I am sorry, but I don’t understand the question. Are you referring to learning Chinese? If so …
I don’t use the booklet as the memory system at all. It just records the vocabulary and locations. I don’t use the major system at all - for numbers I use the Dominic system. But I don’t use that for Chinese. I developed the Chinese system over 2 years, and have produced a few PDF of how it works - with a couple of supporting illustration pdfs. A single image at the palace location gives the pinyin, meaning, tone(s) and Chinese character.
Thank you for that clarification. That helps a lot. I can get Blackwings at the local art store for less than the price you are quoting, but they are expensive. I got a box of them in a sale with them heavily discounted. I haven’t paid full price yet, but would now that I am used to them.
All very interesting. I still need a good HB, so will try the Staedtlers. Thank you!
If you have a Daiso store nearby, their Golden Sword pencils in 2B feel similar to Blackwing 602s but are only USD $1.75 for four. I’ve only used one pencil, but it writes smoothly and doesn’t require a lot of pressure to get dark lines.
They produce darker lines than 2Bs from other brands like Staedtler and Faber-Castell.
Afraid there’s nothing like that around here.
I’ve heard other Japanese pencils also feel similar to the Blackwing (which is made in Japan). The only mechanical pencil I really liked proudly bragged about it’s Japanese lead. It was a 0.9mm, a few shades darker than you expect for HB and felt very silky.
I had never heard of them until now. I’ve done a quick check on what they are, wondering if they offer a better alternative. Plus Indigenous knowledge systems (my area of research) also work on connections more than topics.
I shall follow up more. Thank you for the pointer.
I’ve used Zettelkasten since grad school. I’m aware of nothing that beats it for memory and tasks like article/book writing. The professor who taught the technique said she first heard of it from the CIA who apparently used card systems to help catch Aldrich Ames… something that sounds right if you read Circle of Treason… though it’s one of those blink-and-you-might-miss-it details in the book.
That said, I’ve modified it a fair amount (and stripped it down) and am puzzled by a lot of the architecture that has built up around it. A lot of the suggestions strike me as confusing activity for accomplishment… and one can often notice just how little accomplishment circles those promulgating various “rules” the loudest.
Leibniz had what appears to be a proto-Zettelkasten thing going on. Stephen Wolfram used to have some pics of L’s cards on his blog. Still there:
I’m a big fan of chalk markers, I use them in every colour, best feature is: the ink sticks to the surface and don’t leak sideways,
On a more abstract aspect: stenography?
They say there’s automatic transcription software now though, so I’m curious to learn what you lot make of that? anyone with experience with transcription software? is it any good? what if the speaker /lector switches between languages? say, English and Dutch?
Apple just added that feature in their latest updates (Sequoia 15.0 and iOS 18 with the new chips), and it works well. There are probably some other apps and open source tools that work well too, but I haven’t tried them.
ChatGPT can handle multiple languages, but it makes a lot of mistakes. I tried switching between phrases in a few languages, and it only understood the switch less than half the time. I have an accent, but Google Translate can understand me most of the time.
Following on from stenography - I’m a braille display user and it’s my main note taking tool, and it’s very fast to use as in braille (at least, british braille) there’s grade 1 and grade 2. Grade 2 involves a lot of contractions, so single letters can mean whole words or whole parts of words. Mine uses the Perkin’s style keyboard (eight buttons in a row, first for backspace, six for making the letters, and eighth for new paragraph. It can be connected to a computer or phone too, or you can save files onto a memory card to put them onto your computer that way.
I use Apple’s built in transcription software a lot, and it works very well. I haven’t tried different languages. I’ll play with that but I expect my spoken foreign language pronunciation is too poor to be a good test.
I often record ideas on my phone when I am out walking and then play the phone recording to the voice recognition software on the computer, and it gets it pretty well.
I am so used to the transcription software that I know which words of mine it struggles with, and pronounce in a way that it gets it right. I automatically do the punctuation. Sometimes, when I have been doing a lot of work on a book, I forget I am in the real world and pronounce the way I do for the transcription, even adding punctuation in normal speech. Really embarrassing!
Confession: sometimes I use the transcription for a single word because it can spell better than I can.
depends on the subject, I use mostly 2 colors blue and black. but in some I use many colors but still maximum count would be around 4, 5.
Have lines, I don’t like grids. and blank I use for sketching and loci notes.
wire bound notebook. So if I happen to make mistakes that I do a lot, I don’t need to tear pages from both sides.
I don’t stick pictures on notes it doesn’t look elegant, I like to draw by hands. although I don’t waste more time in drawing since my initial aim is to organise the content so I can look through it again while also teaching myself considering myself like I am the biggest idiot who doesn’t understand a thing. This helped me a lot when I try to understand in such deeper, I feel easy to teach others too.
