A personal knowledge base of everything I learn. Not a repo I fill by hand — three learning agent skills populate and keep it up to date automatically. It’s a living store.
Learning runs as a cycle called PTR (Place → Teach → Review):
place-me → teach-me → review-me
(assess) (learn) (review)
└────────── levels.md ──────────┘
PTR is the name for this three-skill loop. Run it once per topic: assess where you stand, learn piece by piece, then review until it sticks. Repeat as the level rises.
This repo is built to work with the learning skills from the kidow/skills repository.
levels.md entry for the topic as a starting guess. One question at a time until the level is clear, then it writes a prose level summary to levels.md and hands off to teach-me calibrated to the result.levels.md first to calibrate depth. Advances only when I say “next”, never re-teaches covered pieces, and flags imprecise vocabulary for correction. Complex concepts are grounded in analogies to my native language and culture. A visual aid is drawn when something is hard to grasp, and an audio aid plays pronunciation when learning a foreign language. When all pieces are covered, suggests 2–3 related topics. Each piece is committed to notes/topic_name.md; notes auto-organize into domain subfolders as they grow.levels.md; offers to run place-me first if levels.md is missing. When the session ends, it updates the level in levels.md and deletes the ephemeral .review/ folder.The three skills are tied together by a shared topic_name key: the notes/topic_name.md filename and the ## topic_name section in levels.md point to the same topic.
study-me is a fourth skill, outside the PTR loop. It extracts as many content-based questions as each note section supports and asks them one at a time — no grading, no spaced-repetition scheduling, just self-check against the original text. Useful for a low-pressure pass over notes without touching levels.md. No session state is persisted.
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/study-me
brain/
├── notes/ # learned knowledge (written by teach-me, read by review-me)
│ ├── topic_name.md # - one file per topic, no date (git history tracks time)
│ └── <domain>/ # - notes auto-organize into domain subfolders as they grow
├── sheets/ # quick-reference cheat sheets (HTML, served via GitHub Pages)
├── drills/ # practice drills (HTML + JSON word data)
├── vocab/ # cross-language vocabulary book (HTML + JSON, one file per category)
├── levels.md # per-topic level memory (Blank/Glimpsed/Grounded/Fluent)
└── README.md
notes/ — knowledge notes, content only, no frontmatter.vocab/ — one concept, eight languages, side by side. Cut by category (colours, animals, numbers) instead of by language.levels.md — each topic’s level as a four-stage label plus a prose summary.
.review/ — an ephemeral folder that exists only during a review session and is deleted when it ends (excluded from git).Current level per topic — brain.dongwook.kim/levels
All knowledge notes served live at brain.dongwook.kim.
Quick-reference sheets served live at brain.dongwook.kim.
Practice drills — spaced-repetition (SM-2) vocabulary review and stroke-order handwriting — served live at brain.dongwook.kim. Progress is stored in your browser’s localStorage only — it is not synced across devices.
One concept shown in eight languages at once — English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic. Cut by category rather than by language, so you can see where the languages fail to line up. Concept lists come from standard sources (Swadesh, Berlin & Kay); words come from Wiktionary.
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/place-me
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/teach-me
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/review-me
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/study-me # optional, ungraded free study
Run the learning skills from inside this repository.
/place-me Japanese writing system # assess level → record in levels.md
/teach-me Japanese writing system # learn piece by piece → commit to notes/
/review-me # review weakest topics → update levels.md
/study-me Japanese writing system # optional: free ungraded self-check, no levels.md update
Copy the prompt below and paste it to your AI assistant (Claude Code recommended):
Set up a personal knowledge base using the PTR learning system (Place → Teach → Review).
1. Create a new git repository and open it in Claude Code.
2. Install the three learning skills:
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/place-me
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/teach-me
npx skills@latest add kidow/skills/review-me
3. Create this file structure:
- notes/ (empty folder — add a .gitkeep file so git tracks it)
- levels.md (empty file)
- README.md (copy from https://github.com/kidow/brain)
Once done, start with /place-me <topic> to assess your first topic.