feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5091 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian
| Message 1 of 13 29 June 2010 at 7:01am | IP Logged |
I'm having trouble organizing synonyms in Anki. For the majority of my Finnish vocab deck, it's just a basic word in a few forms, then the translation. Then I have the reverse side with the translation as the question, the most basic form as the answer. I have no trouble going from the Finnish to the English. For the most part I just say the word aloud and try to associate the meaning without translating in my head. That's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not an organizational issue by any means. For the English to Finnish, I basically just try to remember the Finnish word. That's simple enough too. My issue comes where there are direct synonyms that don't have any additional meanings. As in, words that mean completely, 100% the same thing. There aren't too many. Most words have another subtle meaning that I can put on the card. But the way I have my system set up, I can't put more than one Finnish word into one card. And if the English translation is the same, I won't know which word to go with on the English-Finnish cards. This isn't going to be a massive issue for me by any means, but if there's any way to resolve this easily, I'd appreciate it.
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fielle Diglot Groupie Japan maliora.com Joined 5080 days ago 53 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German
| Message 2 of 13 29 June 2010 at 7:12am | IP Logged |
This is definitely the main reason I avoid doing cards from English -> Study Language!
There really isn't any good way to deal with it apart from perhaps providing some sort of hint on the card itself. Maybe you can put the first letter of the word on the card, or some other thing that distinguishes the two words.
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feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5091 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian
| Message 3 of 13 29 June 2010 at 7:50am | IP Logged |
Yeah that's what I was thinking. The reason I like doing it from English to my L2 is that I think that's helping my active recall a lot more, so I definitely need to make this work. I think I might start putting in some hints though, thanks for the tip.
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fielle Diglot Groupie Japan maliora.com Joined 5080 days ago 53 posts - 69 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German
| Message 4 of 13 29 June 2010 at 7:58am | IP Logged |
Actually, I think it might be worthwhile to have as the hints the other synonym.
So, if you were studying English and your native language was FOO, you might have a card which is like
Front: BOGABOGA (BLA "red")
Back: crimson
Where BOGABOGA is a mysterious word in the mysterious FOO language which means something like "red" or "crimson" and BLA is a mysterious word in the mysterious FOO language which means something like "not".
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maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5384 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 5 of 13 29 June 2010 at 8:02am | IP Logged |
Don't do English -> Finish, especially not for simple vocabulary. If you must, translate whole sentences and don't mark yourself wrong if you use a different word.
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Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6913 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 6 of 13 29 June 2010 at 8:28am | IP Logged |
maaku wrote:
Don't do English -> Finish, especially not for simple vocabulary. |
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Totally disagree with this, simple vocabulary or not.
Do, however, agree with the rest...
Quote:
translate whole sentences and don't mark yourself wrong if you use a different word. |
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Because...
feanarosurion wrote:
I think that's helping my active recall a lot more, so I definitely need to make this work. |
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If you do it active you have it passive and that's not the case the other way round. I don't have any flashcards in any language from going from L2->L1. On the other hand, I always use sentences and I do add a hint if I'm attempting to draw attention to a particular usage.
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Akalabeth Groupie Canada Joined 5329 days ago 83 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese
| Message 7 of 13 29 June 2010 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
I was initially only doing Japanese→English sentences, but after finding my production
skills for vocab were way lower than I
expected (and I wasn't expecting much) I found myself with the same problem. What I did
was put this into the question side of
my models in Anki:
<a id="hintlink" href="#"
onclick="document.getElementById('hint').style.display='bloc
k';document.getElementById('hintlink').style.display='none'; return
false;">Show Hint</a><div id="hint" style="display: none">%(englishHint)s</div>
And for Japanese→English replacing englishHint with japaneseHint. What this does is
give you a link that says "Show hint", and
when clicked is replaced with the whatever the hint is. For me, it's always an example
sentence showing the word used. So for
Japanese→English it's a Japanese sentence, and for English→Japanese it's an English
sentence. Then whenever I come across a
card where there are multiple possible translations I think of as many as I can, and
then click the link. That's almost always
enough for me to figure out which of my possible answers is correct.
Note that if you have sound in your hint it won't work, as it will still play when the
card loads. I also study Audio→English and Audio→Kanji, and Japanese has a ton of
homonyms, so I have a plugin to give myself the same basic functionality.
EDIT: One thing you should do is make sure you're not relying on the hints though. If
you can remember multiple possible answers without the hint, one of which is right, and
use the hint to tell which it is, that's good. If you can't remember the correct answer
until you see the hint then I would mark it wrong.
Edited by Akalabeth on 29 June 2010 at 11:00am
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chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5120 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French
| Message 8 of 13 29 June 2010 at 3:22pm | IP Logged |
I have similar problem even with words that have sligthly different meanings. I haven't done this yet, but I think I
will just deactivate all but one card with similar meaning, and when I am sure i can remember it, then I'll delete the
card and activate a second one.
That hint sentence sounds good too, but it also sounded like too complicated for me to do.
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