I started using obsidian about a year ago and I have found it to be an invaluable tool.
The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.
I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.
I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs
And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).
Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.
Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.
I think this is an underrated point. A lot of “knowledge management” is really anxiety management — saving feels like progress, and deleting feels like losing options.
One thing I’m trying to learn is whether the “fix” is actually less intake / better filters (so you don’t hoard), versus better retrieval/action tooling after the fact.
For you personally: what has helped more — changing the capture habit (rules/quotas/digests), or having a ruthless review/delete loop? And what triggers you to save in the first place (fear of forgetting, future usefulness, perfectionism, etc.)?
For someone who hasn't grown up speaking an language with tones or pitches, the process of learning them can be maddening. I applaud anyone who makes tools like this to try to make the process easier.
My experience in learning Japanese pitch accent was eye-opening. At the start, I couldn't hear any difference. On quizzes I essentially scored the same as random guessing.
The first thing that helped me a lot was noticing how there were things in my native language (English) that used pitch information. For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
The next part was just doing lots of practice with minimal pairs. Each time I would listen and try my best to work out where the pitch changed. This took quite a lot of time. I feel like massed practice (many hours in a day) helped me more than trying to do 10 minutes regularly. Try to hear them correctly, but don't try too hard. I didn't have any luck with trying harder to 'understand' what was going on. I liken it to trying to learn to see a new color. There isn't much conscious thought.
The final piece of the puzzle was learning phrases, not individual words, that had pitch changes. For example: "yudetamago" could be boiled egg or boiled grandchildren. Somehow my brain just had a much easier time latching on to multi-word phrases instead of single words. Listening to kaki (persimmon) vs kaki (oyster) again and again seemed much harder.
Of course, your mileage may vary with these techniques. I already spoke decent Japanese when I started doing this.
> For example, "uh-oh" has a high-low pitch. If you say it wrong it sounds very strange. "Uh-huh" to show understanding goes low-high. Again, if you reverse it it sounds unusual.
Wow… Thanks for making it clear that English also has tones! I hadn’t thought of it this way before. “Uh-huh” sounds similar to Mandarin tones 3 & 2. “Uh-oh” is similar to Cantonese tones 1 & 3.
I’m wondering if we can find good examples to teach the Mandarin tones. I think two or three syllable words are best because it illustrates the contour of the tones.
The positive version of this is clocks in escape rooms. You set the countdown timer to be slightly faster for the first 45 minutes and slightly slower for the last 10, so that people get more of a taste of time pressure towards the end and a higher chance of a "photo finish" which makes for a great fun story.
Have you done any work on trying to make the opposite? Injecting English words into Japanese text to make it easier to read?
I find that students of Japanese often have enough grammar to read widely after finishing a couple of beginner textbooks, but they are completely held back by vocabulary.
I have a deep understanding of this point, a lack of vocabulary makes reading Japanese materials very difficult.
For this scenario, we will translate the Japanese text completely into English first, then inject japanese words in to the english text, the translated text with the injected Japanese words is displayed next to the original material.
This is the main feature I've been using myself, you can try it out and see if it's the feature you want.
I can second this, after finishing my intro Japanese classes I was able to parse the grammar of most sentences. Memorizing vocab was the hard part, so I used OCR on manga pages and then Yomitan to hover over and see word definitions (in English).
Cycling in Japan is really interesting. The rules say cycle on the road, following traffic rules, helmets are compulsory.
The average cyclist doesn't wear a helmet, cycles on the pavement and will probably cycle on the incorrect side of the road fairly frequently. Cyclists also routinely ignore stop signs, traffic lights and crossings. I'm over a decade in the road I have only ever seen a cyclist use a hand signal once
Part of the problem is cyclists get almost no infrastructure, while cars get multiple lanes.
It is genuinely shocking how true this is. Also, it's not a gradual thing. I used to be very nervous about public speaking. I did it a lot and one day it just stops. Very sudden, very unexpected.
The "making a sandwich" demo is definitely a classic.
Here's another I like:
Give groups of kids 10 identical looking items and a balance to compare the weights. Pre-teach how a balance works to compare the weight of items. Ask them to put the items in order from lightest to heaviest. You're basically asking them to come up with a sorting algorithm. Usually, after much experimentation, someone will come up with an algorithm that works. You can work together to try to write down the steps of the algorithm. You can also explore more mathematical ideas like transitivity when comparing different sorted sets of items.
No single tool, script, device or system will stop this.
In fact, blocking tools can actually make this worse. Using a blocking tool is tacitly saying "I can't control myself. I need to hand control to something outside of myself" This basically reinforces the belief that you cannot control your problematic consumption.
You need strategies that reinforce the opposite belief: You are in control of your usage.
I recommend looking into books like Feeling Good and Feeling Great. Get a greater understanding of your emotional state and work out how that feeds into your social media usage.
There are some tools that are useful. The first is time tracking tools. They let you look back on your day and work out how you spent your time. What are the patterns of your usage. Do you always end up struggling after lunch? Or in the evening? What are your triggers?
While I wouldn't recommend blocking sites completely, blocking the most distracting parts of sites can be useful. If you're studying from youtube videos, using a plugin that blocks comments and suggested videos is extremely useful. This means you will no longer catch a glimpse of a thumbnail of something interesting and go off task.
Overall, you have to tackle your emotions and your beliefs about yourself.
I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.
The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.
> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.
It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.
But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.
That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.
It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.
A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.
But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.
Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".
It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.
The key is using it to solve problems you actually have, rather than problems you want to have.
I was losing track of people's contact details --> I made an addressbook in obsidian.
I wanted to track my exercise to find out how much I was running each week --> make graphs
And so on. Your obsidian should get a bit messy before you try to impose order on it. Use it to solve a problem badly (Just writing down how far I run in a daily diary note) then improve (Writing a query to turn all of those notes into a graph).
Personally I don't use any AI with my knowledge base. Good searching tools and a little bit of organization are the most useful thing for me.
Personally, I think keeping lots of notes/links is a kind of digital hoarding. Just like real hoarding, it's an emotional problem not an organizational problem. If you can work out what emotional need hoarding links is fulfilling for you then you're on the way to working out how to get that emotional need fulfilled by something else.
reply