet.

I used MCDs extensively last year and made over 4000 cards but stopped using them after I got burnt out. You have to be especially careful not to pollute your deck with cards you don't enjoy reviewing, because it's so easy to make them.

I agree that MCDs are probably not as revolutionary as Khatzumoto's marketing makes them sound. Personally I think that they are good for smaller units of information that you can "swallow as a whole" and simply memorize. I mainly used them to study two-word vocabulary but they didn't work at all with 成語s for me.

I wrote a program for myself at the time to be able to make new cards quickly which you can find here:

http://www.zaoyin.eu/chinese/Chinese-MCD-Generator/

Maybe you'll find it useful...

[laurenth]

I wrote a program for myself at the time... Maybe you'll find it useful...

Hey, I do use it to create my Cloze sentences (together with the Japanese MCD generator for Anki). Thanks a lot for that tool! It *is* very useful.

stopped using them after I got burnt out. You have to be especially careful not to pollute your deck with cards you don't enjoy reviewing, because it's so easy to make them.

To try to avoid that, I configured Anki to only show me 15 random new cards/day (on average). I have a lot of "as yet unseen" cards, maybe that's what you call pollution , but I don't see that as a problem. If I feel a card is not as useful as I thought when I created it, I delete it immediately.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

If I feel a card is not as useful as I thought when I created it, I delete it immediately.

This is very good advice, not just for MCDs.

[Mike N]

Thanks for chipping in, everyone. I'm building a new Anki deck and I'd like to incorporate some aspects of MCDs into it to see how effective it is for my language learning.

I'll report back with an update once I have some time to learn and experiment!