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Sick and tired of SRS | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5024 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 17 of 52 20 February 2014 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
Again, I find this bizarre. If that's your philosophy, why use SRS at all? Important words will show up in input after all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4070 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 18 of 52 20 February 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
True, but when I first meet a given word, I use SRS to study it, analyse it and store it in my memory (hopefully long term). The word will show up a few times in my SRS before I delete my deck. Then I rely on input to provide me with (hopefully more enjoyable) repetitions. For the "learning" phase, you're right, you need some tool. You could as well use lists, golden lists, whatever. But as soon as you *can* read/listen in your TL, I believe it's important to keep your lists/SRS relatively lean and mean, otherwise you end up spending more time staring at lists than receiving input in your target language. Once you can afford it, input is both more fun and more useful/natural. It may also help solve the problem OP was referring to. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5328 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 52 20 February 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I can try to explain why it works for me. But as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. About 20 months ago, when I sat the DELF B2, I flipped through Routledge's A Frequency Dictionary of French. I knew at least 4,000 of the 5,000 words in the dictionary (as estimated by random sampling), and I also knew lots of words that weren't in the top 5,000. Since then, I've done a Super Challenge, and I've spent 20 another months using French in my day-to-day life. I've tried measuring my vocabulary more recently, but it's hard. I would have guessed about 15,000, because that's what most people have after a year or two of true immersion, but I can find online vocabulary estimators that put me higher than that—probably because my knowledge of English is messing with their sampling procedure. I've used SRS software at three points during this process: 1. Years ago, reading my first book in French, I used Mnemosyne to learn 1000 L1->L2 and 1000 L2->L1 cards. These were just isolated vocabulary words, and after about three months, I was one miserable student. I twitch just thinking about it. 2. When I restarted my French around a strong A2, I briefly tried using an "Intermediate French" deck I downloaded from a website. This was mostly isolated idiomatic expressions. Within two weeks, I was already starting to suffer. So I switched from a 3rd-party L1<->L2 translation deck to a custom sentences deck. Most of these were copy-and-pasted, except for the time I typed in a huge pile of useful examples from a Saul H. Rosenthal book. My reviews were pretty intense in spring 2012, while I was preparing for my exam. I continued adding cards haphazardly until I finished the Super Challenge. This was fun—I never learned more than about 10 cards per day, and most of the time, I just did my reviews. But I saw lots of benefits. 3. After finishing the Super Challenge, I wrote some software that allowed me to turn ereader highlights into SRS cards, and easily look up definitions. Using this, I made it through ~500 cards in a month, and I saw some pretty remarkable payoffs. In fact, I was able to learn over half of the unknown words from the last 5 books I had read in French, at least well enough to recognize them in context. Here are my stats for ~28,000 Anki reviews (for two languages): 
So, taking it phase-by-phase, here is how SRS has paid off: 1. In the beginning, I was drowning from a lack of words, and SRS let me build a framework. 2. In the intermediate stages, Anki helped a few thousand tricky details stick more-or-less painlessly. 3. Once my vocabulary was already quite good, Anki allowed me to artificially boost the frequency of rare words so that they would stick much quicker. I'm past the point where I can learn lots of new words by exposure without making French my primary language. This is the key to the whole Anki-plus-deletion mentality: The words are all there in the input, and a lot of them will stick on their own. But some words are stubborn. Anki can "turn up the volume" on those words, and amplify the signal by a factor of 5 or 10. But sometimes even the "amplified" words will still refuse to stick, at which point Anki is counterproductive, and—eventually—horrifying. So for me, the trick is to pull words from interesting native materials, run them in Anki for a while, and if those words are still frustrating me, delete them. This is a side activity for me, but a really useful one. Putting cards into Anki is useful, because it gives me a ridiculously good memory. Deleting cards from Anki is useful, because the really stubborn words cause 95% of the suffering, and I'll be able to learn them painlessly another time, when my brain is ready. But even so, for a language like French, I learn 80% of my vocabulary from my environment, and I reserve Anki for the tricky stuff. 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4165 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 20 of 52 20 February 2014 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't use Anki, and many successful learners haven't either, so it's entirely possible to learn a language well without using it. If it's become such a negative experience at this point, it's probably better to just stop doing it right now, concentrate on reading, and don't underestimate the amount of reading that will be necessary for vocabulary. Maybe it's something you can revisit after doing more reading.
Sometimes I've found that when I see a lot of vocabulary or sentence structures that I would like to remember, it does help to make wordlists. There's something about physically writing it out by hand that makes it more likely I'll remember. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5024 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 21 of 52 20 February 2014 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First, it seems to me suspending the word is a far more efficient activity than deleting. That way you can turn it back on when your "brain is ready."
But regardless, your most recent post has to my ear a much different tone than the previous one. One seemed to gleefully advise deletion of most of one's SRS words--4,900 out of 5000 if that's what it takes!--this one seeems to imply deletion is only proper for "the really stubborn words." The latter I understand--the former I don't. If the really stubborn words are nearly all the words, I'd be horrified of SRS too. But I find it hard to believe anyone has that much trouble learning. The SRS really stubborns are frustrating, but there are better ways, in my view, to deal with them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4070 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 22 of 52 20 February 2014 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that suspension is one of the most useful and overlooked features of Anki. Back when I was using Anki, I had set it to an aggressive threshold, maybe 5 or 6. Now... I will make your case and admit that, if I delete my Pleco deck every time I have over 100 reviews on any given day, it's mostly because there is no suspend feature in Pleco... Pleco has plenty of filtering features that would allow me to mimick "suspension". But I believe it's not worth the effort: provided I've put in place a method to learn words (lists, SRS, whatever) and a routine to get input (reading and listening every day to native material), I prefer to rely on input to select those items that are actually repeated and the rate at which they are repeated. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 23 of 52 20 February 2014 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think some of the differences here can be explained by using words vs sentences. With single words, sure, it makes more sense to suspend the card. But if you see a sentence and know that you're bored of seeing it, then it's much better to delete it for good. It's relieving and it keeps your deck enjoyable. Only the most fun sentences are worth keeping, and even the best jokes get stale if you hear them too many times.
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 24 of 52 20 February 2014 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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