2025-03-30
(Mod: 2025-05-27)
| 2 minutes
I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to decide how to organize the data for this series. It all started as flashcards in the Anki system. Every day I would create a few new cards and study some of the older ones. It was great, because I could keep track of a cartoon image, a caption, and both the English and Norwegian headwords all in one place. But now I’m seeing some issues.
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The word for dinner roll in norsk is bolle, which is also the word for a large bowl. So is this flashcard about bowls or buns? It doesn’t really matter, because both senses are used in both the image and the caption, but what about the English version? There’s no humorous confusion in English. The pun only works in norsk. So do I now create a different card for the Unforgettable English Nouns version of the book? That’s going to create so much duplication!
Ok, Jeff, breathe into this bag and calm down. You’re overthinking it. These are no longer flashcards organized by keywords — they’re cartoons. And the organizing principle of a cartoon is the image. If you just flip your framework on its head, you’ll see that every image needs a set of L1 and L2 keywords and a caption, for each target language. Easy peasy. There’s no reason why the subject and joke featured in Norwegian have to be the same as the subject and caption used in French. And if there is a cartoon that for some reason only works in one language, just don’t assign values for any other language. Voila!
You know what? That works! Now all I need to do is explore whether there’s a better tool to organize all this on my phone. Anki can still probably handle it, but I want to see if there’s anything more data oriented.
