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The "low hanging fruit" method for Anki | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5538 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 16 28 October 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm really not a fan of pre-made decks, because they always seem to involve far more suffering for less payoff than decks I make myself. But then again, I have much-better-than-average card creation tools, and I can easily capture words in context and add definitions.
But I definitely agree with your advice:
I've kept my leech threshold at 4 for a good while now, and I'm beginning to suspect that it's worth lowering it even further. If I don't get a card the first few times I try to learn it, it's going to be a continual nuisance. But there's a good chance it will be easier later on. For example, back in my Memnosyne days, when I had an L1<->L2 vocabulary deck (*shudder* *twitch*), I spent a ridiculous amount of time agonizing over a particularly evil group of cards: - ainsi que "as well as" - alors que "while", "when" - tant que "as long as" - autant que "as much as", "as many as" - en tant que "as" But later on, I learned all of these distinctions easily, most of them from context. It's possible for a card to agonizingly difficult at one stage, and ridiculously easy later on. I've seen much the same thing learning hieroglyphs: Some of them are very difficult to learn on their own, but once I see them in the right word, they stick easily. This is one of the major reasons why I'm such a big fan of deleting or suspending cards. As rdearman mentions, I've configured AnkiDroid to suspend a card when I swipe my thumb to the right. And I discard any card which makes me feel stressed or depressed or ignored or bored. As always, if you actually need to know something, you'll see it again in your input soon enough. And maybe next time, it will appear in a better context, or you'll know a few more related words, or your brain will simply be ready to learn it. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4355 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 16 28 October 2014 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I thought the drop-off was logarithmic (if that's the right word). And 10k won't give you that high of a coverage, meaning, if you want to read 5k pages (~1,25kk words), you're gonna see plenty of rare words (though, it depends what you'll read). For example, I've recently been reading a light novel in Japanese (so, aimed at teenagers), and across six pages I've seen probably some 9 or more words which were in the 20k, or even 30k range on the frequency list I use (although it lists なお and 尚 as separate entries, so maybe they would be a bit higher on the list of word families). So, as the drop-off is logarithmic, each individual word may occur very rarely, but the sheer number of such words makes them contribute to a fair part of an average novel. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5242 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 11 of 16 28 October 2014 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually in Italian is is slightly more than 20k and French slightly less, but don't be to impressed, I've seen a little more than 10% of the words so far, so I've only done 2000+ words. The advantage of this deck however is I think I'll quickly burn through the first 10k words. To reach C1/C2 I'd need to expand my vocabulary well over the 10k mark. So once I've gone through the first 1/2 of the deck, I bring the leech setting back to normal and bring down the new cards in order to use this as an advanced vocabulary deck. That is the plan anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 16 29 October 2014 at 8:22am | IP Logged | |||||
But what about all those words you don't need to know but want to? I know lots of Cantonese characters that most natives don't know. I don't need them, but I love knowing them, and they're great discussion topics for interested natives. Some characters I'd probably benefit from dropping, though, but I do very little reading in Chinese, so I'm afraid to drop things I might encounter at some point. Also it's really nice to have an exact number of the amount of characters I know (5073). I think I might follow this advice in other languages, though. At the moment, I don't have a leech threshold at all, and I rarely delete cards. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 13 of 16 29 October 2014 at 9:46am | IP Logged | |||||
For English if you know the most common 8000-9000 words you get about 98% coverage of text. So 2% or 1:50 words in an adult novel should fall in less frequent categories. The problem is that these words only appear once or perhaps twice in an individual book and won't appear in the next book you read. So yes, you can learn them, but once you've learnt them you may not see them again for a long time, certainly longer than the 5000 pages (1.25 million words) of the Super Challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Improbably Diglot Newbie Norway Joined 4942 days ago 34 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English | Message 14 of 16 04 November 2014 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In the article about leeches at supermemo.com it is suggested that leeches be exported to a mobile device to be worked on separately, and that knowing that every card you're studying is a leech might sharpen one's focus. So I guess an additional tip would be to move all your worst leeches from all your decks to a separate deck in Anki, and review that deck, say, at another time of day. That way, you can give the leeches the attention they deserve. Edited by Improbably on 04 November 2014 at 2:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| yogert909 Newbie United States jonkenpo.net Joined 3798 days ago 5 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 15 of 16 15 November 2014 at 5:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been obsessed with leeches for some time based on the same information quoted from supermemo.
However, there are a few things I've been thinking about that don't necessarily contradict setting a low leech threshold - but might: 1. From my understanding, anki doesn't count a lapse until a card has transitioned out of learning. By that time, you've already done a good number of reps before even your first lapse. Therefore, perhaps you may have already sunk a large proportion of time you will ever spend on that particular card. 2. Once a non-learning card lapses, I don't believe it typically takes very many additional reps to either 1. get to a long interval, or 2. lapse a few more times and get suspended with threshold of 5 or 7 for that matter. In other words, the difference in number of reps between my cards with 2 lapses and 5 lapses is not that great. I'm wondering if it would be more efficient to spend the extra reps to "see" if it is actually a leech, or if 2 lapses were a sort of fluke. Of course, a few cards will eventually lapse many more times unless they are suspended, but I'm just not sure that a lot of cards that I've already invested time in and happened to lapse twice aren't actually low hanging fruit themselves. 3. Another way of looking at #2 is after a card lapses a few times, I have a choice. I can trade it for a fresh card that I've never studied before, or I can keep studying it, hoping that it will stick. Which card is more likely to become mature with the least amount of reps? I know there's a threshold somewhere, and maybe 2 lapses is where that threshold is, or not..I haven't decided. 4. The next thing I've been thinking about is partially psychological one. I've had my threshold set to 5 for a while now and I get one or two leeches almost every day. I'm only adding 10-20 cards per day, so for every, say 10 cards I add and spend time learning, 1 of them will end up getting suspended. Some days I get a leech and I'm like "later...good riddance!" but some days it really bums me out because I thought I actually know the card and remember getting it right a bunch of times. Maybe it even had an interval of 6 months and something wasn't clicking in my brain today and now it's gone and I'll forget it for sure... And it bums me out. I'll probably fail the next card because Im now in a foul mood. Anyway, maybe I'm making too much of this, but maybe you felt a bit of this too..? 5. The supermemo developers seem to have crunched a lot of data and figured out somewhat optimal settings. I haven't checked, but I'm thinking Damien just copied supermemo's SM2 algorithm almost verbatim including the optimal leech threshold. So perhaps 7 is actually the magic number if your goal is optimizing quantity of facts per unit of time. 6. There's probably better ways of catching leeches before so many reps are put in. Filtering by lapses requires quite a few reps before the card lapses beyond whatever threshold you set. I would bet you could identify leeches by identifying the cards that stay in learning the longest and suspending them before you've spent too much time on them. Anyway, am I over thinking this? The best thing to do would be to go through a long mature deck and crunch some learning data to see where the actual threshold should be set. Someday... But until then let me know what anybody actually thinks about any of this. Edited by yogert909 on 17 November 2014 at 7:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3714 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 16 of 16 15 November 2014 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
I’ve also found conjunctions and adverbs to be the hardest words to remember, probably because it’s hard to picture them in your mind. I second the idea of suspending/deleting them very liberally, but if one doesn’t like deleting cards I found that it helps to put those words into context, such as creating cards with short phrases that contain the preposition in question: instead of having a card that is [‘as well as’ -> ‘ainsi que’], have one like [‘I really like the name as well as the presentation’ -> ‘J’aime beaucoup le nom ainsi que la présentation’]*. Personally I try to use this latter method, although I still suspend cards after a 5 lapses. *I found this sentence with Goole, using the mask: "J'aime beaucoup * * ainsi que" (including the quotation marks). Although Google doesn’t guarantee that it was written by a native speaker, coming up with my own would guarantee that it isn’t, so it’s still an improvement. Edited by chiara-sai on 15 November 2014 at 10:39am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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