Wow, I am behind on these. I did not do all too much on Friday. I had hoped to go pick up my research permit, but it wasn’t ready yet. So I went to an Internet café. I have been noticing more and more that I am able to fulfill all of my basic needs by just walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo and going to small businesses—rather than walking a few blocks over into Nyamirambo, catching a taxi into Town and going to large businesses.
My previous default for Internet had been to go to Bourbon Coffee in U.T.C. (in Town), buying a scoop of ice cream for 1200 francs and enjoying the free Wi-Fi. However, I can also go to an Internet café in Nyamirambo and pay 100 francs for every twelve minutes. I still usually go to Simba Supermarket (in Town) for my candy and tissues and other food needs, but I could also go to one of the dozens of Alimentation shops much closer to home. And there is a place to be SIM card refills there too.
The other thing I am noticing is that I no longer have a whole lot of new places I want to see in Kigali. I don’t want to say I am bored of it, but unless I plan something specific I might find myself just cycling through my regular errands: using the Internet, buying candy, changing money. What that means, I think, is just that I am about ready to start doing research that takes me other places!
Anyway, one thing I found at the Internet café was that there is a mobile Memrise application available, which I had not known. This was exciting: Memrise is a very useful online tool that is built on algorithms designed to develop memories. It is especially useful for language-learning: it teaches words (or other items) by encouraging users to create mnemonics for them, and then tests on those words at increasing intervals until the memory is deemed to be secure. I created my own lesson plan with all of the words I have learned in Kinyarwanda in two years, and I have found it to be very effective.
The down-side is that it is web-based and fairly data-intensive. There is a little bit of irony in that I was solidly learning dozens of new Kinyarwanda vocabulary words every day before coming here, and upon arrival I slowed to maybe one or two because of the lack of Internet connection.
So I was happy to see a mobile app, and moreover one that could download courses to be used offline. I downloaded the app and my Kinyarwanda course (which took about 40 minutes on the African connection), and started back up. I had over 500 memories to “water” (according to the software’s terminology, which compares memories to plants) because I had been away for so long. I would gradually complete this task over the following days.
What I noticed, unfortunately, was that my course was flawed. I have done a lot of reading about Kinyarwanda since coming here, especially about its tones, and on returning to the course it became clear just how lacking I was in that area. Some words had the tones marked, but most did not, meaning that the memories I had been carefully planting and watering were missing very important pieces of information.
A definite reason for this is that there is no published reference that reliably gives the tones for words in Kinyarwanda. One can ask a native speaker, sure, but that becomes less plausible when trying to update a list of several hundred words. And I had not quite understood the important role that tones play in this language when I was compiling the list from my class notes; I included them where I could, but if a word did not have any marked I didn’t omit it. I figured it was better to know a word incompletely than not at all.
Now, however, I do have a good reference. It is an unpublished dictionary that I think I mentioned in a post awhile ago; I have it on loan, and it does mark the tones in the right way. So I have been spending much of my free time going through and updating the tones on the words in my list. It is a big job, with a list of over 1,000 words, but it is coming along.
I want to keep using Memrise: like I said, it is a very useful tool. I just have to think, now, about the best way to move forward. What I have tentatively decided is as follows: (a) stop “planting” new memories with the course I already have, as its tone information is incomplete; (b) make a new course for words whose definitions I do not know, and for those make sure the tones are correct so I learn them from the start; and (c) for words whose definitions I know but whose tones I do not know, make another course in which the sequence of tones is the only thing to be learned with each word.
That last one, especially, will take some thought, just because of the way Memrise is set up and the way it asks its questions. It’s doable, though—and, hopefully, I will have some long bus-rides ahead of me in which to think about it!
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