Hi all, I’ve decided to adopt Katie Kermode (@katiek)'s two-card system as I find it really elegant and intuitive.
To that end, I’ve made some Anki flashcards to help me practise converting card pairs to syllables, and vice versa. I thought I’d share them here, in case anyone else might find them useful:
Katie system black first pairs.apkg (151.4 KB)
Katie system red first pairs.apkg (150.6 KB)
A few notes:
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a full explanation of Katie’s system is available here: https://katiekermode.com/card-system.html
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due to the nature of this system, the syllables for the black-first pairs are identical to those of the red-first pairs. So depending on how you want to use these flashcards, you could just use one or the other, or put them together into one deck if you wanted to practise both.
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I’ve given the ‘basic’ form of each syllable on the back of each card, but in fact the system allows for flexibility with some phonemes. So, for example ‘dij’ (Q
6
) could just as easily be ‘ditch’ or ‘dish’. -
I’ve checked these flashcards over but I can’t guarantee that they’re 100% accurate - please let me know if you spot any mistakes.
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It’s almost certainly not necessary to practise every single card pair - so why use flashcards? Well, I’m planning to use them a bit every day, until I get used to the method of converting card pairs to syllables and vice versa, at speed. At some point I plan to add my specific word/image associations for each syllable to one of the sets of cards and use the cards to help me internalise these. So the cards are pretty flexible and you can use them in your own way.
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I really like the logic of Katie’s system of converting suit pairs to vowels, but found it a little hard to get my head around at first. When I put them into a table like this, it clicked for me:
- That’s a bit abstract though, so in fact, in my head, I think of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words that contain the relevant vowel sound. The words I use are beet, boat, butt, pit, bat, pet, boot and bait (keeping the consonants similar makes the words easier to recall). So in my head, the table looks more like this:
I was hoping to share an editable version of the above tables in case anyone wants to play around with them, but I can’t see a way to do this. If anyone knows a way, please let me know!
I hope that some of the above proves helpful to anyone hoping to learn Katie’s system. Thanks to @katiek for her permission to share the flashcards and for creating an awesome two-card system! I’ve really enjoyed playing around with it so far.