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Combining Iversen’s Method with Anki | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5021 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 15 17 May 2011 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
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First off, if there is already a topic about this kind of thing, please point me in the right direction.
Currently I only use Anki for vocab, and count on my memory to sort of make things stick just from failing the card a few days in a row and retrying it. This is beginning to not work so well, as my Anki cards pile up when attempting 20 new words a day. So while I'd like to keep using Anki for long term memory, I need a boost at the beginning to really learn it before it goes in Anki. So I guess I'm asking if anyone has tried to use Iverson's word list method followed with Anki (as I've seen posters mention a ~50% retention rate using just word lists, and I am not happy with 50%). Also, is this the correct description of the word list method? http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Word_lists I believe that page was written by Iverson, but I could be wrong. Thanks, -Keilan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 15 17 May 2011 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it was me who wrote the article, and you can also read about the method in my "Guide to Learning Languages" here.
It is always difficult to generalize about retention rates in the long run because you have to use the words you learn to keep them, irrespective of learning method, so the only retention rate which is directly linked to your use of a wordlist is the one measured very soon after finishing it. I have of course made some tests of this by covering up the 'native' column in a list and checking my retention after a day or so. I have found that this rate normally is way higher than 50% (dependent on my familiarity with the language), and I have seen other 'testimonials' hovering around 80-90% in this phase. Retention in the opposite direction, from Danish to my target language, will of course be lower as this is a test of potentially active vocabulary. Maybe it is around 50%, but I haven't tested this systematically. Learning a word from a wordlist or any other source only gives you a first introduction to a word - you only become comfortable with its uses when you have seen it in several different contexts later. But seeing an unknown word in a context won't give you more information than seeing it in a good dictionary with examples and a number of translations. Wordlists are just a convenient and effective way to give you some familiarity with the words they contain, they are not meant to teach you everything about those words. And now to the main question: can you combine my wordlist layout with Anki or other SRS programs? Yes, you can, and I even think it would be a hard-to-beat combination. The reason is that being reminded of the words through Anki will be a good continuation of the intense initial work with the words which I have built into my layout. In contrast the Goldlist method gives you more or less the same thing as Anki: an easy start, but any number of repetitions until the words have been learnt. My main reason for not recommending the combination of three-column wordlists with SRS (or flashcards) is that I already spend a lot of time on 'pure' vocabulary learning. So given that I in my language studies will cover thousands of words through wordlists - or in practice a representative selection of all words in each language - I can just as well start reading genuine texts, where I again and again will find words which at some point were on one of my wordlists. And as an extra bonus I then also get some training in 'input', which pure vocabulary training doesn't give me. The only problem is the phase where I still can't read genuine texts freely, but here the trick is to reread the original source texts for those wordlists that were text based. They will per definition remind me of the words I once wrote in those wordlists. Edited by Iversen on 17 May 2011 at 9:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5701 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 15 17 May 2011 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Anki isn't very good for initial learning, it's good for reviews.
I use word lists only for vocab I got from (or for) material I'm working with and my retention rate is very good, so good that I usually only do target-native-target (target with at least half an hour of doing something else in-between) and then pick out the ones that weren't correct, repeat those once again the same way and then the next day (if I don't forget to). If I weren't so lazy I would take those items I can't remember the first time on with my word list or those that I forget later on and add them to anki, then go through the deck every two weeks and look for 'hard cards' or 'leeches' and find out why I can't remember those. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5021 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 4 of 15 17 May 2011 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the help Iverson and Bao. I am still not quite at the point where I can easily read texts, but I had not considered the idea of drawing my word lists from a specific text, and thus giving me something to read where the vocabulary is familiar to me. I will definitely try that. After reading your advice, I believe I will try a word list + partial SRS approach. Something like only putting difficult words in. Relying more on text than SRS for memory boosting is something I really should be working towards, and this seems as good a time as any to start.
Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5050 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 5 of 15 17 May 2011 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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That combination is exactly what I do. I get my words from a few different sources: lists I find of words related to a certain topic, eg. computer words, words for talking about the weather, etc.; lessons I do, where I'll write down all the words I come across that I didn't know yet; and books. I'm nowhere near the point of being able to read a book in Esperanto, but what I sometimes do is pick a page and write down all the words I don't know (still a lot), and then look them up and make word lists of them. Each time I complete a page of word lists, I transfer all the words into Anki for review. I don't know what my retention rate it, but I do know that I know the answer for most cards that come up, especially after the first few times, and I have cards going from English to Esperanto and vice versa.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5746 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 15 17 May 2011 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been doing a variation on this for a long time (more reps on paper than Iversen
does, fewer on Anki than most people do), and it works very well when I have to learn a large number of words, either because of the nature of the material I'm using, or because I'm going to be tested on something. However, it can be kind of soul-crushing if you try to do too much. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5126 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 15 18 May 2011 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
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For a while I was going through a 10000 Spanish word anki deck. I would use the Iversen Method to learn the words that I didn't recognize because I don't think anki in itself can teach me a new word. I had set the deck to present 100 new words per day beyond those that had already been presented in the past. Of those 100 usually 70-80 were cognates which meant I only had to learn 20-30 new words per day. Anyways, the problem with my approach wasn't the new words per day but instead was the snowball effect of reviewing the words I already knew. Having to review 300-600 words just to get to the 100 new ones got old very quickly. Also, I just reopened that deck in anki today, and it now wants me to review 1983 words. Not gonna' happen.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6059 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 15 18 May 2011 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
You can set Anki so that the new words are shown first, before the review words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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