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Not Memorizing Sentences in Anki | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4852 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 1 of 21 12 February 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How do you experienced Anki users prevent memorizing sentences when doing reviews? I hear that the most important rule of an SRS is not to memorize the sentence. Yet that is what I find myself doing when I am doing Anki reviews, especially when I've seen a card a few times. This is a problem because sometimes if I want to recall the word that I'm trying to learn to use in a situation, I have to recall the entire sentence that I learned it with in Anki.
Let me use English for an example. Let's say that I want to learn the word jump, so I add this sentence to my SRS: "The boy ran to the cliff and jumped into the sea." But if I want to use "jump" in another sentence when I am speaking English, I need to recall the entire sentence in order to recall the word ("Okay... what was that... The boy ran to the cliff... AH, JUMP! That's it. Jump!"). How do you prevent this? Any advice is appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4756 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French | Message 2 of 21 12 February 2013 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't know how to prevent this, but whole sentence recall is part of the reason why I
use SRS programs. I memorize sentences which are as relevant to vocabulary and grammar points I need to remember as reasonably possible. The first couple of times I have to recall a word in a conversation, it's annoying to think through the whole sentence, but after I use it a few times, I generally don't have to go through the whole sentence anymore. My mind forms shortcuts: For example, when I want to remember "foreign language" or "department", my mind just thinks "外语系" (Foreign Language Department) and selects the relevant info. That is cut down from going through the whole sentence, "请转外语系" (Please transfer me to the foreign language department) from Assimil. I assume eventually, I'll use the word for department enough that I won't have to go through any of those steps, like has happened with the majority of the vocabulary I've learned this way. I've also applied the idea of not memorizing cards differently. Sometimes I'll see a card, and I know what it means, but if I can't separate vocabulary into distinct components, explain what's going on grammatically, parse the verbs, etc., I consider it "memorized" and treat it as if I hadn't remembered it at all. If I can't separate the sentence into the important points I can use for composition, it's of very minimal use to me (certain stock phrases excluded, of course). Am I just setting my standards too low for efficiency? I'm interested to see how other people deal with this problem, or if there are others, like me, who have been viewing recalling the whole sentence as a benefit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6830 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 3 of 21 12 February 2013 at 7:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
First, I think to get the right feel for using "jump" in many forms, you need to have many different examples of this word in your SRS. For example:
Second, I don't think it's a problem if you end up memorizing the sentence after many reviews. You will still know how to use it on different occasions. One could even argue that once you're memorized/internalized it, then you really know and can use it naturally. Third, switch the order of your SRS occasionally. If you are currently using Japanese on the FRONT and English on the BACK, then switch it so that you're translating the other way. This will force you to actively recall the sentence and use it the proper way. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| betelgeuzah Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 4406 days ago 51 posts - 82 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Japanese, Italian | Message 4 of 21 12 February 2013 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wouldn't recommend this, as translating from English to Japanese can be quite counter-productive. Even J-E can be since there are many ways to translate the sentences/words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4704 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 5 of 21 12 February 2013 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
How do you know if you translated the sentence correctly or not? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 21 12 February 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If I had to list my "most important" SRS rules, they'd be something like: 1. Get rid of annoying sentences, or sentences which are difficult for the wrong reason. Or even sentences that make me groan a little when I see them. As Khatz writes:
2. Set the leech threshold really low (4 works great in Anki 2). If I miss a card 4 times after the first day, then I'm not ready to learn it yet, or it's just a bad card. This saves me the trouble of deciding to delete it! 3. Don't learn more than 10 or 20 cards per day unless it's a month before a big exam and I need to cram. According to the manual: (New cards per day) times 10 = average number of daily reviews. 4. Try to keep cards interesting and easy. The goal of these rules is that Anki should (1) be fun, and (2) take up no more than 10% or 20% of my study time.
Well, there's two possibilities. Either (a) you use the word a lot, in which case you'll soon be able to use it without thinking, or (b) you don't use it very often, in which case, hey, at least you know it, right? Basically, there's no magic right way to do SRS that will give you a huge advantage over another way. And even if there were such a thing, it wouldn't be the same for everybody. The only reason I recommend keeping it fun is that makes it a lot easier to do the reps. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4526 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 7 of 21 12 February 2013 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I had a similar problem: I could identify the meaning of a word in a sentence very easily after only a few reviews, but I couldn't understand it in isolation even after a lot of reviews.
What I do now is to add the same sentence over and over again for each word I find interesting in it and mark that word somehow (bold or colour). When reviewing, I concentrate only on the word and the immediate surroundings, if that's necessary to disambiguate the word. If I don't get the meaning, I read through the whole sentence and mark the sentence as difficult, if I am able to get the word right. That's more like a combination of word and sentence card though. This way, I see the whole sentence only a few times, so I won't memorize it. As opposed to word cards, I might memorize collocations though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4852 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 8 of 21 13 February 2013 at 2:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@emk - Thank you for your list of SRS rules! I do #1 and #4 already, but #2 especially is eye-opening for me. I left my leech threshold on the default (I think it's 16?), so perhaps setting it to 4 as you suggested would be beneficial. I've had cards I've failed 10+ times before passing, and a lot of those cards I end up failing again.
* * * @AML - I've tried doing it the reverse way as well (English->Japanese), but what happens is that I will translate it into Japanese that is different than what is on the back of the card. This is especially true with sentences. And as others mentioned, I don't even know if the Japanese I translated is right or not. So I stopped doing that, and I don't think that has harmed me. However, I think you make a great point about the number of sentences I need for certain words. Khatz of AJATT mentioned something about 10,000 sentences in your deck. I don't think that's a magic number, but from what I have read on the Internet, many people say that you don't get the benefits of SRSing sentences until you have a lot of sentences in your deck. Looking at my Japanese deck (which is now all-recognition), I have 972 cards. (Although I've deleted a few cards over the months.) I probably need a few thousand more to really start getting benefits. And that ties into what you were saying. To use the "jump" example, I think that once I get a lot of sentences in my deck with "jump" in them, in various contexts, I won't have such a problem recalling the word. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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