Wandering Words

Just got back from a 3-day backpacking trip. *sigh*

I got a kick out of this:



Not exactly the kind of thing you plan.

So, it's been an awful long time since I posted these, but here are some of the latest Scrabble word study graphs. I took another couple of months off a month or two ago, and things are just now clicking back into place for studying regularly. It's at a significantly reduced rate from my studying heyday, but I think it's a healthier pace overall.

	Upcoming Words 4-24 4-24 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3
	Long Upcoming Words 4-24 4-24 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6

So, for a lot of good reasons I took another two months off from doing any cardbox quizzing. When I fired up a cardbox quiz yesterday I found that I had 29000 words due. Oomph. I quickly rescheduled that down to 150 and polished that off in no time flat. I was a little bit rusty, but as I found previously it only takes a day or two to work the kinks out and get the anagrammer clicking again. It's just like riding a bike...only not. I have my doubts about whether I'll be able to maintain the vigorous pace I've set before. I have no immediate plans to add in more new words--but we'll see how long that lasts. At any rate, it feels good to be quizzing again. I had my Modified-Kenji Method quizzes for a while, and I've been doing a lot of hook drilling lately, but there's nothing quite like the BIG QUIZ. THE Quiz, you might say. Like before, it's invigorating to come back to it. To come at it with a clearer mind and see so many of the words that were "tough" before, but I see instantly now. Of course, there are also the words that *used* to be easy that I'm not seeing, but it's good to find those out, too. It's all good.

Almost exactly a month ago, I made a post that I subsequently deleted about my latest study foray. I'd been feeling like I was in a bit of a rut, study-wise, just running through my cardbox quizzing. SO, I changed things up a bit. Here's the post I made back then (originally posted on 2/21):

So I decided that I need another break from my cardbox quizzing. I've been quite faithful to it lately (averaging over 1000/day for quite a while now), but I'm not feeling inspired by it. SO, I've set it aside for a couple of weeks. I went ahead and made a list of the 21000ish words that AREN'T in my cardbox database...and started a quiz with all of them in it. As of right now--1800 words in--I'm running around 74% correct. That's kind of cool. I suppose this is somewhat inspired by Kenji (I would link to him, but I guess he got scared off of LJ), or cesarsalad, but mostly I'm just bored. It's fun to see new words. I'm thinking I'll be done in a week or two and go back to the cardbox stuff. In my mind, it comes down the depth of word study versus the breadth of word study. The cardbox system is well designed to increase the depth of word knowledge, but a survey quiz like I'm doing now is better for increasing the breadth quickly. It should be fun!

Well, I finally finished that quiz yesterday evening. I guess I was a little optimistic about finishing it in two weeks--I got distracted with tournaments and hiking and life and all--but it was still a fun venture. My final score was 75.9% correct. Many of those words were ones I knew well that I'd just never been quizzed on, although there were a few total guesses that panned out. Of the words I missed, there were a few that I totally should have seen, but missed, and a few more that I just mistyped, but most were strange beasts and oddities that I have yet to learn. The good news is that now I have a list of 5100 words to focus more closely on. It's kind of nice to pare down the "don't know" list to an *almost* manageable amount. At any rate, now I'll start a quiz on that list (it ought to take me a week or two...*grin*).

I just added the last batch of 150 2-anagram 6s to my cardbox database and ran through them this evening. Yay! I now have every alphagram less than 8 letters with more than one valid anagram in my study rotation. That is awfully useful in so many ways, not the least of which is if I see a word played that I don't know, and I see a valid anagram, it's getting challenged. Of course, all this is predicated on me actually *remembering* what I've studied, but that's a WHOLE other story...

I took a snapshot of these a week and a half ago, but I never got around to posting them. I've been kind of lax about posting in general, but since I had these I figured I'd finally do it. The study has been going fairly well in general. I'm down to just 300 2-anagram 6s left before I finally have everything from length 2-8 with more than one anagram in my study rotation. I keep meaning to just finish those off, but I get distracted by more interesting words. I'm not adding terribly many in general lately, either, because of the rising wave of cardbox 8 words crashing over me in the next month or so. It's already started, but the worst is another week or so out still. I helped my case a little bit earlier this week by using the holiday weekend to study 3500 questions over the course of just two days. Wow, that was a trip. In general, I"ve been working to keep my daily load down below 1000 per day, with some success. It's nice to feel like I can keep up with it without TOO much effort. Other than that, I'm just churning away on 6s and 8s that catch my interest. All the *WAY* patterns, the *BONE* patterns, other random word bits and such that sound cool, like the SMITH* anagrams and the *THM* patterns. Whatever will stick. You never know when it might come in handy. At any rate, word study is humming along. I just am not looking terribly much forward to starting all over again practically from scratch with the Collins list. Ah well...

	Long Upcoming Words 12-18 12-18 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6
	Upcoming Words 12-18 12-18 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3

Inspired by Kevin, here is a bigger breakdown of missed questions:

3s (believe it or not):
AES - 7 misses
AHS - 6
EHY - 5
EOS
ALS
ATU

4s:
ARSU - 24 misses
EERS - 19
EHST
AMNO - 16
IKRS
AELR - 15
DELW
EOPS
CINO

5s:
ADERW - 36 misses
AENSW - 35
AMRSU
BELOS - 34
AEMNS - 33
EENSS
AELPS

6s:
AEINRS - 26 misses
AERSTW - 24
AEENSU
EERSTX - 19
AHIKRS
ACEINT
DEIORT

7s:
ABDEERS - 46 misses
ADILMOS - 42
EELOPRS
ADELOSS
EIILMST - 41
AADLMNO - 40
ACEEPRS

8s:
EEIMNORS - 61
AEILOPRT - 42
EEINRRST
CEILNORS - 41
AACINORT - 40
EINORSSU - 39

How many times have you gotten any particular word wrong on your Zyzzyva cardbox quizzing?? Have you gotten any *one* *question* wrong more than 61 times? That's how many times I've missed ( this alphagram )

So I pushed hard over the weekend and got over the backlog caused by adding all the rest of the type II 8s. I feel like I'm in a pretty good space right now as far as daily quiz levels go, as long as I don't go and add a whole load of words again...

	Upcoming Words 11-06 11-06 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3
	Long Upcoming Words 11-06 11-06 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6

So, I did a rather silly thing yesterday. For whatever reason, I had the idea stuck in my head that I'd already added all the Type II 8s to my Zyzzyva cardbox system. I was doing various word searches and had all the Type II 8s pulled up at the moment. On a whim, I decided to go ahead and add them to my cardboxes. Since I figured they were already in there, I didn't think it would do anything. I pulled up a new cardbox quiz and found 400 some odd new questions for me. Doh. Now I'm scrambling to catch up again--especially since I don't get any much study in on club nights (like last night) anyway. Ah well... At least I'm learning some fun new words!

It's been a solid four months since I posted any of my zyzzyva cardbox graphs. A lot of that has to do with the two months of not studying at all, but now that I'm back to studying again, I figure it's about time to post again. My milestone of getting all the 7s in yesterday might have been something of a motivator, but it's all good. You still can't see any of the cardbox 9 questions showing up yet. Someday... Anyway, it's all good.

	Upcoming Words 10-16 10-16 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3
	Long Upcoming Words 10-16 10-16 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6

The significance of this entry's title? How about the very last (24029th) 7-letter alphagram that I've added to my cardbox system. Yee-haw. Just for the record, YEEHAWS* sounds like more fun than its valid anagram.

So, after studying a grand total of 1069 words in all of last week (well under my average daily load), I decided to hit the Zyzzyva cardbox study again today. I've got a lot of words to go, still. I felt good about the time off for the tournament, post-tournament analysis, and a day or two of strictly recuperative time, but it's time to push ahead. I dumped in another hundred or so sevens and had at it. They went pretty quickly. Yay. I'm interested to see what kind of state my head is in before Dayton. Maybe I really should take a day or two off of my study before I play there--like I keep meaning to do before some tournament but I never quite have the discipline to not study at all. I guess it's better than the opposite problem. I've been doing some JTs the last few days, too, which has been nice. I've been feeling the 4s and 5s getting a bit rusty on there, so I should keep it up to keep them fresh.

I've emailed this to a couple of folks before, but I don't know that I've ever posted it here on LJ or in the Zyzzyva user group (where it just may belong...who knows...). Anyway, I figured I'd just copy and paste the instructions I've sent in email form before, with some minor copy-editing. Enjoy. Send me an email if you want the Excel template file to make your own graphs (it's in the few meg size range, just to warn you). These instructions aren't quite for the computer stupid, but you don't need to be SUPER TECHNO to do it, by any means.

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First off, you'll need to locate your Zyzzyva quiz database. If you're using Windoze, it's found at ~user\.zyzzyva\quiz\data\OWL2+LWL\Anagrams.db (~user = your user profile directory, for me it's c:\Documents and Settings\tlconrad\). I'm stuck with Windoze myself, so I can't speak with any authority on other OS's.

Next you'll need the SQLite software to read the database. It can be downloaded at http://www.sqlite.org/download.html. I went ahead and extracted the program into the directory where the quiz database is located, just to make my life easier.

To run the SQLite software, you need to access the command prompt. (>Start>All Programs>Accessories>Command Prompt, in WinXP) Navigate to the directory where the Zyzzyva quiz database is located. I went ahead and configured my command prompt window to open that directory by default, but you can change to that directory with the cd command (cd\~user\.zyzzyva\quiz\data\OWL2+LWL).

Once in the correct directory, with SQLite installed, type "sqlite3 Anagrams.db" (this tells the SQLite program to access the Anagrams database).

At the "sqlite> " command prompt, enter ".output Anagrams.txt" (or some other filename of your choosing). This tells SQLite to send your output to a text file, instead of just displaying it on the screen.
Next, type "select * from questions;". This tells it to display every database entry in the "questions" table, essentially printing out your entire database to that text file. Don't forget the semi-colon at the end of your select statement. Finally, type ".output stdout" to release the lock the SQLite program has on the text file.

Voila...you just outputted your whole Cardbox database to a text file. Each field will be separated by the "|" character (Shift-\). You'll need to know that in importing it into your data editor ( i.e. Excel). You can do a lot of other tricks with SQLite, like editing your cardbox entries and stuff, but I'll leave it to you to read the online documentation and try to make sense of it.

Anyway, now that you have your data in a text file, you can do what you want with it. Like I mentioned, I open it with Excel. I import the file, then copy all the data into a template that I created to calculate the useful information (like the due dates, and the histograms I post online). The headers for the eight columns of data in the database are:

question (the alphagram of the word)
correct (number of times you've gotten it correct)
incorrect (number of times you've been incorrect)
streak (number of times in a row right/wrong)
last_correct (last time you got it right)
difficulty (measure of difficulty, not used by Zyzzyva yet...arbitrarily set to 0 or 50)
cardbox (cardbox number)
next_scheduled (next time the question is scheduled to appear)

The time fields (last_correct and next_scheduled) appear as a ten digit number counting down the number of seconds elapsed since 1/1/1970 0:00 GMT. Fun, eh? I went ahead and set up a calculation in Excel to convert it to a useful date/time, although mine is set for MST (something you would need to change depending on your time zone/DST, etc).

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So I've finished with the wave of cardbox 7s, finally. It's down below 200 a day from now on (although I'm already seeing >250 a day from cardbox 8 come October or so...). So, since the rest of the loading is back down, I've overcompensated for not being able to add words for so long. I went a little...crazy...over the past week or so. For instance, I added all the 7s ending in the -ED yesterday. It was only 400 or so that I didn't already have in there, but still... The cool part was that I burned through the 400+ words in about a half hour--and got a grand total of 3 wrong. I like it, but it makes for a huge cardbox 1 (and cardbox 2 is burgeoning as well, as you can see below). Good times. I like that I've been adding so many words and still been able to keep cardbox 0 around 100 or so. That means a lot of the words I've been adding have been pretty easy, plus it feels like I'm getting even faster at doing my quizzing. I like it.

	Upcoming Words 6-19 6-19 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3
	Long Upcoming Words 6-19 6-19 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6

So I dropped the last couple hundred 2 anagram 8s in my cardbox system today. I got between half and two-thirds right on the first pass, which is nice. I threw in a dollop of 7s for good measure. My next goal is finish those off. I'm optimistic that they might go fairly quickly. Many of the hundred-plus words I did today were easy, familiar words that just hadn't made it into the cardboxes yet. Hopefully the other 3000ish will be more of the same. I celebrated by getting 100% on the JT 7s with 50 seconds left on my clock. I'll take it. I suppose you could say that I'm boning up for Reno, but my study schedule generally bears little to no correlation to my tournament schedule. I just study, and wherever I've gotten to before the tournament is what will have to do. I would kinda like to finish out the 7s before Dayton, though. Just to keep things tidy. I'm still hovering around the year mark before everything 2-8 is in my cardbox system. Maybe I can speed that up a bit now that the cardbox 7s have relented.

So, I am very nearly out of the woods on the cardbox 7 avalanche. I only have another week or so in the 300 range, and then it drops off fairly quickly from there.

More meaningful (although less practically impactive), was the milestone I passed today of receiving my very first cardbox 8 question. I got it correct, thank you. I won't see CHILORS again until next February (at the earliest...assuming I don't reschedule, which I almost certainly will). I think that's kinda cool. So I'm starting into the 8s with one or two a day for a while, but it will be up to 100 or so by September. Awesome. Way cool.

On the practically impactive side of the house, the drop in the daily load of cardbox 7 questions means I can get back to the business of actually LEARNING NEW WORDS. My personal goal is to finish out the 2 anagram 8s this week (500ish to go), then set to work polishing off the 7s. I went ahead and added all the 3 S 7s last night, and made fairly short work of those. I'm hoping most of the other 3500 I have to go will be fairly straightforward as well. Time will tell...

So, yeah. It's been a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd post the latest graphs. What's striking to me is how similar they look to the last graphs. That's not shocking, because with the amount I've had to push back my cardbox studying, I've probably only advanced a little more than a week. However, I've also been adding *very* few words during this time. I rather expected my lower cardboxes to pretty much empty out, but that just hasn't been the case. I think I actually do *better* at quizzing when I'm consistently adding new words (and challenging myself) rather than when I'm just reviewing words I've already seen before. It keeps me on my toes...mentally nimble. It's interesting stuff, to me at least.

SO, on that note, I've been doing Jumbletime again lately. Not that that isn't largely review as well, but I do run into words I don't know still. Plus the format and time pressure are a nice challenge. I was rather mad at missing OCTUPLY on the 7s yesterday. It's in my cardbox now!

	Upcoming Words 5-31 5-31 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3
	Long Upcoming Words 5-31 5-31 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6

	Long Upcoming Words 5-14 5-14 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6
	Upcoming Words 5-14 5-14 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3

SO, yeah. I've noticed that one of the unfortunate side effects of frequent rescheduling of the zyzzyva cardbox is something of a compression in the carbox 0/1 range. A couple of days of intense study has burned off most of the cardbox 0 (I'm below 200 again...yay!), but the cardbox 1 crowd will take a little longer to deal with. Part of my problem with that yesterday was that I added another 150ish more 2 anagram 8s in my bid to finish those off in the next week or two. Only 670 to go! 100 a day and I could be done this week...

The other bad news is that the attack of cardbox 7 has begun...and been prolonged by all my rescheduling. I've got a solid month of 200+ cardbox 7s a day to slog through, peaking at 350 a day in about 2 weeks. Yee-haw!

A couple other random facts to chew on. Even with missing a few days for a tournament last weekend, my average words quizzed/day is right around 1250, and average words added/day is around 82. I only have 3600 more sevens to add to my cardbox system, and I'm only 1300 eights away from 40% of the eights. I'm still about a year away from having all the 2-8 alphagrams in my system, which is a little frustrating, but I can pull that number in with another word adding binge sometime. I have a funny feeling it may happen fairly soon. I find this stuff MUCH more productive to geek out about than bothering to muck around with ratings conjectures.

Wow, cardbox 7 is definitely upon me. I'm getting about 150 a day now, but it will be up to 300 a day within 2 weeks. That's going to be fun. It will be nice once I get through the wave of cardbox 7. Cardbox 8 spreads it out over an even longer window, and the center of that window is 5 months out. So, if the center of the cardbox 7 wave hits in May, I should be in the middle of cardbox 8 in October. Ask me about it then. In other news, my first cardbox 8 question comes up in just over a month. That will be cool!

	Long Upcoming Words 4-20 4-20 histogram of words per day by cardbox, long version through the end of cardbox 6
	Upcoming Words 4-20 4-20 histogram of words per day by cardbox, through the end of cardbox 3