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Changing the way you use anki | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 17 of 23 24 October 2011 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Is that a typo? I've never heard of a 14hr/day language class. I don't want to turn this into a heated debate about sleep learning (we've had several of those), but I'm hoping you are getting enough undisturbed sleep. It looks like you are getting enough time to reinforce those 40 words per day, so I'm firmly in the lists-over-anki camp now. Your teacher sounds very aggressive; I hope she's a good one. From what I've heard, I think it is possible for you to succeed in understanding TV in 6 months. Please let us know how this goes - this will be an awesome and inspiring success story. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dongsen Newbie Taiwan Joined 4744 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English | Message 18 of 23 24 October 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hmm, I was assuming per week, and you were assuming per day? 14+10 = 24hours of study each day? I wish (: 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 23 24 October 2011 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ha ha. Have you ever read the alljapaneseallthetime blog? You'd be surprised how many people think you can productively study in your sleep. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dongsen Newbie Taiwan Joined 4744 days ago 30 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English | Message 20 of 23 25 October 2011 at 1:46am | IP Logged | |||||
I have been giving this point you make some thought and I disagree with it because its not an argument against what I am suggesting. It seems that people believe anki is a great tool for learning a language. I am discovering that it seems that using Anki is genuinely slowing down my progress. I am not sure if its the algorithm or the principles itself, but either way by not using anki how it was intended I "seem" to be able to learn more. ie perhaps the "impossible expectations" are only in reality impossible due to Anki? Perhaps their are better ways, and that is my point! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5343 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 21 of 23 02 November 2011 at 8:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, that's certainly a major debate point.
Figuring out what the "fastest" way to learn vocabulary would be is a tough one and I would guess that every person on this forum has a different method for what they "think" is best. I certainly don't know what the answer is, or to what degree the "correct" answer may vary depending on the particular characteristics of the individual. Personally I rely pretty heavily on Anki, but certainly when I see one of these words in a more "natural" and memorable context I'm much more likely to recall it and know how to use it later on ... but those types of natural and contextual events are hard to script and plan on. It's also hard to know at what opportunity cost they come in terms of anki reviews. Reading/listening for a half hour or an hour may only create a few of those "A-ha!" moments while 200-400 anki cards could probably be reviewed in the same time (or word list reviews). Even if those Anki reviews are individually not very helpful ... there's still a LOT of them. There's a TON of information flow, but of very limited usefulness. I think there's definitely a quantity vs. quality tradeoff that occurs. But regardless of the method, having daily vocab requirements of 40 new words per day in Chinese just sounds sadistic to me. You could see that many words ... and maybe very loosely get a definitional idea of them through something like Anki or word-lists ... but really learning them to the degree of being automatic and instantly recognizable (which is necessary for anything approaching acceptable reading speed), recognizing them when you hear them, and knowing how they would be used in all their various grammatical contexts ... yikes! I wouldn't even hope to do that in Spanish, much less Mandarin. It's possible to sprint that for a while, but reviewing material regularly is also necessary ... and with that much material the necessary reviews in itself, however you choose to "review" the material, would quickly become it's own mountain. Pushing back the reviews in order to focus only on the new words coming in may really be the only option you have under the circumstances if you hope to "keep up", and I'd probably end up doing the exact same thing. But what I'd be afraid of is when it's finally time to go back and look at all those things you hope you still remember, you find that you not only don't remember definitions, you don't remember seeing the word at all in the first place. It might be such a long lag that most of the old work you've put in has been wasted. If you think you've solved the Anki conundrum in some way, I'd love to hear the method you've finally adopted. I don't doubt the Anki method has inefficiencies and probably doesn't take advantage of some of the peculiarities of how human memory works. It is one of those things that is hard to measure though and many months of a specific technique would probably be necessary in order to assess it's usefulness. I think one of the things that makes other techniques sometimes "look" good is that the subject of real repetition is glossed over and treated as a borderline afterthought, while with Anki it makes no bones about it whatsoever. Anki shoves the repetitions right in your face from the very beginning, which is not something we really want to see. We naturally want to see more words and a vocab count we can say is getting higher and higher, and to not be bothered with someone shoving those words we "already learned" right back in our face again to say, "oh yeah? Prove it!". Anki doesn't play along with any "hopes" about your language learning speed, it doesn't care at all ... and to some degree it's psychologically demoralizing if you aren't prepared for the fact that Anki will take EVERYTHING you think you've learned and will just keep shoving it back in your face over and over and over again until you've proven it. The Gold-list method, which I've tried and find questionable, and some word-list techniques give you a major pass on repetition. That may be a sure fire way to make you "feel" like you are learning way more words, but repetition in itself is a big part of the game. Maybe the biggest part. If you REALLY knew the words showing up on Anki reviews (as many other techniques are "suppose" to allow you to do), you'd be able to hit "Easy" a couple times for that particular word in a matter of a few seconds and that word would very, very quickly disappear into the far distant future, essentially never to be seen again (I have MANY Japanese words at a 4+year review interval at the moment, and with every one of them I feel extremely confident that when they eventually show up again that within 1 second I'll be able to click "Easy" again and it'll turn into something like an 8 year interval probably - just guessing ..). If you KNOW the word, it takes up none of your time really. I think in some ways that the "repetition" process in itself is more important, maybe far more important in the long-run, than the word-adding process employed. The techniques we often talk about on these forums involve how to maximize the "learning" of X words per day, but they rarely involve things like how to "efficiently" REVIEW the X words you've already seen per day and make them something you can quickly read/listen/speak/write. The "vocab learning" seems at times to be like a drinking through a fire-hose test, and the one who can drink the most water, wins. But really, with each of these "words" we learn, we have to see many of them (depending on how distant the word is from our native language) dozens, or perhaps hundreds of times before they really "sink" in. What is the most efficient method of getting these "learned" words truly up and operational? Once again, I don't know. But I do know that if they AREN'T up and operational, they'll serve as a bottle-neck to keep more of the newly added words from being up and operational as well. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing more time placed on the subject of efficient word-assimilation rather than that of pure word-acquisition on these forums. If we can find ways to make 50 "efficient" repetitions of a word as useful as 100 repetitions that we might've otherwise used, it could potentially speed up language learning just as much (or more) than doubling the words/day we "learn" through introduction. Edited by Sandman on 02 November 2011 at 9:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 22 of 23 02 November 2011 at 9:30am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm skeptical as to that being possible no matter how few new words a day you have. It's just not what Anki is good for, in my opinion. Anki is great for cramming vocab to a point where you can understand the word slowly and with some thought. You'll get a slow, conscious, contextless understanding of the word. This isn't the end of your study of the word. You'll need to encounter the word in books, in your own speech (thinking "Oh, how is that word said, again?") and in the speech of your interlocutors (asking "What's that word mean? Oh, oh yeah, I knew that one!"). After encountering the word a number of times, you'll have naturalized it. This process isn't something you can count on Anki for. But Anki can create a space in your mind for the word, that can later be filled through encountering it in context. For creating that space, I think Anki is useful. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 23 of 23 04 November 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
You're right, of course. But what we're really talking about here is increasing your "mastery" of vocabulary items by 40 a day. It doesn't have to be the same day's vocabulary. It can be weeks or even months later. My theory is if you keep doing this "first step" of memorizing 40 words per day, and a hell of a lot of general usage and practice, there will be a lag at first, but eventually the same number of words will become mastered per day. I also think that during a big push of this kind you shouldn't memorize more words a day than you can master. And my reason for this is you get sort of a log jam that restricts the flow of vocabulary learning. More words have to sit around and wait until enough practice is completed to become mastered. When they sit around for a longer time, they aren't as fresh and take even more practice to clear. I say this because in my experience a word that I just memorized will clear faster than one that's been sitting in my SRS for a year. So memorizing more words a day than you can master is less efficient. The whole theory that it's a good idea to have a huge anki deck while you gradually master the items is bs, imo. You've got tons of words which are waiting to be mastered, and instead of mastering them you are playing with flashcards. It's less efficient than learning the correct amount of vocabulary. I'm not against anki, I'm just against putting too much new stuff in it, or keeping a deck for more than a few months. Of course, it's impossible to tell how many words you are mastering a day, so that's where the rule of thumb comes in. Spend 10 times as much time practicing as you do with your lists/flashcards, and you're probably ok. Spend less time practicing than you do with your lists/flashcards, and you'll probably fail to master the same number of words per day that you are memorizing. There's a sweetspot in there somewhere. Is 40 unreasonable? I think it depends on a lot of things, but it's certainly not impossible. I remember reading that 30/day is a safe number for someone who is fully immersed and studying a language agressively, so I don't think 40 is too much of a stretch. And although there is a lot more grunt work involved, I don't think the number of vocabulary items varies per language. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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