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Anki for vocab | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 29 15 October 2013 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What's the best way, or rather, what's a way you think is good, to learn vocabulary with Anki? I've seen many on these forums recommend putting phrases in Anki and I've tried that a few times with a few variations, but every time I end up recognizing the phrase rather than the words. I recognize this phrase I've looked at many times, and I know what it means. Through this I can deduce the meaning of the word without actually knowing it, so when I later encounter the word somewhere else, I don't recognize it. I do appreciate the benefit of adding context for the words so that you get familiar with how it's used, but I'm not sure this is the best way. All you phrase-supporters, have you encountered this problem?
And if we go single words, which is good, we get into synonym problems pretty quickly. I have to start adding little notes saying which of the five words meaning "terrific" that this particular card is about. That, too, is problematic. It works when going L2->L1, but in the other direction it gets tricky. Of course, one way is to just do passive translation of single words and then read to get the context, listen to get the speed, write to activate and speak to get quick active command. Use SRS to get the first handle on the word and then use practice to "develop" it. Oh, another possible tactic I tried for a short while and then abandoned, but that I've been thinking of taking up again: adding longer texts to Anki. I'm talking about adding a few paragraphs and reading it on the computer or on a tablet. This gets around some of the problems with context, I've found, as you get too much context to be able remember a single phrase and deduce the meaning of the word. Basically, I add a longer text, then for review I read it, looking up any words I don't recognize, and grade myself as to how well I understood it. I found this worked pretty well, but I have to limit myself to very low numbers, as each review takes a long time. Then again, each review contains a lot more than just a single word or phrase, so maybe I don't need as much? So how do you do it? How do you use SRS to increase your vocab, and what pros and cons do you find with your method? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5343 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 29 15 October 2013 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, sometimes. At least 75% of the time, if I add a sentence to Anki, I'll understand the word in a new context without any trouble. The other 25% of the time, it's a bit harder to recognize it out of context. But I find French sentence cards to be fun and easy, and I can do huge numbers of them with a really high pass rate, and I still get noticeable benefits. So even if only 75% of the words are recognizable in other contexts, and only 25% of them enter my active vocabulary, I consider that to be an excellent trade off. There's also the advantage that I pick up tons of collocations and information on speech register. My tutor once accused me of having a ridiculously large supply of idiomatic phrases that I liked to trot out at appropriate times. So I'd say sentence cards work wonderfully for me. However, Egyptian sentence cards are a lot harder, because I'm not even A1. I need to decode the hieroglyphs, find the word boundaries, and decode the decidedly odd grammar. Plus half my sentences are too long. (I typed them in from Assimil.) There's an art to making good cards, and it depends on my level. But even in Egyptian, the short, simple sentence cards are generally easier than many of my hieroglyph and vocab cards. The other advantage I have with French over Egyptian is that Anki is all I do in Egyptian, but I'm exposed to huge amounts of French, and I have plenty of opportunities to use it.
This happened with my original Mnemosyne deck, and it was absolutely agonizing. By the end, I was up to almost 40 minutes of pure suffering per day, because I kept flunking the ambiguous cards over and over again, and eventually they made up almost all of my daily reviews. Anki has a "suspend leeches" which I now keep set at 4. This is a sanity saver. Edited by emk on 15 October 2013 at 9:54pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4500 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 3 of 29 15 October 2013 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I discover words that I struggle to remember outside of my ANKI sentence, I create a few more sentence cards using that same word, but with different structures so that I can get used to seeing the word(s) in various contexts and rely less on one sentence. I don't need to do this with most words, but sometimes I find a word that just won't stick.
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| zpoirier Senior Member Canada Joined 4129 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Studies: French | Message 4 of 29 15 October 2013 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When you say phrases are you putting a cloze delete around the unknown word ? If not, then I don't imagine anki will be all the useful, because you can take such a passive and unengaged approach to your reviews. I've found that when you have to test yourself on the word (ie cloze delete) then it really makes you focus on the sentence structure and how the meaning of the words fits into that. That said, the first few times you may just recognize the phrase and put in appropriate word based on this recognition, but when you hit the 21days or 1.1 month interval, it should guarantee you can't do this 'recognition cheating' (if you can and your doing 30+ new cards a day I'm blown away). Anyways, I've never found an issue with remembering the meaning of a word if it gets into anki and cloze-deleted, however, if your doing french and you come across 'faire', well, there a few pages in the dictionary for that one so you have to put in each meaning, or as many as you see fit.
Also, I've noticed if the context is too good (ie gives the word away without thinking) its a bad card. Maybe put dictionary sentences into your anki cards - context is usually more bland and less forgiving. Edited by zpoirier on 16 October 2013 at 1:38am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5343 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 29 16 October 2013 at 5:05am | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting. My approach is almost exactly the opposite. My ideal card is one where I can infer the meaning of the boldfaced word very precisely from context. (Either from the words on the card, or from what I remember of the original story.) I certainly don't translate words to English. Nor do I attempt to define them in French. In fact, I often don't look at the back of the card at all. To mark a card as passed, all I need to do is read the sentence (or at least the part surrounding the marked word), and understand the word in context. I do pay rather close attention, however, just like I would with the text in an Assimil course. These cards are quite difficult to fail. And yet somehow, I later recognize the majority of these words without any particular difficulty. I have no idea if this approach would work for anybody else, but I'm quite happy with it. I do use cloze cards, mostly for a few specific things: the gender of articles, the individual words in a phrase like en tant que, and words which are a truly good choice in a particular context. If there's two possible words that would work well in a sentence, I'm highly unlikely to mess around with cloze cards. Ambiguous answers are poison. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 29 16 October 2013 at 7:07am | IP Logged | |||||
Do you mean you enter a sentence, cloze delete a word and during review you have to remember it? Wouldn't you have to rely on context-based recognition then, so you don't run into the synonym problem? Trying to learn a more complicated word for something when you already know a simpler word would be hard, no? Unless you can remember which word it is based on the context of the card. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5676 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 7 of 29 16 October 2013 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've wondered about the cloze delete bit, too. It seems like you run into the synonym issue and moreso, and often can have other confusing things like multiple possible tenses, persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd, sg, pl), though i guess that's not quite as important.
Do you add extra information to pinpoint the word you're looking for? As Ari said, sentences without the cloze (ie. just a normal sentence) are often much easier to understand than a single word. Personally, i've been doing T2->T1 single words, often with example sentences or pictures for complicated words, for a long time, and depending on other things to activate them and provide context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aik Newbie Japan Joined 4340 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 29 16 October 2013 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have quite a few cards where I understand it more from the context rather than from the unknown word itself, but I don't see it as much as a problem. Eventually I'll end up adding another card that has the same word in a different context and it will fall into place.
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