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Sick and tired of SRS

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52 messages over 7 pages: 13 4 5 6 7  Next >>
Lizzern
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
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Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 9 of 52
20 February 2014 at 12:44pm | IP Logged 
Plenty of people learn languages to a high level without ever using Anki, so yes, you can obviously do just fine without it. And if you hate it that much, you should stop using it, imo - but consider keeping the files if you want, in case you feel differently later. You'll do fine without it, and the things that are important will show up for review eventually in native materials anyway. You're not violating some universal law of language learning by not using it :-)

Liz
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Warp3
Senior Member
United States
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Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese

 
 Message 10 of 52
20 February 2014 at 12:46pm | IP Logged 
The farther I get into a language the less useful I find an SRS, especially for things like
vocabulary. In fact, I recently heavily tweaked my Korean Anki deck to (a) suspend
everything over 1 year then (2) unsuspend anything I just suspended that is a grammar
point, sentence starter, etc. (i.e. that is structural, not vocabulary). My thinking when I
made this change was mostly that if I haven't nailed a word yet 1 year in, maybe I just
don't need that word yet (and in fact, I'd considered shorter than a year). By suspending
rather than deleting, I can still use the search function of Anki as sort of a mini dictionary
to look up words I know I'd learned previously, but it still cut my reviews notably (since I
had about 4 years of SRS cards at that point).

In addition, the bulk of my SRS queue now (my queue of items to add to Anki) consists of
grammar points, not vocabulary. Adding vocabulary just isn't as appealing now at this
point in the language, so I mostly just look up words that catch my attention and then
they either stick or they don't (and if they don't stick now, perhaps they will later if and
when I see them again)
5 persons have voted this message useful



iguanamon
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Senior Member
Virgin Islands
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 Message 11 of 52
20 February 2014 at 12:56pm | IP Logged 
To the OP. I do not use anki. I've never used anki, nor do I intend to. It is possible to learn a language without it. Many learners use it effectively in the beginning stages and then maintain the same routine at latter stages where the system becomes more of a burden and less of an aid- unless a happy medium can be achieved somehow. That being said, emk seems to have found that happy medium and has proven that it can be effective for him. He uses it in the right way as just one tool out of many in his toolbox- and not the primary tool either. Where I have seen anki become a problem for some learners is when they start working for the system instead of letting the system work for them.

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patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
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1546 posts - 3200 votes 
Studies: German

 
 Message 12 of 52
20 February 2014 at 1:32pm | IP Logged 
I gave up my German Anki deck in June 2013 after a year of using it, with about 8000 cards. I have kept reading and watching films and never looked back. If you are ready to go solo with native materials do it!

At a certain point you have to say goodbye to Anki. It's OK.
1 person has voted this message useful





emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
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Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
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 Message 13 of 52
20 February 2014 at 1:45pm | IP Logged 
cod2 wrote:
OK emk, I'll have a think about your post.

Aw, thanks. :-) Just to be clear, I'm not saying you should keep using Anki. Even if it were a super-effective tool for you—and it probably isn't, not at this point, not immediately after so much Anki use—you don't want to waste time on tools which make you miserable. You want to aim for endurance, not speed.

For example, I'm pretty sure that I'd get some benefit from FSI drills. But I've had horrible experiences with audio-lingual drills in the past, and they poisoned me on language learning for a decade. So even if they might be useful, I'm in no rush to do them. No single tool is essential; they're all just shortcuts and tuneups for the underlying natural language-learning process.

So just in case I wasn't clear enough, you should probably either:

1. Stop using Anki, or
2. Radically change how you use Anki, starting with a massive deletion spree.

Either choice would work well, I'd guess.

My post wasn't intended to encourage you to keep doing something that made you miserable. I'm against miserable. :-) Lots of people do without Anki just fine, including every native speaker ever. Instead, my goals were to (a) help other people avoid Anki-induced misery, (b) give you a route to resume Anki at a later date, if it ever seems potentially useful, and (c) explain that Anki, used carefully and at the right time, can make a big difference even at relatively high levels. This is sort of a pet topic of mine, because the general consensus seems to be that Anki is of limited utility after B1, and that's not my experience at all.

3 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 14 of 52
20 February 2014 at 2:14pm | IP Logged 
Try wordlists instead. Whether you try Huliganov's goldlist or my three-column system with wordgroups is up to you, but you are in full control of when and how you do your repetitions, whereas the main idea behind SRS is to deprive you of precisely that control and leave you in the same situation as the target board at a shooting range.

3 persons have voted this message useful



ScottScheule
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
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Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French

 
 Message 15 of 52
20 February 2014 at 3:26pm | IP Logged 
The short answer is of course you don't need SRS. People have been learning languages for millenia without it. Why would you think otherwise?

Personally, I hate when I fall behind in Anki, but I enjoy it when I'm up to date. I like watching the interval times increase, signifying how much I've learned. I love tackling a new batch of cards, learning a bunch of new words. That's just me.

I frankly don't understand a lot of peoples' opinions on Anki. I find the "pro-delete" position bizarre. If I think something is worth learning, I make a card. I may have trouble with, say, the Spanish word for "dashboard." But it's a term I want to know, so I keep at it.
3 persons have voted this message useful



lorinth
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Belgium
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 Message 16 of 52
20 February 2014 at 4:11pm | IP Logged 
I no longer use Anki (Pleco now), but provided your daily input (listening and reading) in your target language is sufficient, my rule of thumb is:

I delete everything as soon as there are more than 100 reviews on any particular day.

Words that are important will show up anyway in your input. If you know them, good. If you don't, you add them again to your deck. That's natural SRS.


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