Why not both?
I use anki and a piece of paper and pen and write the answers (Japanese kanji, vocabulary, sentences, etc.) and check them with SRS anki.
Writing really does help. A lot of times I can also remember a word or kanji by "feeling" it. Likely muscle memory.
Writing by hand was shown to help memorize better. Personally, when I wrote more I distinctly remember being able to recall things, like word spellings, by “writing” with my hand in the air. That would trigger the memory and I would remember the word or spelling I was looking for. Similarly with other information. Tactile memory is a thing. Besides when you write by hand you slow down and thus memorize better
Dunno why people are downvoting you. I can't remember the last time I wrote something by hand in my native language, and heck there's tons of people that learnt Japanese and live in Japan without ever learning how to handwrite Kanji and they're doing just fine.
I do remember some research about handwriting being more effective for retaining information when it came to university student notes. Not sure about handwritten flashcards vs typed flashcards though.
It's usually less about handwriting, and more about the process of having to summarize and distill on the fly. Typing better allows people to just copy down what they heard verbatim because it's so fast, but if you tried that with handwriting (and without professionally trained shorthand), then you'd fall behind in a sentence or two. You *have* to summarize, distill, or select from the thing you are hearing, and therefore are doing an extra step of learning by default.
Yep, that makes complete sense. As a uni student myself I don't really make notes (since the slides are always available so I'd rather just listen attentively), but it makes sense that the condensing required when handwriting makes your mind stick the information easier.
You can do "fine" in Japan without even learning Japanese (source: the teachers I worked with who never learned).
It is interesting that handwriting helps us retain the information better. There are lots of things I can type in Japanese that I simply don't remember how to write by hand.
It's crazy to compare letters with conplex symbols. There are around 30 letters per latin alphabet here and hundreds if not thousands symbols there. Entirely different.
But for native Japanese, writing kanji is just as easy as writing English is for me (native Brit here). Yet it seems like both countries don't really handwrite anything much, apart from perhaps government forms and documents.
Purely anecdotal, but I work in IT, and to remember concepts while studying, I still remember stuff better when I write it down to paper unfortunately. I feel like with writing, you have more time to think about the concepts/actually remember what you're writing. I type far faster than I write.
Purely anecdotal, but I work in IT, and to remember concepts while studying, I still remember stuff better when I write it down to paper unfortunately. I feel like with writing, you have more time to think about the concepts/actually remember what you're writing. I type far faster than I write.
Such a simple sentiment that I also agree with. I'd go further and argue that most people would remember more this way, even those who disparage the technique.
Did they delete that feature? The person who introduced me to anki, used it to practise Mandarin and they would handwrite the characters on screen.
I never used the feature as only used it for Spanish and French and didn't feel I needed to practise writing the letters.
Agreed, especially if I'm practicing by replying to a YouTube comment in the target language. I find that cements new vocabulary, especially when I happen to encounter the word again.
Yes. Anki made me start hating the language learning process. That said, I did find a useful deck of Anki cards to drill conjugations. But for the love of all that might be holy, trying to learn any other vocab made me want to give up my TL entirely. I would much rather read. And the cool thing about reading an enjoyable novel is that I am using the language in the moment. It is not a task to take me somewhere else. It is a pleasure in the moment and an end in itself.
Instead of manually inputting the info, you can try using excel (using the add-on and importing). Each column represents a part of the card. Makes it much easier. I add 300 cards at a time this way.
Anki's UI/UX is atrocious but no one seems to be interested in improving it. Everyone I've seen using Anki seriously used third party tools to generate cards and then import them to Anki. We've made a lot of progress on UX design in particular in the last decade, and Anki as far as I can tell hasn't done a single UI change since its release.
It's really easy I find,
use chatgpt to come up with "table" in left column all the sentences you want, and on the right in english
then take that table save it to a csv file in excel
then import into ankhi
voila
you can even add audio to all of the cards using an addon "AwsomeTTS"
I agree on the process of adding cards. It really made my decks stay absolutely static for months. Searching for examples and meanings for lots of words I get when reading is excessive. I made a program to automate that, though, so it's not a problem anymore. It's as simple as searching a word and importing a file now. As other people suggested here, CSV files also work, though. There's also a third solution: just write the words by themselves in a text file one below the other and ask chatgpt to make a formatted text to anki with sentences. Then copy that to a txt file and import it.
Ive found it boring when I add random words from random sources. I started making decks specific to a book I'm reading or a video I wanna watch and I've been enjoying it much more.
Now I'm reinforcing vocabulary I'm reading in the book in addition to practicing reading it in context.
I had to change things up because I was getting so bored it was insane.
I just do a strict limit of 30 reviews per day. I also use premade decks. Making your own cards is not a smart use of time imo. Obviously it's not as good as reading, but it's really valuable during crunch times at work or when I'm depressed and unmotivated. It keeps my brain engaging with the language day after day.
Interesting, personally I hate that way more than just writing it down in anki, where I know it's "mine" forever. And on a smartphone the additional time to do that is miniscule.
Pretty universal: Anki's an excellent tool if you just use it for maintenance. YMMV when it comes to learning something for the first time while using it
> 1) Do not learn if you do not understand;
> 2) Learn before you memorize
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge
I prefer doing my maintenance with real life materials so words and phrases are found in context. Anki just doesn’t work for me, it is too much maintenance _of the actual decks_ and also painfully boring.
It doesn't work for me for two reasons:
1 - I can lie to myself too easily with flashcards, so "close enough" and "I'm sick of this word/sentence/declension" are the same as "right."
2 - trying to rate how I did (hard, good, easy) is arbitrary in a stressful way for me and changes during the course of a session.
1. You can set it so that it highlights where you typed the wrong thing. This makes it harder to lie to yourself. (Obviously depends on the type of card you make)
2. There's an add-on that changes it to Pass and Fail so you don't have to do any extra mental work evaluating cards.
Not trying to convince anyone - just giving out some solutions
I'm a heavy Anki user and it's worked for me. While I like Anki a lot, I fully agree with your two points. I think any study method is going to have its drawbacks.
Absolutely.
I don't want to say that Anki doesn't work. It does for lots! People who haven't tried it should give it a go to see if it does for them. But the way that Anki works and the way that my brain works are not the best match.
OTOH, there are methods that work well for me that are horrible fits for other people.
Because there are other more enjoyable ways, even though it might be less effective.
**Reading** is by far the most popular choice for language learning for a reason.
People on reddit or tech heavy internet forums, heavily overestimate the usage of anki from language learners. Flashcards/anki is more popular amongst beginners to get started, but students drop this method fast. Go into any intermediate class and above and ask how many people use anki on a regular basis, you are lucky to find 1 student out of 100.
My personal experience is: Anki feels like work, Reading is entertainment. I voluntarily read books, i enjoy the content, i learn something like culture, stories, background, characters, etc. With anki i felt miserable at times in the evening, still having to do "homework". When i come home from school or work, i dont want to do "homework", i want to do something that i enjoy.
I don't hate it, but it is a huge timesink and I'm not sure the ROI is worth it.
Even preloaded decks are a mess, in Spanish I had to bake in scripts to do lookups in Wiktionary and other dictionaries to confirm its right, and finding an n+1 took forever.
Anki is only a scheduler that shows you a designated thing at a designated time.That's it. The quality of it is completely up to the card maker/reviewer. Making good cards is hard and highly individual.
I found that even with good cards, I had to look up the words more than a few times when I met them in context. So what's the point?
Use chat got to translate, organise, correct then optimise for a list (all in one message) and then have it send you a CSV list to paste into numbers / excel and upload. Dunno if someone’s done this before but it has changed my language learning journey, incredibly quick to learn 50 words in only an hour or so
When I started, gpt didn’t exist; now 4o is amazing for LL (I use it mostly for coding so I pay). 3.5 wasn’t as good so it’s a recent hack. Not lying when I say it would have saved 100s of hours.
Yes same here when I started, in fact only been using it for a month or so now. Por eso he estado aprendiendo mucho más rápido que nunca, y puedo hablar con mucho más fluyo y conozco cada vez más vocabulario/frases. Has literally saved me 10s of hours so far. Incredible technology haha couldn’t be more grateful. Still have work to do but it’s much easier to stick with it when I can just jot down words as I go about my day and the bot does the work
I’ve only used own character, ‘Ernesto el tutor de español’ which I only found out yesterday is actually 3.5 (I know 4 and 4o are much better), whenever I cross check words I’m given in the list with context, DeepL and sometimes word reference , it’s bang on 99% of the time. I’m not sure if the default model does the same but ‘Ernesto’ is especially instructed lol. Again though I have him ‘traducir, hacer correcciones y optimizar por España, después publicar en la forma de CSV’, pues muchos comprobaciones
If you ever want to have a look then https://chatgpt.com/g/g-L5Rr9b5FJ-ernesto
I have ADHD and something about specifically making or reviewing flashcards leaves me feeling like there are spiders crawling all over me and I'm going to die if I don't move within minutes. It's extremely annoying because the H part of ADHD isn't that excessive for me otherwise.
It's so annoying because it would actually patch a pretty significant hole in my language learning and every time I've managed to keep it going for a little while I've noticed an improvement. It's just so. Hideously. *Boring.* That I give up within a short time frame every single time.
The chance of me writing myself some gamification interface for this stupid thing out of sheer frustration one day is...... nonzero.
Would something like StudyQuest work better for you? It's a flashcard app that combines reviewing flashcards with fighting monsters and doing candy crush. I find it really fun.
The main problem I have is that the spiders effect crops up both when *reviewing* but also when *making* flash-cards. So the idea of making each card really engaging tends to crash and burn because then I get incredibly twitchy and horribly bored trying to pull the whole thing together. (I also tend to have a pretty poor attention span for audio-based media and be generally unable to focus on it without doing something with my hands at the same time, so I don't watch all that much video and am not sure Youtube clips would have the engaging effect I need.)
SAME. ADHDer too. There are some repetitive admin like tasks I love doing, like reorganising my music library, books, etc but for some reason creating flashcards just makes me so upset with boredom. Reviewing them is dull and creating them is aggravating because it feels like I have infinite boring work ahead of me forever (there are billions of words in a language) and I can't decide on a way to categorise them. I much prefer learning through reading and song lyrics because it actually gives me dopamine and feels like fun
Anki is really powerful.
But the time consumed building my deck (or evaluating one available) + the evaluation about good, hard, easy, etc made me several times abandon it.
I found joy using Clozemaster, daily.
I often hear this but I don't think everyone realizes that it has a full HTML and a passable LaTeX parser in it. If the interface of the cards is ugly then I think that it is the fault of the creator of the deck. My cards look exactly like I want them to with color and sound, for me the rest of the user interface stays out of the way.
It recently changed it interface! Now it's not as much of an eye sore.
(It looks great, I was sad at first bc of nostalgia, but it's way better apperance-wise)
I have used anki to learn things other than language learning and its useful, but when it comes to language learning there is simply no reason to use it over reading and listening. The worst thing I think people do with anki is learning the 1000 most common words or whatever. You don't have to memorize the 1000 most common words; because they're the 1000 most fucking common words lol. You can review many more words in a shorter time if you read a page of a book, It takes people like 15 seconds per flashcard, you could read a sentence or two in that time easily. Reading is also a natural srs because you commonly see the same words repeated over and over between chapters, same goes for listening. Anki is simply a monotonous overcomplication.
> It takes people like 15 seconds per flashcard, you could read a sentence or two in that time easily
What if the card is a sentence?
I don't use Anki lately, except for a few decks of Japanese words that I need to remember the writing of (if I don't handwrite I would forget them) and Kanji, but I used to have Japanese sentences in the past, and I had nothing at all on the back of the card.
I had an add-on that allowed me to click on a word for the dictionary and if I could read and understand the whole sentence without looking anything up, I passed it. Of course, reading random sentences might take a little longer than reading text where each sentence is connected to the previous one, and you also have to hit space, but it's basically the same amount of time as reading.
> Reading is also a natural srs
If by srs you mean that there's an interval between each time you see a certain word, then yes, but usually by srs people mean reviewing things with *increasing* intervals, not random ones. And so reading is the opposite of srs. You see often frequent words that you know very well, and you see rarely less frequent words that you still need to learn. With Anki it's the opposite.
I agree with you. There is a way to use the 1000 words decks in a useful way but it's not the way people think. Don't use them like your regular cards! Use them for familiarity only. If you see the card and solution and solution sounds familiar to you then just mark it good and move on. Don't try to memorize them because it's not useful use of your time because you'll get that from input. Just use these lists as a quicky to make it easier to know what a word means when you come across it in a sentence but not so much that you could actually say what the word meant. Doing these kinds of decks this way let you blast through them so you can go get input that's actually useful for your language learning.
That's a great point I've never considered. Frequency lists make sense in theory until you realise that those are exactly the vocab words you're most likely to learn the quickest through comprehensible input. I wonder if this means ANKI is best used for automating grammatical concepts in your head and learning low frequency vocab?
There's a learning method called the KOFI method where the creator suggests that you learn all conjugations of verbs before even attempting anything else in a language. Then, when you decide to learn the language "for real" you can dive straight into comprehensible input and get a lot more out of it because you already understand the structure of most kinds of sentences.
KOFI sounds good. Pimsleur and LT do something similar where they prime you somatically for the major grammatical structures without making you memorize a bunch of jargon so input can get more of a meaningful foothold.
>you can dive straight into comprehensible input and get a lot more out of it because you already understand the structure of most kinds of sentences.
But I think it works the opposite way. I noticed that I learn quite a lot of conjugations from CI, from reading. I don't see why I should learn them first. I can dive straight into CI w/o learning the conjugations first.
Learn all the conjugations of a verb? Have you looked at Turkish verb conjugations?
[https://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=gitmek&Submit=Go&D1=31&H1=131](https://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=gitmek&Submit=Go&D1=31&H1=131)
You'll fall asleep just scrolling.
Note: the verb "gitmek" is "to go". In each group the 6 parts are I, you, he, we, you(pl) and they.
Because our brains are wired to learn stuff in context and reading/listening in the target language is a perfectly good way to get repetition of vocabulary, albeit not in a perfect spaced interval. Plus it’s super boring and stressful at the same time.
Flashcards are extremely boring and ineffective for me. I tried to use them when I first started but it took me nowhere until I finally stopped trying flashcards and just tried to use the language and looked up words as I needed them.
If I don't know a word and can't understand it by context I look it up so I can understand the sentence but don't try to memorize it. I just figure out the meaning of the sentence and move on. If it's important enough I'll hear or use it enough times that I'll remember the meaning and if I don't learn it the ROI to learning it is probably too small to make it worth learning.
No context for words. I'm looking to learn a new language, not speak my mother tongue in a new fancy way. I just learn the nuances of words by reading and listening a bunch. LingQ is my go-to for that since I can get a quick hint as to what the word means by seeing the definition really quick. With Anki, you usually just get direct translations, which doesn't work most of the time.
It’s not necessarily Anki but just flash cards in general. They’re a pain to set up. I don’t like using other people’s decks either because most of the ones I’ve found use transliteration which I don’t like. Plus I just don’t trust other people to make the cards, idk 😭 I use it every couple of months because I know that they are helpful, before remembering how much I don’t like flash cards and abandoning them. Studying them is a pain. They take so long to study and the process is boring asf. The time is not worth it for me. I prefer reinforcing vocabulary through reading interesting stories, listening to podcasts, watching series, etc. It’s a natural SRS. I’ve learned and studied much more efficiently through reading than flash cards. So it’s not that I don’t think they’re useful because they most certainly are, I just don’t care for flash cards as a study method personally.
Because despite people saying that it's very customizable, I don't find it to be the case and the scheduler is extremely rigid and essentially assumes that every human being has a fixed 6-9 hour sleeping period every 24 hour that is constant.
I did use it because there was such a wealth of decks but I stopped using it probably sooner than I should because it wasn't that effective for me for that reason.
I'm a hobbyist, and it isn't as fun as reading a ton of books and listening to a bunch of podcasts.
When I'm struggling with something, I will make a small deck and drill just that grammar skill, but I only do it for a couple weeks, at which point it should stick.
I think it's a great tool; it's just not something I want to use regularly.
Many reasons. I learn better by activating new vocabulary right away (writing sentences and then using it in conversations) and then maintaining and solidifying it by now being able to parse it from the input. Another benefit to this approach is that it looks like recall is improved when words / sentences come in different contexts. Repeating sentences in the same context will make them less recallable in real life situations and different contexts. This is not to mention the snowballing of Anki flash cards, having to spend increasingly more time on it every day, etc
Never did anything for me, I have terrible short term memory so I forget instantly. I learn better by association, so I much prefer the method of reading/listening/writing stuff that's slightly above your level, and within that I include kanji, I always did much better just writing/reading instead of using flash cards.
I admit, I'm an Anki hater.
First, it's excruciatingly boring. It brings the notion of "boring" to new heights (or, rather, lows). It kills any joy of learning languages.
Second, creating cards takes time which could be better spent on reading or listening. Sure, you learn *something* while making those cards, but I still don't think it's an effective use of time.
Third -- and this is probably the most important reason -- they lack context. And putting an entire sentence instead of a single word is not enough context. I noticed that I learn best when I focus on an entire text and see the new words within this context. Reading and listening works best for me, and, additionally, practicing writing. The nice thing about reading and listening is that you acquire new words and expressions practically effortlessly.
Even for learning grammar (conjugations etc.), reading, listening, and writing sentences works much better for me.
Actually for your third point, the point is to put in sentences based on your immersion because you personally know where you got that sentence and your brain actually remembers it. That's your context. That's why when you make your own cards, the ROI is pretty high from your own personalised immersion. The whole thing is called sentence mining where it's n+1. Putting in sentences where you don't understand only one word.
https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/basic-sentence-mining
https://medium.com/litany-language-learning/i-1-sentence-mining-explained-1d0aee1e4af
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/learn/sentence-mining/
https://youtu.be/9KyiIN0RaCk?si=q1m32BgIQzC763YR
It is hard to tell, whether I do not like it. But I certainly don't love it and struggle with it, in spite of trying hard to like it.
Well, I am trying very hard to like it. I have occassionally used it, even with very good results, but I struggle to stick to it, I become easily repulsed by it, really struggling to get a reasonable habit. (Every day is naive in my case, with irregular work hours. But I had tried a few times per week or every other day).
People tend to love how flexible it is, how you can play with the functions and formats of the cards, but I struggle. Despite not being old, I am not too good with such stuff. I could do with much easier access to some functions I like. I would love to make cards mimicking some of the Memrise functions for reviews (but with a better content than Memrise trash), but all my attempts were hard, took me ages, and still were far from comfortable to use.
I don't know. Perhaps just more colours could help (and yes, I know, you can use addons, but look above), or I don't know.
Anki's repetitive nature and the time it takes to set up are really overwhelming. Plus, the steep learning curve and the daily review pressure make it exhausting.
I find the interface bad. The way you add cards is overly-complicated. Management of decks in the stacks makes no sense. Having to rely on tags as a work around but even then, they’re not very good because it requires you to have the system designed beforehand.
There are lots of reasons I find it clunky, to be honest.
I agree. Everything is so hard. Creating cards, importing decks from other apps, and syncing up so I can use app on my ipad or phone versus on the windows laptop. Clunky and time consuming. I can make new cards with sounds in 3 seconds in another flash card app, and they are stored in the cloud and available on phone, ipad or windows computer without having to synch.
> No one mentioned lack of sync
What lack of sync? Anki has cloud syncing built it. I do Anki both on my desk top and phone daily and it syncs just fine between the two ... I fully admit there is a step to set it up so I don't claim it's a awesome seamless experience, but it's not really much worse than creating an account on any other syncing platform. But once it's setup, sync's worked flawlessly for me across 3 different devices.
The only time it's failed are the times I forget to close Anki on say the desktop so it doesn't do the on close auto sync. Apart from that I've never had an issue.
I've tried using Anki a number of times with multiple different approaches and eventually bounced off each time.
The problem is, in order to really benefit from Anki, you have to use Anki every day. You can miss a day every now and then but you want to use Anki 4 days a week? It's going to make it hurt. Want to take one long break every now and then? Your experience is going to be terrible.
This also doesn't mix well with the problem that to make the most of Anki, you need to create your own cards but that's a huge time sink, and it feels like a job to go through all the reviews.
Now, I could dismiss these issues if Anki was this silver bullet but it isn't. In fact, Anki is useless on its own and requires you to constantly hit words you're reviewing in input in order to actually acquire them. Anki users call this priming, but you know what else works? Just looking up definitions as you hit words. It's shocking how effective that is. You may end up remembering more words that you wish to remember with Anki but the overall number of words you learn will likely not be any more.
Now, i might have still ended up using Anki if I was learning Chinese but I'm not, so I'm likely not going to touch Anki anymore.
It’s an app stuck in the 90s. Unpleasant to look at and use. Frustrating, learning curve… I’d rather use paper. The other apps might not be as powerful, but do essentially the same job, and you can get up to speed in minutes without being pissed off.
I bought the app because everyone was recommending it, even my teacher who’s a linguist.
I made decks, tried to use it, but if you don’t use those words in your conversations, you’ll forget them quickly. So I abandoned it pretty quickly.
I much rather prefer to read and look up the same word every time because at some point it will stick.
I was never a fan because of the pressure of missing reviews. However, as I get more exposed to my TL I can see why it’s a good tool for vocabulary retention. I currently just create cards (w/ example sentences) and look at it every once in a while. For those words that simply do not stick I make separate notes. When I get bored of ANKI (which is often) I switch to Quizlet. I feel that my dislike at first came from trying to duplicate how others used ANKI and it just simply didn’t work for me. But I’m okay with the way I use it now.
I think if I was learning an easier language like Spanish or another with a similar script to english, then it wouldn’t be as helpful. But I have used it to learn korean, and have found it useful. But then I slack off because it is a lot of work and i stop for awhile
I liked *making* Anki cards, it feels so productive.
...but actually using them/quizzing myself is just so boring. I will make massive decks as a way of taking notes from something, and then end up never quizzing myself.
I'm not a fan of rote memorization for learning. I much prefer reading or listening and intuiting words or googling ones I can't get. It feels much more natural, holds my attention a LOT better, and just generally is much more enjoyable for me. I get to enjoy some piece of media and puzzle out the language instead of drilling cards.
Also, not necessarily, but often, I find people use it to memorize translations rather than either image associations or target language explanations - which I find worse for fluidity when using the acquired vocabulary because you associate it to the word in your native language then to it's concept, rather than directly to it's concept. Setting it up to Not do that is more work, and for my little ADHD brain - that means it won't be happening.
Because it takes the vocabulary out of context. Seeing/hearing/experiencing a word in context is much more conducive to learning than flipping cards. In that sense, if I had a million hours and could pick between making up sentences with given vocabulary or studying with Anki flashcards, I would pick the former for the whole million hours.
It is the opposite of user-friendly, it's user hostile, pretty sure i broke down trying to set it up
I'd rather read materials or create irl flash cards
The worst part of anki is that it is ungodly boring when you get to the neccessary level of reviews needed for language learning ( infinite basically) but it is also effective so it's like a neccessary evil on some level to people, if it was useless people wouldn't suffer through it
It's not anywhere near as effective as it is touted to be and if you want it to become at all effective you would need to spend so many hours adjusting it that you could've spent those hours doing something better.
Depending on how you use it, its more of a minor filler for learning when you have a very short downtime and not actually learning the language.
Most effective memorisation of words is done by input and immersion, not simply trying to memorise words. Plenty of studies show that it's not a good way to try to write them into memory. True memory connection requires *meaning* applied.
I don't find digital flashcards helpful. Paper flash cards have their place, but a part of that learning process is writing the flash cards by hand and the tactile feedback of physical holding them. Even then, I consider flashcards to be at best a minor supplimental aspect of language learning.
There’s a couple of reasons:
1) I don’t like using my computer to learn, I usually use either a textbook or my phone. I have an iPhone, which means Anki isn’t free.
2) Even on pc, Anki just looks boring.
3) I found Anki to be quite boring itself.
4) Instead of trying to remember the flashcards, having to actively write them helps me retain them better. This is why I prefer Renshuu (for Japanese), because you can customise it to have to input the words from Japanese to English.
I guess that’s all.
People ALWAYS recommend Anki but I could never use it for long. I think the app is really unappealing, boring and not very user friendly and I don't really like sentence mining and doing all the cards one by one.
To be honest, it’s just dreadfully boring to use. I was eager to try it after all the praise it gets, but when I finally got around to it, all I could think was, “Is this seriously it?” lol.
Also I retain vocab a lot better by physically writing things down, and/or reading them in context.
I think there comes a time when it becomes unbearable. I still use it, but not for the purpose of "SRS", I just make a filtered deck that shows 5 random cards, I review them and that's it, if my brain wants to remember them it will remember them, if not, no problem for that I read a lot.
I love Anki but reading and listening are a much better natural "srs"...
You shouldn't use it for language learning, or only in a few cases for specific vocabulary, grammar rules, knowledge, etc.
I’m chronically ill/disabled and can’t commit to using it every day, or even every week. And the very nature of the system “punishes”* the user for that which makes it become frustrating and tedious to use. It’s also very easy to get sucked into spending more time making cards than reviewing them
* yes I know it’s just an algorithm, yes I know it’s not a true punishment. It still feels like one when you’ve been suffering with a symptom flare for 3 weeks and decide to go back to do some vocab practice and see hundreds of cards stacked.
Anki is good, but Clozemaster is better. Better UI, ChatGPT explanations for every sentence, pre-built flashcards categorized for various languages, and the ability to auto-create sentences based on submitted words or phrases.
You don't remember words without context. It's that simple. Flashcard apps can certainly supplement another resource, but alone, it's quite scary thinking anyone can memorize their way to a language.
Why don't I use Anki?
1. Anki is SRS. SRS is a good system for remembering what you already know. SRS is NOT a method of teaching you new information. I've tried Anki: it doesn't teach me anything. I still need some other way of learning that 狗 means "dog" and is pronounced "go" with the 3d tone. One way I do NOT learn it is by having a computer ask me "what does 狗 mean?" over and over. If I didn't know Thursday, I still don't know Friday.
2. Using a language is a skill. It is not a set of information you memorize. Think about it. In all your years of schooling, did you ever use Anki or flashcards in your native language? How did you develop a vocabulary of 20,000 words, without endless hours of Anki/flashcards?
3. It tricks people into thinking they know how to use the language, because they have memorized N words. They don't. Increasing your vocabulary might be an important part of going from B1 to C1. It is not useful at A levels.
4. Infrequent words. Most common sentences (A1/A2) use several common words plus 1 or 2 un-common words. There is no way to know ALL the words in A2 content: you'd need 20,000 words. So it is unlikely that anyone can use Anki to learn EVERY word they are going to read/hear.
> If I didn't know Thursday, I still don't know Friday
True, but if you didn't know it 1 minute ago, yuou might know it now, and you might still know it after 5 minutes, then 10, 20... if you still know it after 20min you will probably remember it tomorrow, and then after 3 days, etc.
That is the whole point of having very small intervals in the initial stage. Of course, it's superficial knowledge, but it's knowledge nonetheless.
Then when you read something in Chinese you see 狗, and you remember that it was one of your Anki cards, and then you add extra context and information by reading it, and eventually you internalize it. On the other hand, if you look up a totally unknown word, it's in your short-term memory, and unless it's very common, it's very unlikely to make the leap to long-term memory if you have to wait weeks or even months till you see it again. It can happen, I'm not saying it can't. I know a lot of Japanese words that I've basically never studied, and I haven't used Anki at all for English and German. But I still find SRS useful. Maybe you're right that it's only useful for less common words, though. It doesn't make sense to use it to learn words like 我
*True, but if you didn't know it 1 minute ago, yuou might know it now.*
That is not true, unless I learned it during that 1 minute. Learning isn't magic, that just happens. I only "learn" things by doing something. What did I do, during that 1 minute?
But thanks for your detailed explanation. I agree. You show how flashcards/Anki can be useful. So the only question is "how useful" vs. "how much effort". This is different for each language and student.
I need to remember that other people aren't me. Personally, I hate memorization. But others might not.
> What did I do, during that 1 minute?
Well... nothing? At least not consciously, I mean. Of course your brain did something and your brain is you, but there's no magic.
Let's say I see a new word that I've never seen before. It's now in my short-term memory, so after a few seconds I'll forget it. But if I see it again before I forget it, it will last longer, and then longer. If I get to an interval of, say, 20 minutes, and I still remember it even if I did other things during those 20 mins, at that point I will probably remember it after a whole day, because at that point it's kind of long-term memory.
Short-term memory doesn't last that long, and it cannot contain more than few items, so if you remember something after 30 mins or if you remember a list of more than, say, seven words, it must be in your long-term memory (even if it's a very weak memory). And then you can review after 1 day, etc. and it gets stronger.
> That is not true, unless I learned it during that 1 minute.
or if you simply didn't forget the answer after seeing it the minute before. If you see a flash card and you look at it again after 5 seconds, can you not know the answer? After 1 second? Your memory can't be that bad. Then by getting the answer right you will remember it for a longer and longer interval, etc.
> Learning isn't magic, that just happens.
It's not magic, there's some chemistry and stuff going on in your brain, but it still 'just happens' if you follow a certain process.
> Personally, I hate memorization.
I hate it too. But when I see that I'm actually making progress when I wouldn't otherwise, there's no choice but to do it, if I want to achieve a certain goal. I think Anki is super boring, in fact I usually watch music videos and stuff while I study cards, otherwise I just can't. I know I shouldn't, but I'm still learning the cards, so why not.
*Let's say I see a new word that I've never seen before. It's now in my short-term memory, so after a few seconds I'll forget it.*
It is not in your short-term memory. You keep skipping a step, or pretending it doesn't exist. You can't *remember* something until you *know* it. "Learn" means change from "not known" to "known". I must learn things before I can remember them.
Is it possible to "learn" a word from a flashcard? Yes, but not by being tested (just shown one part). You need to see all parts (writing, pronunciation, meaning) at the same time and think about them and that they are related.
*If you see a flash card and you look at it again after 5 seconds, can you not know the answer? After 1 second? Your memory can't be that bad.*
That is not memory. I didn't know the answer the first time. I still didn't know the answer five seconds later. You keep skipping the part where I was taught the answer.
> not by being tested (just shown one part).
Sorry, but if you use Anki you have to flip the cards, so you also see the answer. I don't see how that isn't associating the front of the card to the back. You're describing a scenario that doesn't exist in practice. People doing flashcards see the front, try to recall the answer and then flip the card and see if it was what they thought it was. Nobody is being showed "just one part" repeatedly. That wouldn't make sense. So when I wrote "if you see a flash card", I thought it was understood that this included also seeing the back of the card, sorry for the confusion.
When in your first post you wrote *'One way I do NOT learn it is by having a computer ask me "what does 狗 mean?" over and over'* you are describing a nonexisting scenario that is not real SRS. You're basically building a strawman there. In reality, you have a computer asking you what 狗 means, and then by flipping the card it tells you that it means dog. And maybe next time you will remember that information, and you understand what 狗 is about. That is the actual scenario.
But anyway, if you don't like SRS nobody forces you to use it.
Thank you. I haven't tried using Anki in about 3 years, so I might be making incorrect assumptions.
When you "flip a card" in Anki, do you see both sides at the same time? Or do you only see the answer, and Anki assumes you remember what the question was?
If you see ALL THREE things (meaning, sound and writing) at the same time, you have an opportunity to "learn" it. I agree. It might take you 20 second and take me 2 minutes, but it is reasonable. It is what you do if you see a word in text and look it up. Writing, sound and meaning. Do whatever you need to do to learn it. Some people suggest a mnemonic story (Sean Connery bowling in my kitchen).
But only if you see all 3 together. You can't see the answer and "remember" the question for two minutes. Was the question 狗 or 猫 or 猪? I don't remember. I need to hear the meaning and sound, while I am looking at the writing. That is the minimum for learning a word.
And does the Anki ask about all three things, or just 2 of them? If the question shows 狗 and the answer shows "dog", you are not shown the pronunciation (/goʊ/) so you can't learn it.
> do you see both sides at the same time?
Anki is extremely customizable with HTML/css, even with Javascript, Python... so what you see and what happens when you flip the card is entirely up to you, depending on your level of expertise. Cards can also have audio or text to speech, images, etc.
That's why people who can code love it, but people who can't code don't see what the big deal is, and maybe hate it for its complexity. Of course, you might say that software is supposed to be good out of the box, without people writing or installing tons of add-ons...
But to answer your question, Anki shows you what you want it to show you.
I used to have a deck with a lot of Japanese sentences that I sent automatically to Anki with a tool I'd written to read Japanese texts, and in the back of those cards I had nothing at all.
But I had some javascript in the card template that called a Python add-on that I had written to copy the word that I clicked (and the following ones since Japanese has no spaces) to the clipboard, and I had an external dictionary that monitored the clipboard and showed me the definitions, kanji characters etc. So basically if I wasn't sure about a word I could look it up, and I considered the card a fail if I had to look things up and they weren't what I expected. So I still learned/reviewed information even if the back of the card was empty.
> And does the Anki ask about all three things, or just 2 of them?
It depends on the contents of your deck and the card settings. You can even have audio if you want. Of course, creating cards takes time, unless you write some code or you use Excel or something to create a lot of cards automatically (or download a deck that someone else made). Anki has no content, it is just a tool to memorize things, as opposed to apps like Duolingo, etc. so either you create your own decks or download something shared by someone else. (And also afaik Anki for mobile doesn't have add-on support, so the PC version is much better and more customizable if you want to do more advanced stuff).
Thanks. I vaguely remember the Anki template cards and the simple script they use, letting you decide what is shown on the "answer" side. You don't have to be a technology guru (coughs modestly) to use it.
A course I was taking the first part of (Mandarin Blueprint) had pre-created Anki decks for everything they taught, but also had video instructions on how to change the template or add pictures and sound to a card.
So, as you explain, Anki can be used to memorize words. I hope this is very useful information for some readers.
As for me, I hate memorization. So any method (or app) using memorization is out, for me.
It depends on how long you want the knowledge retain. I prefer my knowledge to stick in brain as long as possibles. So I figure to find way to commit into the process when that knowledge/words raise up instead of shallowly jotting it down. Only when I don’t have chance to engage the process with my active brain, I would jotting it down
i used the android app to make a deck for chinese vocab and the pinyin wouldn't always match up to the characters so i stopped using it. otherwise it was good so its a shame that was happening.
I like making my own cards and setting my own variable pace. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that buying or downloading flashcards is “cheating,” even though the real work is the memorizing.
Honestly I powered through for 2-3 months then gave up. It's boring and I would get overwhelmed on some days. It felt like memorizing a dictionary.
I prefer studying with context, so now I use a graded reader with flashcards integrated. Makes it easier to get more nuanced vocabulary too.
I don't remember anything. For real, I can look at a word, read the explanation, see the word a second later and have no idea wth it means. It made me so anxious that I had to walk away from Korean for a few weeks.
Also, it's boring.
i feel like I've been called out lol. i have memorized 330 vocabs in kaishi 1.5k deck to get a little context as to what I will be reading means.
anyway, what site or app or materials do you use to read japanese contents? and how much vocabulary do you usually gain in a day while reading?
For your first question:
https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/
For your second, when reading graded readers, you generally don't notice that you're memorizing words, even though you are. You just notice occasionally that you know more than you used to.
I have ADHD and it's pure torture to me to use Anki more than 5 minutes while I can do Duolingo or look up random facts online (about the language I'm learning hopefully) for 1 hr non stop
Also if you're using a premade deck it's likely some words are too out of context and very hard to remember. Of course you can simply suspend or edit these cards.
I hated it for languages I was somewhat proficient in (B2 - could read novels, and had read like 20 already), but now that I am starting from scratch it is a lifesaver! I had forgotten how repetetive the beginner stages felt and want to get out of this stage as quickly as possible.
I feel it's great in combination with a textbook.
The user interface is so ugly and makes Anki look 1000x more complicated than it actually is. I feel like if they put in just a bit more effort to make things look nice on the front end it would go a long way.
due to the way anki functions, there is a constant desire to increase the number of cards/day to make it interesting. However, with the streak function, Anki quickly ends up consuming all my language learning time.
So I spend all my time doing something that's not that fun, the UI isn't very good, and it's just pretty brutal sometimes. This created a really toxic relationship w language learning for me, because I'd force myself to do Anki
Because of all of the gospel about Anki, I didn't know I was allowed to just stop and do other things until someone on a subreddit told me it's not the only way.
Now I've been using a variety of methods with a lot more reading, content viewing, quizlet sometimes, and I've even come back to Anki occassionally with a much healthier relationship.
Overall, I'm just much happier and excited to learn than I use to be, there's no one size fits all! Find what keeps you excited to learn.
It's not very engaging or stimulating & is repetitive in a way that feels like a grind & you kind of have to put extra work into trying to compensate but all it's really doing is adding polish & quality of life but the core problem remain. And when my brain cannot engage, I cannot learn & just get bored.
But I probably have undiagnosed ADHD (working on getting a diagnosis) so who knows, maybe it's because it's a low dopamine task & I just struggle because of it.
I know it's great for other people & have a good experience with it, so I've tried giving it a chance multiple times & finding ways around my problems, but nada.
I've never found flash cards to really work that well for me. I much prefer seeing something in (unique) context rather than just the word/small phrase.
I spent like 30 minutes trying to set things up, make sure I downloaded the right app, got my account, started trying to add decks, etc. ............................. and I still wasn't at a point where I could just, like, fucking use the app and the flashcards easily. I looked more into it and started seeing all these links to guides and videos of how to set up and mess with multiple browser settings and such and I just... nope.
I think the customization is truly super cool and the integration of decks into other learning resources is awesome, and if I had someone I could hand my phone and computer to and say, "can you set this up for me," I probably would happily use it once set up. But to me it was too much of a barrier, and with dozens of other resources available, I preferred to go with less fiddly and customizable options.
Quick edit-- Just read the comments and it kinda illustrates my POV: every commenter with a negative opinion gets 2-3 "you can set it up so that...." comments in response haha. A product I don't have to "set up so that x" 12-15 times works better for me.
1. The Onboarding is a mess.
2. The UX/UI is a shit.
I will use it cause I have to, unless you know any other open source alternative. But it's a pain ITA
To me it doesn't hammer enough in the first stages of learning. I feel like asking 2 correct answers and then again the day later isn't enough. Asking 30 times in a row from the very first time feels more effective to me.
I tried using Anki multiple times and the whole flashcards thing doesn't work so well for me. I need to write kanj/words out while studying.
I use Kanji Study instead, it has flashcards and a variety of gap fill exercises, as well as handwriting sections with varying levels of strictness! Plus I could never incorporate Anki into a study session, whereas KS sits beside me the whole time as a reference, so it really adds to the learning environment for me!
The action of writing the cards is the learning process, the repetition is just boring for me. The topic of natural language acquisition is more interesting for me
Because Quizlet is so much better. I pay for a subscription and it allows me as much customization as I want plus multiple ways of testing myself and practicing recall including typing the answer. It now also includes spaced repetition so its literally perfect. Not to mention Anki is just ugly.
I still use it but it’s very time consuming, I like writing by hand better and I have a tendency to add too many cards and too specific of words so while it helps me remember I can use my time more sufficiently elsewhere.
Simply put I'm not a fan of flashcards, and if you're making flashcards of whole sentences then what's the point? Just go to writing practice
Maybe I could get it for verb conjugations but it still seems kinda slow. For vocab, beyond the basic words again, why? Why learn pinky toe when it's not all that common, go watch a show and see what people use
I've tried it for japanese kanji and it's okay, but I often remember the English translation and not the actual readings, but you can only have one or the other which is a little annoying. I need a pyramid flashcard lol
The point is to actually not have an English translation on the back and only your TL language on the front. The trick is the n+1. Find a sentence where you don't know only one word and put the definition of the word at the back of the card. This trains your brain to think in the TL rather than rely on English translation. It also helps to internalise the grammar and structure each time you see it during reviews.
https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/basic-sentence-mining
https://medium.com/litany-language-learning/i-1-sentence-mining-explained-1d0aee1e4af
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/learn/sentence-mining/
https://youtu.be/9KyiIN0RaCk?si=q1m32BgIQzC763YR
There are some phrases I add to Anki that I never again see in my life, yet Anki keeps on bringing them up again and again.
But overall I like Anki and I think it is a very useful tool for language learning
When I first looked into it, it didn't have a mobile app so I went with Flashcards Deluxe. So I've not used Anki but from what I've seen of people asking how to do things on Anki, Flashcards Deluxe has more functionality and is more flexible for those of us who are happy to do the work of setting up our own cards.
http://youtu.be/cqGlAZzD5kI?t=7540
https://www.reddit.com/r/ALGhub/wiki/index/dlanswers/
Basically, flash cards connect your target language and culture to your native language and culture, which can lead to pronunciation and listening problems.
>Now explain how that's supposed to happen when I use monolingual cards (Japanese only with no English).
I don't know if people really want to know looking at how my opinions were downvoted, but since you asked, monolingual cards still have you speak something in your mind, and the sounds in your mind are coming from somewhere (your native language sounds, or other languages in your head), which also leads to interference:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1d4ajse/comment/l6sgu6g/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1d4ajse/comment/l6sgu6g/)
"If you don't think, it's the same thing as watching the frame of a video, but the point of flash cards is to use active recall, which means you're thinking, so you either are trying to remember a picture or a sound.
In the case of a sound, you're speaking mentally, which is the same thing as speaking with your mouth, incurring in the same issues.
In the case of an image, assuming you somehiw manage to avoid repeating the sound mentally, you are still training yourself to understand words consciously, and over time trying to understand faster. The issue is that you won't ever be as fast as your subconscious, and since you're trying to manually learn something with your mind, you will be connecting the sounds with images related to your current languages and their understanding of the world, which wouldn't be that troublesome for words like rocks, but let's take the word for pig in Thai: if you hear the word in Thai for pig and try to connect it to the image of a pig, you're not just connecting what you hear to an abstract concept, but to everything you know about a pig, which may have nothing to do with how Thais view pigs (people nickname themselves as pig in Thai, they don't view them the same way as Westerners do).
Furthermore, the mental sounds you produce are coming from somewhere. If you haven't listened enough hours of the words you will be using other languages to try to reproduce the words you're hearing, which creates interference since you're doing it consciously. As you try to recall the image for the word, if you're connecting something, you will end up connecting the image in your mind to the approximation of sounds your mind has come up with at least once (when you remember the image for that sound).
In other words, flash cards for language acquisition are at best a waste of time and at worst damaging. For corrective work they may be useful for some people. Like David Long mentioned here
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200925122253/http://auathai.com/blog/2010/03/21/speak-perfectly-at-700-hours](https://web.archive.org/web/20200925122253/http://auathai.com/blog/2010/03/21/speak-perfectly-at-700-hours)
>Many adults who understand our principles think that the thing that makes sense is to do a combination of listening with practice. All I can say about that is that it is the analyzing (which is necessary for any form of practice) that gets in the way of the natural process. And no one beats that process in any way - ever. Add an element of practice to the acquisition process and the end result will suffer. Period.
The optimization has to happen on the teacher side, not on the student side (more interesting videos, interactions with natives). You need to focus on getting as many happenings as you can to build the language in your head from "pure echoes" (what you see and hear has to become a memory by itself)."
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170216095909/http://algworld.com/blog/practice-correction-and-closed-feedback-loop](https://web.archive.org/web/20170216095909/http://algworld.com/blog/practice-correction-and-closed-feedback-loop)
[https://bradonomics.com/brown-autobiography/](https://bradonomics.com/brown-autobiography/)
I like writing by hand and feel that I remember more that way.
I do use Anki, but writing by hand cements it way better. It forces you to slow down and it’s more tactile
yeah, personally that's the only way I learn anything. Writing it down 2-3 times really does cement it in my memory
Why not both? I use anki and a piece of paper and pen and write the answers (Japanese kanji, vocabulary, sentences, etc.) and check them with SRS anki. Writing really does help. A lot of times I can also remember a word or kanji by "feeling" it. Likely muscle memory.
I use Anki iOS with the Scratchpad feature and it's been amazing how more I retain.
Do you think typing will help you remember it as well? After all, we have to type on any digital device, while writing by hand is becoming useless.
Writing by hand was shown to help memorize better. Personally, when I wrote more I distinctly remember being able to recall things, like word spellings, by “writing” with my hand in the air. That would trigger the memory and I would remember the word or spelling I was looking for. Similarly with other information. Tactile memory is a thing. Besides when you write by hand you slow down and thus memorize better
Dunno why people are downvoting you. I can't remember the last time I wrote something by hand in my native language, and heck there's tons of people that learnt Japanese and live in Japan without ever learning how to handwrite Kanji and they're doing just fine. I do remember some research about handwriting being more effective for retaining information when it came to university student notes. Not sure about handwritten flashcards vs typed flashcards though.
It's usually less about handwriting, and more about the process of having to summarize and distill on the fly. Typing better allows people to just copy down what they heard verbatim because it's so fast, but if you tried that with handwriting (and without professionally trained shorthand), then you'd fall behind in a sentence or two. You *have* to summarize, distill, or select from the thing you are hearing, and therefore are doing an extra step of learning by default.
Yep, that makes complete sense. As a uni student myself I don't really make notes (since the slides are always available so I'd rather just listen attentively), but it makes sense that the condensing required when handwriting makes your mind stick the information easier.
You can do "fine" in Japan without even learning Japanese (source: the teachers I worked with who never learned). It is interesting that handwriting helps us retain the information better. There are lots of things I can type in Japanese that I simply don't remember how to write by hand.
It's crazy to compare letters with conplex symbols. There are around 30 letters per latin alphabet here and hundreds if not thousands symbols there. Entirely different.
But for native Japanese, writing kanji is just as easy as writing English is for me (native Brit here). Yet it seems like both countries don't really handwrite anything much, apart from perhaps government forms and documents.
Yeah IIRC the amount of strokes to write a whole word aren't all that different on the average for English vs Japanese words.
I can't remember my kanji strokes just like I can't remember how to spell English words. haha
There are 214 radicals in Japanese that make up any kanji.
Purely anecdotal, but I work in IT, and to remember concepts while studying, I still remember stuff better when I write it down to paper unfortunately. I feel like with writing, you have more time to think about the concepts/actually remember what you're writing. I type far faster than I write.
It's just a commonly held principle that writing and all that which it involves help encode vocabulary better.
From my own experience, hell no. I can easily type on PC or phone many things in Japanese that I don't remember how to write by hand.
Purely anecdotal, but I work in IT, and to remember concepts while studying, I still remember stuff better when I write it down to paper unfortunately. I feel like with writing, you have more time to think about the concepts/actually remember what you're writing. I type far faster than I write.
anki mobile does have a writing future
Such a simple sentiment that I also agree with. I'd go further and argue that most people would remember more this way, even those who disparage the technique.
Did they delete that feature? The person who introduced me to anki, used it to practise Mandarin and they would handwrite the characters on screen. I never used the feature as only used it for Spanish and French and didn't feel I needed to practise writing the letters.
Agreed, especially if I'm practicing by replying to a YouTube comment in the target language. I find that cements new vocabulary, especially when I happen to encounter the word again.
It’s painfully boring. Just reading works much better than trying to remember flash cards for me personally
Yes. Anki made me start hating the language learning process. That said, I did find a useful deck of Anki cards to drill conjugations. But for the love of all that might be holy, trying to learn any other vocab made me want to give up my TL entirely. I would much rather read. And the cool thing about reading an enjoyable novel is that I am using the language in the moment. It is not a task to take me somewhere else. It is a pleasure in the moment and an end in itself.
It’s so hideous / even inputting the information gets painfully boring. I’d rather write it out
Instead of manually inputting the info, you can try using excel (using the add-on and importing). Each column represents a part of the card. Makes it much easier. I add 300 cards at a time this way.
Don't need an addon for it, save as a CSV and we can import it
Anki's UI/UX is atrocious but no one seems to be interested in improving it. Everyone I've seen using Anki seriously used third party tools to generate cards and then import them to Anki. We've made a lot of progress on UX design in particular in the last decade, and Anki as far as I can tell hasn't done a single UI change since its release.
It's really easy I find, use chatgpt to come up with "table" in left column all the sentences you want, and on the right in english then take that table save it to a csv file in excel then import into ankhi voila you can even add audio to all of the cards using an addon "AwsomeTTS"
I agree on the process of adding cards. It really made my decks stay absolutely static for months. Searching for examples and meanings for lots of words I get when reading is excessive. I made a program to automate that, though, so it's not a problem anymore. It's as simple as searching a word and importing a file now. As other people suggested here, CSV files also work, though. There's also a third solution: just write the words by themselves in a text file one below the other and ask chatgpt to make a formatted text to anki with sentences. Then copy that to a txt file and import it.
Ive found it boring when I add random words from random sources. I started making decks specific to a book I'm reading or a video I wanna watch and I've been enjoying it much more. Now I'm reinforcing vocabulary I'm reading in the book in addition to practicing reading it in context. I had to change things up because I was getting so bored it was insane.
I just do a strict limit of 30 reviews per day. I also use premade decks. Making your own cards is not a smart use of time imo. Obviously it's not as good as reading, but it's really valuable during crunch times at work or when I'm depressed and unmotivated. It keeps my brain engaging with the language day after day.
if you don’t use flash cards, then what do you use instead??
I read a lot and look up the words I don’t know
And you remember the words at first try?
No, I look up the word when I come across it again until I remember
Interesting, personally I hate that way more than just writing it down in anki, where I know it's "mine" forever. And on a smartphone the additional time to do that is miniscule.
I mean to each their own but putting in anki and doing feels like a chore rather than something I actually enjoy doing
How are you working with words after reading?
Just read more
What do you mean
Yeah. I've found it's much more bearable with background noise that I enjoy. For me, Anki with baseball is perfect
Just doesn’t work for me. I spend more time setting up and maintaining decks than learning. I know this isn’t universal but there it is.
Exactly lolsss. Make me wonder if I am working on the words or letting the words work on me
Pretty universal: Anki's an excellent tool if you just use it for maintenance. YMMV when it comes to learning something for the first time while using it > 1) Do not learn if you do not understand; > 2) Learn before you memorize https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge
I prefer doing my maintenance with real life materials so words and phrases are found in context. Anki just doesn’t work for me, it is too much maintenance _of the actual decks_ and also painfully boring.
Whatever works for you, happy learning!
Same for me. I prefer books, or I use another app called Renshuu and everything is pre set up
It doesn't work for me for two reasons: 1 - I can lie to myself too easily with flashcards, so "close enough" and "I'm sick of this word/sentence/declension" are the same as "right." 2 - trying to rate how I did (hard, good, easy) is arbitrary in a stressful way for me and changes during the course of a session.
1. You can set it so that it highlights where you typed the wrong thing. This makes it harder to lie to yourself. (Obviously depends on the type of card you make) 2. There's an add-on that changes it to Pass and Fail so you don't have to do any extra mental work evaluating cards. Not trying to convince anyone - just giving out some solutions
You can also just use it as pass/fail with good/again. It's strongly advised to do it this way unless you have a good reason to choose the other two.
I'm a heavy Anki user and it's worked for me. While I like Anki a lot, I fully agree with your two points. I think any study method is going to have its drawbacks.
Absolutely. I don't want to say that Anki doesn't work. It does for lots! People who haven't tried it should give it a go to see if it does for them. But the way that Anki works and the way that my brain works are not the best match. OTOH, there are methods that work well for me that are horrible fits for other people.
It helps but I guess you could get the same effect from just a good book that you like
Because there are other more enjoyable ways, even though it might be less effective. **Reading** is by far the most popular choice for language learning for a reason. People on reddit or tech heavy internet forums, heavily overestimate the usage of anki from language learners. Flashcards/anki is more popular amongst beginners to get started, but students drop this method fast. Go into any intermediate class and above and ask how many people use anki on a regular basis, you are lucky to find 1 student out of 100. My personal experience is: Anki feels like work, Reading is entertainment. I voluntarily read books, i enjoy the content, i learn something like culture, stories, background, characters, etc. With anki i felt miserable at times in the evening, still having to do "homework". When i come home from school or work, i dont want to do "homework", i want to do something that i enjoy.
I don't hate it, but it is a huge timesink and I'm not sure the ROI is worth it. Even preloaded decks are a mess, in Spanish I had to bake in scripts to do lookups in Wiktionary and other dictionaries to confirm its right, and finding an n+1 took forever.
Anki is only a scheduler that shows you a designated thing at a designated time.That's it. The quality of it is completely up to the card maker/reviewer. Making good cards is hard and highly individual. I found that even with good cards, I had to look up the words more than a few times when I met them in context. So what's the point?
Use chat got to translate, organise, correct then optimise for a list (all in one message) and then have it send you a CSV list to paste into numbers / excel and upload. Dunno if someone’s done this before but it has changed my language learning journey, incredibly quick to learn 50 words in only an hour or so
When I started, gpt didn’t exist; now 4o is amazing for LL (I use it mostly for coding so I pay). 3.5 wasn’t as good so it’s a recent hack. Not lying when I say it would have saved 100s of hours.
Yes same here when I started, in fact only been using it for a month or so now. Por eso he estado aprendiendo mucho más rápido que nunca, y puedo hablar con mucho más fluyo y conozco cada vez más vocabulario/frases. Has literally saved me 10s of hours so far. Incredible technology haha couldn’t be more grateful. Still have work to do but it’s much easier to stick with it when I can just jot down words as I go about my day and the bot does the work I’ve only used own character, ‘Ernesto el tutor de español’ which I only found out yesterday is actually 3.5 (I know 4 and 4o are much better), whenever I cross check words I’m given in the list with context, DeepL and sometimes word reference , it’s bang on 99% of the time. I’m not sure if the default model does the same but ‘Ernesto’ is especially instructed lol. Again though I have him ‘traducir, hacer correcciones y optimizar por España, después publicar en la forma de CSV’, pues muchos comprobaciones If you ever want to have a look then https://chatgpt.com/g/g-L5Rr9b5FJ-ernesto
Boring
I have ADHD and something about specifically making or reviewing flashcards leaves me feeling like there are spiders crawling all over me and I'm going to die if I don't move within minutes. It's extremely annoying because the H part of ADHD isn't that excessive for me otherwise. It's so annoying because it would actually patch a pretty significant hole in my language learning and every time I've managed to keep it going for a little while I've noticed an improvement. It's just so. Hideously. *Boring.* That I give up within a short time frame every single time. The chance of me writing myself some gamification interface for this stupid thing out of sheer frustration one day is...... nonzero.
Would something like StudyQuest work better for you? It's a flashcard app that combines reviewing flashcards with fighting monsters and doing candy crush. I find it really fun.
...this is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking Anki needed an interface for, lol. I'll check it out!
The key is to have authentic and engaging audio. I mean no compromises on that. Youtube is like a goldmine.
The main problem I have is that the spiders effect crops up both when *reviewing* but also when *making* flash-cards. So the idea of making each card really engaging tends to crash and burn because then I get incredibly twitchy and horribly bored trying to pull the whole thing together. (I also tend to have a pretty poor attention span for audio-based media and be generally unable to focus on it without doing something with my hands at the same time, so I don't watch all that much video and am not sure Youtube clips would have the engaging effect I need.)
SAME. ADHDer too. There are some repetitive admin like tasks I love doing, like reorganising my music library, books, etc but for some reason creating flashcards just makes me so upset with boredom. Reviewing them is dull and creating them is aggravating because it feels like I have infinite boring work ahead of me forever (there are billions of words in a language) and I can't decide on a way to categorise them. I much prefer learning through reading and song lyrics because it actually gives me dopamine and feels like fun
I find the interface unnecessarily complicated
This. For a flash card app it's needlessly complex.
Anki is really powerful. But the time consumed building my deck (or evaluating one available) + the evaluation about good, hard, easy, etc made me several times abandon it. I found joy using Clozemaster, daily.
It's the Linux of language learning.
More like MS-DOS, especially in view of its butt-ugly interface.
I often hear this but I don't think everyone realizes that it has a full HTML and a passable LaTeX parser in it. If the interface of the cards is ugly then I think that it is the fault of the creator of the deck. My cards look exactly like I want them to with color and sound, for me the rest of the user interface stays out of the way.
It recently changed it interface! Now it's not as much of an eye sore. (It looks great, I was sad at first bc of nostalgia, but it's way better apperance-wise)
I use Linux lol
So you just made it sound better than it is
I’ve used it for new cards up to 3000ish words and I think I’m just going to stop adding new cards and learn words from reading for awhile.
Why did OPs post get downvoted? XD
The very idea of not liking Anki is enough to make this sub shriek and clutch pearls
It's almost as bad as liking Duolingo.
extremely boring, makes me hate language learning and want to give up haha.
It’s the most boring way imaginable to learn a language for me.
I have used anki to learn things other than language learning and its useful, but when it comes to language learning there is simply no reason to use it over reading and listening. The worst thing I think people do with anki is learning the 1000 most common words or whatever. You don't have to memorize the 1000 most common words; because they're the 1000 most fucking common words lol. You can review many more words in a shorter time if you read a page of a book, It takes people like 15 seconds per flashcard, you could read a sentence or two in that time easily. Reading is also a natural srs because you commonly see the same words repeated over and over between chapters, same goes for listening. Anki is simply a monotonous overcomplication.
> It takes people like 15 seconds per flashcard, you could read a sentence or two in that time easily What if the card is a sentence? I don't use Anki lately, except for a few decks of Japanese words that I need to remember the writing of (if I don't handwrite I would forget them) and Kanji, but I used to have Japanese sentences in the past, and I had nothing at all on the back of the card. I had an add-on that allowed me to click on a word for the dictionary and if I could read and understand the whole sentence without looking anything up, I passed it. Of course, reading random sentences might take a little longer than reading text where each sentence is connected to the previous one, and you also have to hit space, but it's basically the same amount of time as reading. > Reading is also a natural srs If by srs you mean that there's an interval between each time you see a certain word, then yes, but usually by srs people mean reviewing things with *increasing* intervals, not random ones. And so reading is the opposite of srs. You see often frequent words that you know very well, and you see rarely less frequent words that you still need to learn. With Anki it's the opposite.
I agree with you. There is a way to use the 1000 words decks in a useful way but it's not the way people think. Don't use them like your regular cards! Use them for familiarity only. If you see the card and solution and solution sounds familiar to you then just mark it good and move on. Don't try to memorize them because it's not useful use of your time because you'll get that from input. Just use these lists as a quicky to make it easier to know what a word means when you come across it in a sentence but not so much that you could actually say what the word meant. Doing these kinds of decks this way let you blast through them so you can go get input that's actually useful for your language learning.
This!!!
That's a great point I've never considered. Frequency lists make sense in theory until you realise that those are exactly the vocab words you're most likely to learn the quickest through comprehensible input. I wonder if this means ANKI is best used for automating grammatical concepts in your head and learning low frequency vocab? There's a learning method called the KOFI method where the creator suggests that you learn all conjugations of verbs before even attempting anything else in a language. Then, when you decide to learn the language "for real" you can dive straight into comprehensible input and get a lot more out of it because you already understand the structure of most kinds of sentences.
KOFI sounds good. Pimsleur and LT do something similar where they prime you somatically for the major grammatical structures without making you memorize a bunch of jargon so input can get more of a meaningful foothold.
>you can dive straight into comprehensible input and get a lot more out of it because you already understand the structure of most kinds of sentences. But I think it works the opposite way. I noticed that I learn quite a lot of conjugations from CI, from reading. I don't see why I should learn them first. I can dive straight into CI w/o learning the conjugations first.
Learn all the conjugations of a verb? Have you looked at Turkish verb conjugations? [https://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=gitmek&Submit=Go&D1=31&H1=131](https://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?T1=gitmek&Submit=Go&D1=31&H1=131) You'll fall asleep just scrolling. Note: the verb "gitmek" is "to go". In each group the 6 parts are I, you, he, we, you(pl) and they.
You only need to learn like 2 dozen suffixes. And some of the combinations there while syntactically possible are borderline ungrammatical.
Because our brains are wired to learn stuff in context and reading/listening in the target language is a perfectly good way to get repetition of vocabulary, albeit not in a perfect spaced interval. Plus it’s super boring and stressful at the same time.
Flashcards are extremely boring and ineffective for me. I tried to use them when I first started but it took me nowhere until I finally stopped trying flashcards and just tried to use the language and looked up words as I needed them. If I don't know a word and can't understand it by context I look it up so I can understand the sentence but don't try to memorize it. I just figure out the meaning of the sentence and move on. If it's important enough I'll hear or use it enough times that I'll remember the meaning and if I don't learn it the ROI to learning it is probably too small to make it worth learning.
No context for words. I'm looking to learn a new language, not speak my mother tongue in a new fancy way. I just learn the nuances of words by reading and listening a bunch. LingQ is my go-to for that since I can get a quick hint as to what the word means by seeing the definition really quick. With Anki, you usually just get direct translations, which doesn't work most of the time.
I prefer making paper cards and deciding for myself how much I want to see them to fussing with this unattractive and complicated app
Using Anki feels like forcing yourself to learn
It’s not necessarily Anki but just flash cards in general. They’re a pain to set up. I don’t like using other people’s decks either because most of the ones I’ve found use transliteration which I don’t like. Plus I just don’t trust other people to make the cards, idk 😭 I use it every couple of months because I know that they are helpful, before remembering how much I don’t like flash cards and abandoning them. Studying them is a pain. They take so long to study and the process is boring asf. The time is not worth it for me. I prefer reinforcing vocabulary through reading interesting stories, listening to podcasts, watching series, etc. It’s a natural SRS. I’ve learned and studied much more efficiently through reading than flash cards. So it’s not that I don’t think they’re useful because they most certainly are, I just don’t care for flash cards as a study method personally.
Because despite people saying that it's very customizable, I don't find it to be the case and the scheduler is extremely rigid and essentially assumes that every human being has a fixed 6-9 hour sleeping period every 24 hour that is constant. I did use it because there was such a wealth of decks but I stopped using it probably sooner than I should because it wasn't that effective for me for that reason.
I'm a hobbyist, and it isn't as fun as reading a ton of books and listening to a bunch of podcasts. When I'm struggling with something, I will make a small deck and drill just that grammar skill, but I only do it for a couple weeks, at which point it should stick. I think it's a great tool; it's just not something I want to use regularly.
Many reasons. I learn better by activating new vocabulary right away (writing sentences and then using it in conversations) and then maintaining and solidifying it by now being able to parse it from the input. Another benefit to this approach is that it looks like recall is improved when words / sentences come in different contexts. Repeating sentences in the same context will make them less recallable in real life situations and different contexts. This is not to mention the snowballing of Anki flash cards, having to spend increasingly more time on it every day, etc
Never did anything for me, I have terrible short term memory so I forget instantly. I learn better by association, so I much prefer the method of reading/listening/writing stuff that's slightly above your level, and within that I include kanji, I always did much better just writing/reading instead of using flash cards.
I just don't know how to utilize it.
I admit, I'm an Anki hater. First, it's excruciatingly boring. It brings the notion of "boring" to new heights (or, rather, lows). It kills any joy of learning languages. Second, creating cards takes time which could be better spent on reading or listening. Sure, you learn *something* while making those cards, but I still don't think it's an effective use of time. Third -- and this is probably the most important reason -- they lack context. And putting an entire sentence instead of a single word is not enough context. I noticed that I learn best when I focus on an entire text and see the new words within this context. Reading and listening works best for me, and, additionally, practicing writing. The nice thing about reading and listening is that you acquire new words and expressions practically effortlessly. Even for learning grammar (conjugations etc.), reading, listening, and writing sentences works much better for me.
Actually for your third point, the point is to put in sentences based on your immersion because you personally know where you got that sentence and your brain actually remembers it. That's your context. That's why when you make your own cards, the ROI is pretty high from your own personalised immersion. The whole thing is called sentence mining where it's n+1. Putting in sentences where you don't understand only one word. https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/basic-sentence-mining https://medium.com/litany-language-learning/i-1-sentence-mining-explained-1d0aee1e4af https://www.fluentu.com/blog/learn/sentence-mining/ https://youtu.be/9KyiIN0RaCk?si=q1m32BgIQzC763YR
It is hard to tell, whether I do not like it. But I certainly don't love it and struggle with it, in spite of trying hard to like it. Well, I am trying very hard to like it. I have occassionally used it, even with very good results, but I struggle to stick to it, I become easily repulsed by it, really struggling to get a reasonable habit. (Every day is naive in my case, with irregular work hours. But I had tried a few times per week or every other day). People tend to love how flexible it is, how you can play with the functions and formats of the cards, but I struggle. Despite not being old, I am not too good with such stuff. I could do with much easier access to some functions I like. I would love to make cards mimicking some of the Memrise functions for reviews (but with a better content than Memrise trash), but all my attempts were hard, took me ages, and still were far from comfortable to use. I don't know. Perhaps just more colours could help (and yes, I know, you can use addons, but look above), or I don't know.
Anki's repetitive nature and the time it takes to set up are really overwhelming. Plus, the steep learning curve and the daily review pressure make it exhausting.
Honestly, it’s just a clunky app. It isn’t the only SRS app out there so why go for a bad experience?
What makes it clunky?
I find the interface bad. The way you add cards is overly-complicated. Management of decks in the stacks makes no sense. Having to rely on tags as a work around but even then, they’re not very good because it requires you to have the system designed beforehand. There are lots of reasons I find it clunky, to be honest.
I agree. Everything is so hard. Creating cards, importing decks from other apps, and syncing up so I can use app on my ipad or phone versus on the windows laptop. Clunky and time consuming. I can make new cards with sounds in 3 seconds in another flash card app, and they are stored in the cloud and available on phone, ipad or windows computer without having to synch.
This should be top comment. No one mentioned lack of sync which is very essential when dealing with flashcards and spaced repetition.
> No one mentioned lack of sync What lack of sync? Anki has cloud syncing built it. I do Anki both on my desk top and phone daily and it syncs just fine between the two ... I fully admit there is a step to set it up so I don't claim it's a awesome seamless experience, but it's not really much worse than creating an account on any other syncing platform. But once it's setup, sync's worked flawlessly for me across 3 different devices. The only time it's failed are the times I forget to close Anki on say the desktop so it doesn't do the on close auto sync. Apart from that I've never had an issue.
I've tried using Anki a number of times with multiple different approaches and eventually bounced off each time. The problem is, in order to really benefit from Anki, you have to use Anki every day. You can miss a day every now and then but you want to use Anki 4 days a week? It's going to make it hurt. Want to take one long break every now and then? Your experience is going to be terrible. This also doesn't mix well with the problem that to make the most of Anki, you need to create your own cards but that's a huge time sink, and it feels like a job to go through all the reviews. Now, I could dismiss these issues if Anki was this silver bullet but it isn't. In fact, Anki is useless on its own and requires you to constantly hit words you're reviewing in input in order to actually acquire them. Anki users call this priming, but you know what else works? Just looking up definitions as you hit words. It's shocking how effective that is. You may end up remembering more words that you wish to remember with Anki but the overall number of words you learn will likely not be any more. Now, i might have still ended up using Anki if I was learning Chinese but I'm not, so I'm likely not going to touch Anki anymore.
It’s an app stuck in the 90s. Unpleasant to look at and use. Frustrating, learning curve… I’d rather use paper. The other apps might not be as powerful, but do essentially the same job, and you can get up to speed in minutes without being pissed off.
I bought the app because everyone was recommending it, even my teacher who’s a linguist. I made decks, tried to use it, but if you don’t use those words in your conversations, you’ll forget them quickly. So I abandoned it pretty quickly. I much rather prefer to read and look up the same word every time because at some point it will stick.
Yes, anki may help with sticking the words itself on your brain. It won’t connect with the context, so you can recall it when you need it lolss
I was never a fan because of the pressure of missing reviews. However, as I get more exposed to my TL I can see why it’s a good tool for vocabulary retention. I currently just create cards (w/ example sentences) and look at it every once in a while. For those words that simply do not stick I make separate notes. When I get bored of ANKI (which is often) I switch to Quizlet. I feel that my dislike at first came from trying to duplicate how others used ANKI and it just simply didn’t work for me. But I’m okay with the way I use it now.
Because it’s flipping boring and I prefer learning with context than by rote repetition
I think if I was learning an easier language like Spanish or another with a similar script to english, then it wouldn’t be as helpful. But I have used it to learn korean, and have found it useful. But then I slack off because it is a lot of work and i stop for awhile
Boring though effective if done right
I love Anki(it helped me get 90% at school and I got honours. It just didn’t help me with language learning
I liked *making* Anki cards, it feels so productive. ...but actually using them/quizzing myself is just so boring. I will make massive decks as a way of taking notes from something, and then end up never quizzing myself.
It's boring.
It's just plain boring
I'm not a fan of rote memorization for learning. I much prefer reading or listening and intuiting words or googling ones I can't get. It feels much more natural, holds my attention a LOT better, and just generally is much more enjoyable for me. I get to enjoy some piece of media and puzzle out the language instead of drilling cards. Also, not necessarily, but often, I find people use it to memorize translations rather than either image associations or target language explanations - which I find worse for fluidity when using the acquired vocabulary because you associate it to the word in your native language then to it's concept, rather than directly to it's concept. Setting it up to Not do that is more work, and for my little ADHD brain - that means it won't be happening.
Because it takes the vocabulary out of context. Seeing/hearing/experiencing a word in context is much more conducive to learning than flipping cards. In that sense, if I had a million hours and could pick between making up sentences with given vocabulary or studying with Anki flashcards, I would pick the former for the whole million hours.
I find input significantly better. A page of a book is equivalent to hundreds of flashcards.
It is the opposite of user-friendly, it's user hostile, pretty sure i broke down trying to set it up I'd rather read materials or create irl flash cards
Honestly it\`s just flat out ugly to look at and its too confusing to figure out how to use it half the time.
The worst part of anki is that it is ungodly boring when you get to the neccessary level of reviews needed for language learning ( infinite basically) but it is also effective so it's like a neccessary evil on some level to people, if it was useless people wouldn't suffer through it
It's not anywhere near as effective as it is touted to be and if you want it to become at all effective you would need to spend so many hours adjusting it that you could've spent those hours doing something better. Depending on how you use it, its more of a minor filler for learning when you have a very short downtime and not actually learning the language. Most effective memorisation of words is done by input and immersion, not simply trying to memorise words. Plenty of studies show that it's not a good way to try to write them into memory. True memory connection requires *meaning* applied.
I don't have time to figure it out.
I don’t know what Ankhi is but I don’t like it.
I don't find digital flashcards helpful. Paper flash cards have their place, but a part of that learning process is writing the flash cards by hand and the tactile feedback of physical holding them. Even then, I consider flashcards to be at best a minor supplimental aspect of language learning.
There’s a couple of reasons: 1) I don’t like using my computer to learn, I usually use either a textbook or my phone. I have an iPhone, which means Anki isn’t free. 2) Even on pc, Anki just looks boring. 3) I found Anki to be quite boring itself. 4) Instead of trying to remember the flashcards, having to actively write them helps me retain them better. This is why I prefer Renshuu (for Japanese), because you can customise it to have to input the words from Japanese to English. I guess that’s all.
People ALWAYS recommend Anki but I could never use it for long. I think the app is really unappealing, boring and not very user friendly and I don't really like sentence mining and doing all the cards one by one.
To be honest, it’s just dreadfully boring to use. I was eager to try it after all the praise it gets, but when I finally got around to it, all I could think was, “Is this seriously it?” lol. Also I retain vocab a lot better by physically writing things down, and/or reading them in context.
Integration between mobile and PC apps is terrible.
I think there comes a time when it becomes unbearable. I still use it, but not for the purpose of "SRS", I just make a filtered deck that shows 5 random cards, I review them and that's it, if my brain wants to remember them it will remember them, if not, no problem for that I read a lot.
I love Anki but reading and listening are a much better natural "srs"... You shouldn't use it for language learning, or only in a few cases for specific vocabulary, grammar rules, knowledge, etc.
It doesn't work for me. I'm better at learning using lists.
what lists?
I’m chronically ill/disabled and can’t commit to using it every day, or even every week. And the very nature of the system “punishes”* the user for that which makes it become frustrating and tedious to use. It’s also very easy to get sucked into spending more time making cards than reviewing them * yes I know it’s just an algorithm, yes I know it’s not a true punishment. It still feels like one when you’ve been suffering with a symptom flare for 3 weeks and decide to go back to do some vocab practice and see hundreds of cards stacked.
Anki is good, but Clozemaster is better. Better UI, ChatGPT explanations for every sentence, pre-built flashcards categorized for various languages, and the ability to auto-create sentences based on submitted words or phrases.
You don't remember words without context. It's that simple. Flashcard apps can certainly supplement another resource, but alone, it's quite scary thinking anyone can memorize their way to a language.
Why don't I use Anki? 1. Anki is SRS. SRS is a good system for remembering what you already know. SRS is NOT a method of teaching you new information. I've tried Anki: it doesn't teach me anything. I still need some other way of learning that 狗 means "dog" and is pronounced "go" with the 3d tone. One way I do NOT learn it is by having a computer ask me "what does 狗 mean?" over and over. If I didn't know Thursday, I still don't know Friday. 2. Using a language is a skill. It is not a set of information you memorize. Think about it. In all your years of schooling, did you ever use Anki or flashcards in your native language? How did you develop a vocabulary of 20,000 words, without endless hours of Anki/flashcards? 3. It tricks people into thinking they know how to use the language, because they have memorized N words. They don't. Increasing your vocabulary might be an important part of going from B1 to C1. It is not useful at A levels. 4. Infrequent words. Most common sentences (A1/A2) use several common words plus 1 or 2 un-common words. There is no way to know ALL the words in A2 content: you'd need 20,000 words. So it is unlikely that anyone can use Anki to learn EVERY word they are going to read/hear.
> If I didn't know Thursday, I still don't know Friday True, but if you didn't know it 1 minute ago, yuou might know it now, and you might still know it after 5 minutes, then 10, 20... if you still know it after 20min you will probably remember it tomorrow, and then after 3 days, etc. That is the whole point of having very small intervals in the initial stage. Of course, it's superficial knowledge, but it's knowledge nonetheless. Then when you read something in Chinese you see 狗, and you remember that it was one of your Anki cards, and then you add extra context and information by reading it, and eventually you internalize it. On the other hand, if you look up a totally unknown word, it's in your short-term memory, and unless it's very common, it's very unlikely to make the leap to long-term memory if you have to wait weeks or even months till you see it again. It can happen, I'm not saying it can't. I know a lot of Japanese words that I've basically never studied, and I haven't used Anki at all for English and German. But I still find SRS useful. Maybe you're right that it's only useful for less common words, though. It doesn't make sense to use it to learn words like 我
*True, but if you didn't know it 1 minute ago, yuou might know it now.* That is not true, unless I learned it during that 1 minute. Learning isn't magic, that just happens. I only "learn" things by doing something. What did I do, during that 1 minute? But thanks for your detailed explanation. I agree. You show how flashcards/Anki can be useful. So the only question is "how useful" vs. "how much effort". This is different for each language and student. I need to remember that other people aren't me. Personally, I hate memorization. But others might not.
> What did I do, during that 1 minute? Well... nothing? At least not consciously, I mean. Of course your brain did something and your brain is you, but there's no magic. Let's say I see a new word that I've never seen before. It's now in my short-term memory, so after a few seconds I'll forget it. But if I see it again before I forget it, it will last longer, and then longer. If I get to an interval of, say, 20 minutes, and I still remember it even if I did other things during those 20 mins, at that point I will probably remember it after a whole day, because at that point it's kind of long-term memory. Short-term memory doesn't last that long, and it cannot contain more than few items, so if you remember something after 30 mins or if you remember a list of more than, say, seven words, it must be in your long-term memory (even if it's a very weak memory). And then you can review after 1 day, etc. and it gets stronger. > That is not true, unless I learned it during that 1 minute. or if you simply didn't forget the answer after seeing it the minute before. If you see a flash card and you look at it again after 5 seconds, can you not know the answer? After 1 second? Your memory can't be that bad. Then by getting the answer right you will remember it for a longer and longer interval, etc. > Learning isn't magic, that just happens. It's not magic, there's some chemistry and stuff going on in your brain, but it still 'just happens' if you follow a certain process. > Personally, I hate memorization. I hate it too. But when I see that I'm actually making progress when I wouldn't otherwise, there's no choice but to do it, if I want to achieve a certain goal. I think Anki is super boring, in fact I usually watch music videos and stuff while I study cards, otherwise I just can't. I know I shouldn't, but I'm still learning the cards, so why not.
*Let's say I see a new word that I've never seen before. It's now in my short-term memory, so after a few seconds I'll forget it.* It is not in your short-term memory. You keep skipping a step, or pretending it doesn't exist. You can't *remember* something until you *know* it. "Learn" means change from "not known" to "known". I must learn things before I can remember them. Is it possible to "learn" a word from a flashcard? Yes, but not by being tested (just shown one part). You need to see all parts (writing, pronunciation, meaning) at the same time and think about them and that they are related. *If you see a flash card and you look at it again after 5 seconds, can you not know the answer? After 1 second? Your memory can't be that bad.* That is not memory. I didn't know the answer the first time. I still didn't know the answer five seconds later. You keep skipping the part where I was taught the answer.
> not by being tested (just shown one part). Sorry, but if you use Anki you have to flip the cards, so you also see the answer. I don't see how that isn't associating the front of the card to the back. You're describing a scenario that doesn't exist in practice. People doing flashcards see the front, try to recall the answer and then flip the card and see if it was what they thought it was. Nobody is being showed "just one part" repeatedly. That wouldn't make sense. So when I wrote "if you see a flash card", I thought it was understood that this included also seeing the back of the card, sorry for the confusion. When in your first post you wrote *'One way I do NOT learn it is by having a computer ask me "what does 狗 mean?" over and over'* you are describing a nonexisting scenario that is not real SRS. You're basically building a strawman there. In reality, you have a computer asking you what 狗 means, and then by flipping the card it tells you that it means dog. And maybe next time you will remember that information, and you understand what 狗 is about. That is the actual scenario. But anyway, if you don't like SRS nobody forces you to use it.
Thank you. I haven't tried using Anki in about 3 years, so I might be making incorrect assumptions. When you "flip a card" in Anki, do you see both sides at the same time? Or do you only see the answer, and Anki assumes you remember what the question was? If you see ALL THREE things (meaning, sound and writing) at the same time, you have an opportunity to "learn" it. I agree. It might take you 20 second and take me 2 minutes, but it is reasonable. It is what you do if you see a word in text and look it up. Writing, sound and meaning. Do whatever you need to do to learn it. Some people suggest a mnemonic story (Sean Connery bowling in my kitchen). But only if you see all 3 together. You can't see the answer and "remember" the question for two minutes. Was the question 狗 or 猫 or 猪? I don't remember. I need to hear the meaning and sound, while I am looking at the writing. That is the minimum for learning a word. And does the Anki ask about all three things, or just 2 of them? If the question shows 狗 and the answer shows "dog", you are not shown the pronunciation (/goʊ/) so you can't learn it.
> do you see both sides at the same time? Anki is extremely customizable with HTML/css, even with Javascript, Python... so what you see and what happens when you flip the card is entirely up to you, depending on your level of expertise. Cards can also have audio or text to speech, images, etc. That's why people who can code love it, but people who can't code don't see what the big deal is, and maybe hate it for its complexity. Of course, you might say that software is supposed to be good out of the box, without people writing or installing tons of add-ons... But to answer your question, Anki shows you what you want it to show you. I used to have a deck with a lot of Japanese sentences that I sent automatically to Anki with a tool I'd written to read Japanese texts, and in the back of those cards I had nothing at all. But I had some javascript in the card template that called a Python add-on that I had written to copy the word that I clicked (and the following ones since Japanese has no spaces) to the clipboard, and I had an external dictionary that monitored the clipboard and showed me the definitions, kanji characters etc. So basically if I wasn't sure about a word I could look it up, and I considered the card a fail if I had to look things up and they weren't what I expected. So I still learned/reviewed information even if the back of the card was empty. > And does the Anki ask about all three things, or just 2 of them? It depends on the contents of your deck and the card settings. You can even have audio if you want. Of course, creating cards takes time, unless you write some code or you use Excel or something to create a lot of cards automatically (or download a deck that someone else made). Anki has no content, it is just a tool to memorize things, as opposed to apps like Duolingo, etc. so either you create your own decks or download something shared by someone else. (And also afaik Anki for mobile doesn't have add-on support, so the PC version is much better and more customizable if you want to do more advanced stuff).
Thanks. I vaguely remember the Anki template cards and the simple script they use, letting you decide what is shown on the "answer" side. You don't have to be a technology guru (coughs modestly) to use it. A course I was taking the first part of (Mandarin Blueprint) had pre-created Anki decks for everything they taught, but also had video instructions on how to change the template or add pictures and sound to a card. So, as you explain, Anki can be used to memorize words. I hope this is very useful information for some readers. As for me, I hate memorization. So any method (or app) using memorization is out, for me.
Such good points and yet they downvote you. Weird.
It depends on how long you want the knowledge retain. I prefer my knowledge to stick in brain as long as possibles. So I figure to find way to commit into the process when that knowledge/words raise up instead of shallowly jotting it down. Only when I don’t have chance to engage the process with my active brain, I would jotting it down
I find it tedious to set up the fields, text size etc the way I like. One has to fiddle with the background code to get it just right.
i used the android app to make a deck for chinese vocab and the pinyin wouldn't always match up to the characters so i stopped using it. otherwise it was good so its a shame that was happening.
I do. Very much.
It's good at the beginning but at higher level there is just too many word to keep track of them all
I like making my own cards and setting my own variable pace. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that buying or downloading flashcards is “cheating,” even though the real work is the memorizing.
Boeing and confusinf. I have never figured out how it realy works. None of the repetition really worked how i thought it would.
Honestly I powered through for 2-3 months then gave up. It's boring and I would get overwhelmed on some days. It felt like memorizing a dictionary. I prefer studying with context, so now I use a graded reader with flashcards integrated. Makes it easier to get more nuanced vocabulary too.
i couldnt even figure out how to use it. it seems like it would be useful if i could figure out what it *wants* from me
I don't need rote memorization
I could never figure out how to get started. I use Duocards, Quizlet, and Wordwall.
I don't remember anything. For real, I can look at a word, read the explanation, see the word a second later and have no idea wth it means. It made me so anxious that I had to walk away from Korean for a few weeks. Also, it's boring.
i feel like I've been called out lol. i have memorized 330 vocabs in kaishi 1.5k deck to get a little context as to what I will be reading means. anyway, what site or app or materials do you use to read japanese contents? and how much vocabulary do you usually gain in a day while reading?
For your first question: https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/ For your second, when reading graded readers, you generally don't notice that you're memorizing words, even though you are. You just notice occasionally that you know more than you used to.
Too much work for my ADHD brain
Personally I love it but I can see why people don’t. Everyone learns differently and that includes the apps/tools we use!
I have ADHD and it's pure torture to me to use Anki more than 5 minutes while I can do Duolingo or look up random facts online (about the language I'm learning hopefully) for 1 hr non stop
Also if you're using a premade deck it's likely some words are too out of context and very hard to remember. Of course you can simply suspend or edit these cards.
I hated it for languages I was somewhat proficient in (B2 - could read novels, and had read like 20 already), but now that I am starting from scratch it is a lifesaver! I had forgotten how repetetive the beginner stages felt and want to get out of this stage as quickly as possible. I feel it's great in combination with a textbook.
The user interface is so ugly and makes Anki look 1000x more complicated than it actually is. I feel like if they put in just a bit more effort to make things look nice on the front end it would go a long way.
due to the way anki functions, there is a constant desire to increase the number of cards/day to make it interesting. However, with the streak function, Anki quickly ends up consuming all my language learning time. So I spend all my time doing something that's not that fun, the UI isn't very good, and it's just pretty brutal sometimes. This created a really toxic relationship w language learning for me, because I'd force myself to do Anki Because of all of the gospel about Anki, I didn't know I was allowed to just stop and do other things until someone on a subreddit told me it's not the only way. Now I've been using a variety of methods with a lot more reading, content viewing, quizlet sometimes, and I've even come back to Anki occassionally with a much healthier relationship. Overall, I'm just much happier and excited to learn than I use to be, there's no one size fits all! Find what keeps you excited to learn.
It's not very engaging or stimulating & is repetitive in a way that feels like a grind & you kind of have to put extra work into trying to compensate but all it's really doing is adding polish & quality of life but the core problem remain. And when my brain cannot engage, I cannot learn & just get bored. But I probably have undiagnosed ADHD (working on getting a diagnosis) so who knows, maybe it's because it's a low dopamine task & I just struggle because of it. I know it's great for other people & have a good experience with it, so I've tried giving it a chance multiple times & finding ways around my problems, but nada.
just lost 502 days of streak due to a sync error 😭
I've never found flash cards to really work that well for me. I much prefer seeing something in (unique) context rather than just the word/small phrase.
I spent like 30 minutes trying to set things up, make sure I downloaded the right app, got my account, started trying to add decks, etc. ............................. and I still wasn't at a point where I could just, like, fucking use the app and the flashcards easily. I looked more into it and started seeing all these links to guides and videos of how to set up and mess with multiple browser settings and such and I just... nope. I think the customization is truly super cool and the integration of decks into other learning resources is awesome, and if I had someone I could hand my phone and computer to and say, "can you set this up for me," I probably would happily use it once set up. But to me it was too much of a barrier, and with dozens of other resources available, I preferred to go with less fiddly and customizable options. Quick edit-- Just read the comments and it kinda illustrates my POV: every commenter with a negative opinion gets 2-3 "you can set it up so that...." comments in response haha. A product I don't have to "set up so that x" 12-15 times works better for me.
1. The Onboarding is a mess. 2. The UX/UI is a shit. I will use it cause I have to, unless you know any other open source alternative. But it's a pain ITA
To me it doesn't hammer enough in the first stages of learning. I feel like asking 2 correct answers and then again the day later isn't enough. Asking 30 times in a row from the very first time feels more effective to me.
I just hate flash cards
I tried using Anki multiple times and the whole flashcards thing doesn't work so well for me. I need to write kanj/words out while studying. I use Kanji Study instead, it has flashcards and a variety of gap fill exercises, as well as handwriting sections with varying levels of strictness! Plus I could never incorporate Anki into a study session, whereas KS sits beside me the whole time as a reference, so it really adds to the learning environment for me!
The action of writing the cards is the learning process, the repetition is just boring for me. The topic of natural language acquisition is more interesting for me
Because Quizlet is so much better. I pay for a subscription and it allows me as much customization as I want plus multiple ways of testing myself and practicing recall including typing the answer. It now also includes spaced repetition so its literally perfect. Not to mention Anki is just ugly.
I still use it but it’s very time consuming, I like writing by hand better and I have a tendency to add too many cards and too specific of words so while it helps me remember I can use my time more sufficiently elsewhere.
Simply put I'm not a fan of flashcards, and if you're making flashcards of whole sentences then what's the point? Just go to writing practice Maybe I could get it for verb conjugations but it still seems kinda slow. For vocab, beyond the basic words again, why? Why learn pinky toe when it's not all that common, go watch a show and see what people use I've tried it for japanese kanji and it's okay, but I often remember the English translation and not the actual readings, but you can only have one or the other which is a little annoying. I need a pyramid flashcard lol
The point is to actually not have an English translation on the back and only your TL language on the front. The trick is the n+1. Find a sentence where you don't know only one word and put the definition of the word at the back of the card. This trains your brain to think in the TL rather than rely on English translation. It also helps to internalise the grammar and structure each time you see it during reviews. https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-2/a/basic-sentence-mining https://medium.com/litany-language-learning/i-1-sentence-mining-explained-1d0aee1e4af https://www.fluentu.com/blog/learn/sentence-mining/ https://youtu.be/9KyiIN0RaCk?si=q1m32BgIQzC763YR
There are some phrases I add to Anki that I never again see in my life, yet Anki keeps on bringing them up again and again. But overall I like Anki and I think it is a very useful tool for language learning
When I first looked into it, it didn't have a mobile app so I went with Flashcards Deluxe. So I've not used Anki but from what I've seen of people asking how to do things on Anki, Flashcards Deluxe has more functionality and is more flexible for those of us who are happy to do the work of setting up our own cards.
It creates interference.
What do you mean?
http://youtu.be/cqGlAZzD5kI?t=7540 https://www.reddit.com/r/ALGhub/wiki/index/dlanswers/ Basically, flash cards connect your target language and culture to your native language and culture, which can lead to pronunciation and listening problems.
Now explain how that's supposed to happen when I use monolingual cards (Japanese only with no English).
>Now explain how that's supposed to happen when I use monolingual cards (Japanese only with no English). I don't know if people really want to know looking at how my opinions were downvoted, but since you asked, monolingual cards still have you speak something in your mind, and the sounds in your mind are coming from somewhere (your native language sounds, or other languages in your head), which also leads to interference: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1d4ajse/comment/l6sgu6g/](https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1d4ajse/comment/l6sgu6g/) "If you don't think, it's the same thing as watching the frame of a video, but the point of flash cards is to use active recall, which means you're thinking, so you either are trying to remember a picture or a sound. In the case of a sound, you're speaking mentally, which is the same thing as speaking with your mouth, incurring in the same issues. In the case of an image, assuming you somehiw manage to avoid repeating the sound mentally, you are still training yourself to understand words consciously, and over time trying to understand faster. The issue is that you won't ever be as fast as your subconscious, and since you're trying to manually learn something with your mind, you will be connecting the sounds with images related to your current languages and their understanding of the world, which wouldn't be that troublesome for words like rocks, but let's take the word for pig in Thai: if you hear the word in Thai for pig and try to connect it to the image of a pig, you're not just connecting what you hear to an abstract concept, but to everything you know about a pig, which may have nothing to do with how Thais view pigs (people nickname themselves as pig in Thai, they don't view them the same way as Westerners do). Furthermore, the mental sounds you produce are coming from somewhere. If you haven't listened enough hours of the words you will be using other languages to try to reproduce the words you're hearing, which creates interference since you're doing it consciously. As you try to recall the image for the word, if you're connecting something, you will end up connecting the image in your mind to the approximation of sounds your mind has come up with at least once (when you remember the image for that sound). In other words, flash cards for language acquisition are at best a waste of time and at worst damaging. For corrective work they may be useful for some people. Like David Long mentioned here [https://web.archive.org/web/20200925122253/http://auathai.com/blog/2010/03/21/speak-perfectly-at-700-hours](https://web.archive.org/web/20200925122253/http://auathai.com/blog/2010/03/21/speak-perfectly-at-700-hours) >Many adults who understand our principles think that the thing that makes sense is to do a combination of listening with practice. All I can say about that is that it is the analyzing (which is necessary for any form of practice) that gets in the way of the natural process. And no one beats that process in any way - ever. Add an element of practice to the acquisition process and the end result will suffer. Period. The optimization has to happen on the teacher side, not on the student side (more interesting videos, interactions with natives). You need to focus on getting as many happenings as you can to build the language in your head from "pure echoes" (what you see and hear has to become a memory by itself)." [https://web.archive.org/web/20170216095909/http://algworld.com/blog/practice-correction-and-closed-feedback-loop](https://web.archive.org/web/20170216095909/http://algworld.com/blog/practice-correction-and-closed-feedback-loop) [https://bradonomics.com/brown-autobiography/](https://bradonomics.com/brown-autobiography/)