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Strategies for using Anki effectively?

  Tags: Anki
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
21 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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 Message 17 of 21
21 December 2012 at 5:47pm | IP Logged 
Oh I make tons of cards from sports news;)
I think it's the i+1 thing that makes it boring. There should be something else about the sentence, not just one word which you could put on a single-word card. For me that's usually the general feeling of "I'd not put it this way, my sentence would've been more awkward".
Which is the language in question? For Portuguese there are quite a few forms for the irregular verbs, some pretty rare but still too important to ignore.
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Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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 Message 18 of 21
21 December 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged 
LaughingChimp wrote:
kujichagulia wrote:
I might understand the new word quickly, but if I don't get the meaning of the entire sentence quickly, I have to mark "Hard", or if I forget the meaning of the entire sentence, then I have to fail it. If I'm just trying to learn the new word, what's the point?


The point is that you learn grammar along with vocabulary. You say that grammar is your strong point, but if you don't understand the sentence, obviously you haven't quite mastered it. Also, you don't HAVE TO mark it as hard.

kujichagulia wrote:
I find that my brain just shuts down from time to time, and a sentence that was easy before becomes impossible to remember the next time, so I have to fail it.


It would happen even with words. It's called "semantic satiation". Just take a break when it happens.
yeah. Single word cards are good for a short period of time but then they just get exhausting. And usually there's nothing amusing about a single word to make up for it...
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emk
Diglot
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 Message 19 of 21
21 December 2012 at 5:54pm | IP Logged 
kujichagulia wrote:
Then I tried this:

Q: The man [...BABOO] the dog.
A: fed

BABOO means a hint in my native language. Unfortunately, I found these cards too easy and wondered if it is a waste of time. If I'm not failing any cards, it's not working.


If you're getting good results with single-word cards, I'm certainly not going to argue with that. But I don't think there's anything wrong with using a hint like "BABOO", or with having lots of easy cards. Anki cards don't need to be painful memory exercises!

Here's a card from my Egyptian deck, which I typed in from Assimil:



Let me translate that to English, replace the special characters with their standard uppercase equivalents, and give a literal translation:

Quote:
The snake [is] behind him.
mk HfAw m-sA=f

Behold serpent in-back=him.


This is a really easy card, and I'll probably never miss it. But it's not really enough for me to know that the literal translation of behind is m-sA, because I also need to know that preposition takes a special enclitic pronoun (=f), that I can use it as a standalone predicate with no verb, and that I'll need some kind of particle (mk).

This card is actually reinforcing about 5 different things. The cloze deletion just forces me to pay attention and helps get one important word into my active vocabulary. But I learn from everything on the card, including the stuff which is written and translated right on the front!

Again, I'm not trying to convince anybody to stop doing something that's working. I just want to make sure that people aren't beating themselves up with hard, horrible Anki cards out of a sense of obligation. Easy cards work, too.
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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
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1031 posts - 1571 votes 
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 Message 20 of 21
22 December 2012 at 6:37am | IP Logged 
A funny thing happened while I was out today.

I went to lunch with my wife's family. Going out with the in-laws is the purest form of immersion in Japan that I have. My wife stops speaking English to me in front of her family, either because she is embarrassed or because it could be considered rude. So it's all Japanese. I have to listen to, understand, and even speak Japanese, because they speak to me like they would a Japanese member of the family.

Anyway, the point is this: while I still have trouble with Japanese, I noticed that I could recall words that I couldn't before. These are words that I've been studying with the help of SRS... and with sentences. I not only recalled words, but which particles to use with them, which is extremely important with verbs. So that seems to suggest that my system is not broken.

I think that LaughingChimp may have hit the nail on the head. I think my problem is with this "semantic satiation" thing (I need to research this more). My brain would probably shut down from time to time even with single words. So instead of changing the system, I should just stop doing reviews when I get semantic satiation.

As always, the wisdom of those who went before me wins the day. Thank you!

Serpent wrote:

Which is the language in question? For Portuguese there are quite a few forms for the irregular verbs, some pretty rare but still too important to ignore.

I do sentence cards for both Japanese and Portuguese. Yeah, I'm ready to make plenty of cards for irregular verb forms. I can't shortcut my way through that. :) Luckily in Japanese, there are only two irregular verbs to master.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 days ago

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 Message 21 of 21
22 December 2012 at 7:47am | IP Logged 
The thing about the irregular verbs is that when you learn them passively, it's fairly clear which verb's form it is. So you could aim for one vocab unit and one irregular verb form per card :-) that's more i+1.5 than i+2.

Yay about making progress!!!

@emk hahaha le serpent

Edited by Serpent on 22 December 2012 at 7:58am



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