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Sick and tired of SRS | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5327 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 52 20 February 2014 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I usually suspend, not delete, because AnkiDroid requires an extra click to confirm deletions. But I almost never unsuspend, so it amounts to the same thing. If I can't make a word stick with Anki, I need to find more examples in context: 1 really good example will do more than 10 reps of a poor example.
My actual deletion rates vary tremendously. When I'm using subs2srs, for example, I delete over 95% of the cards within the first 3 reps, and I continue deleting after that. But if I've pulled my sentences from an awesome book, one that I would happily re-read 5 times, and my Anki reviews always make me smile, my deletion rates might be as low as 5%. It's an emotional decision, not a numeric one: does the card make me say, "Yay!" Or does it make me say, "Meh." Or even "Oh, yuck." Now, cod2 wrote:
If cod2 wants to salvage this deck, the only solution may be to delete 90% of the cards. Or maybe only 40%. Again, it's an emotional decision, and I'm seeing a lot of hostility towards Anki in this quote. Deletion feels good: by deleting, you assert your right to control your environment, and to control your learning process. And deletion can also teach you how to make better cards in the future: What cards are so cool you can't bear to delete them? Can you make more like that? Of course, it's also reasonable to just jettison the deck and to start reading books. Enjoyment is far more important than any technique.
The problem the SRS algorithm is that the easy, pleasant cards quickly wind up with really long review intervals. But the horrible cards, the ones I forget all the time, get reset every week or two. So if I learn 1,000 Anki cards, I'll eventually distill my daily reviews down to a handful of easy cards, and pile of horrible cards I can never learn. Then Anki will throw those horrible cards at me again and again, and eventually they'll stick—for about six months, at which point I'll fail them again. This is pointless, because at another time, in another context, I'll learn those words painlessly. Anki can be very useful, but as other people have said, you need to take control of it and make it work for you. Add, delete, use the scoring buttons to adjust the review intervals, and so on. Don't just show up and review cards because Anki thinks you should—at least not if your reviews are starting to hurt. Get involved. Make decisions. Act on your whims. Make it clear who's in charge: you, not the software. :-) Used like this, Anki can be a pleasant minor tool that gives excellent payback for the effort—and an amusing way to kill time in line, if you pull your sentences from awesome materials. Edited by emk on 20 February 2014 at 7:42pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4328 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 26 of 52 20 February 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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My mother still does the crossword every day, as she was encouraged to do so by her teacher when she first emigrated to Australia in the 1940s as a technique to build her English vocabulary. I guess they didn't have SRS software back in the 1948. :)
Yesterday she and I - I'm visiting her at the moment - learnt the word "corona" for a halo of light around the moon. I guess whether you continue to use Anki for the next 65 years is a question of style of learning more than anything. I am sure it would continue to be useful to build vocabulary for a long time. I was pretty systematic with Anki, using the program for an one hour a day, for over a year, 'learning' about 8000 cards in that period. Why did I stop? Unlike my mother I could never imagine using Anki daily for the rest of my life to learn German. That just isn't my style. It's really a question of learning aesthetics for me. Anki always felt like a prop or crutch to get me to the point in learning where I could learn simply by doing the native language, without any extras. So it was always a question of when, not whether, I would give up Anki. After about six months of using SRS I started reading real books on the Kindle, and diligently added words I didn't know, plus example sentences, into Anki. Over time my reading rate started to increase dramatically, but my learning rate with SRS remained pretty steady at about 30 cards/day. Six months after I started reading I was in the bizarre situation that the cards I was adding for a particular book would - given the backlog of cards already not learnt - remain unseen in my Anki queue for another six-to-twelve months, and the gap was getting ever wider. Of course, I could have just put in only the important words to Anki, but how do you decide which word is really important before you really know the word? Perhaps "corona" is more important than it seems. I didn't want to stress about trying to work out what words I needed to learn now, as opposed to six months from now, as opposed to sixty years from now. A major insight I got from Anki was that words embedded in sentences are learnt much much more easily than words alone. But what is a book, but a whole bunch of words - some unknown - embedded in sentences? For learning purposes why not see X sentences once in a book, rather than 1 sentence X times in SRS? So I decided to stop using Anki and just concentrate on reading books and watching movies and see where that got me. I was scared at first to lose all the words I had learnt in Anki, but despite losing some words previously learnt from my Anki deck, my vocabulary has continued to improve at a steady natural rate eight months after I stopped using SRS. Anki is really useful to get you to a certain point - for me that was ready access to native materials - but after that point it's OK, perhaps even important, to let it go. Edited by patrickwilken on 20 February 2014 at 9:04pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5023 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 27 of 52 20 February 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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That's a lot to respond to. I'll give it a shot. First, I hope it goes without saying I don't mean any offense if I disagree with what others have said.
Second, regarding fun. It's naturally hard to address something so subjective, but I will say that I don't think fun is the be all end all that others seem to think it is. So when we have: Serpent's: "Only the most fun sentences are worth keeping, and even the best jokes get stale if you hear them too many times." I just don't agree. A fun sentence is nice, but I'm a big fan of sentences that teach me something, fun or not. An Italian card demands a translation for "Ramona is taller than Joseph." Is that fun? No. And it's a pretty shitty sentence. But translating it teaches something essential. emk also says Anki should be an "amusing way to kill time in line," with sentences pulled from "awesome materials." Personally, I prefer my sentences come from grammar workbooks, because those are meant to be tutorial. Flaubert's French is gorgeous, but if I'm trying to learn French I'm not going to yank my sentences from Madame Bovary--awesome sentences are often those that are most difficult to translate. emk: "Enjoyment is far more important than any technique." I just don't agree. Personally, I enjoy techniques that are effective--that governs my enjoyment. I don't demand that language learning always be fun. I don't expect it to be. I expect it to be difficult at times. I expect it to be frustrating at times. I expect to be challenged. In fact, that applies to most of the things I think are worthwhile: physical exercise, relationships with the opposite sex, my job. These are fun at times, challenging at others, at times downright painful, but all things I'm glad to apply myself to. So when people complain about learning vocabulary, mastering pronunciation, translation, etc., my sympathy only extends so far. You're doing a challenging thing, what'd you expect? And my sense of fun is somewhat different. That boring Italian sentence I quoted--when I get that right, I find that fun. It's dull as hell but I translated it correctly, and I enjoy that. Serpent: "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." I agree, if it's a useless sentence. But if it's useful, I'd say keep at it. If it's too easy, then far better to just launch it into the future by pressing the appropriate button when you get it right. If it's too hard--well, why is that? Is it Flaubert? Ok, get rid of it. Or is it something grammatical you haven't mastered yet? If so, find out and study it until the sentence is easy and then push the Easy button. emk: "If I can't make a word stick with Anki, I need to find more examples in context: 1 really good example will do more than 10 reps of a poor example." There are two issues. One, I think it's important to learn words without context, at least if it's the kind of word a native speaker could recall without context. "Camel" needs little preparation. The only time context seems essential to me is when differentiating homographs, and that's easy enough to do with a note on the card. Two, if context is really important, again, it's a piece of cake to add that to the card, as: L1: "Camel" (animal) L2: Verbljud emk: "My actual deletion rates vary tremendously. When I'm using subs2srs, for example, I delete over 95% of the cards within the first 3 reps, and I continue deleting after that." I've no scientific data to say that's incorrect, so I'll just say, to me that seems like a complete misuse of SRS. If three reps assured I would know a word forever, or for a very long time, then I'd consider that strategy. But my memory isn't anywhere near that good--I need refreshers at spaced intervals. Gradually increasing spaced intervals. emk: "Deletion feels good: by deleting, you assert your right to control your environment, and to control your learning process." "Don't just show up and review cards because Anki thinks you should—at least not if your reviews are starting to hurt. Get involved. Make decisions. Act on your whims. Make it clear who's in charge: you, not the software." Others mileage may vary, and I don't mean disrespect, but that just sounds like psychobabble to me. I appreciate you're making a joke, but there seems to be a serious point there too, one with which I don't agree. emk: "The problem the SRS algorithm is that the easy, pleasant cards quickly wind up with really long review intervals. But the horrible cards, the ones I forget all the time, get reset every week or two." This seems precariously close to saying the problem with the SRS algorithm is that it's an SRS algorithm. Reviewing hard cards more frequently than easy cards is sort of the point. emk: "This is pointless, because at another time, in another context, I'll learn those words painlessly." You know yourself better than I do, so I'll just say, for my part, I'm skeptical that a difficult word will magically become easy in the future. And even if that does occur with a single card (maybe I watch my brother get run over by a camel while a Russian tourist screams warnings--it's likely I'll never forget verbljud again), I wouldn't count on it in most cases. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3939 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 28 of 52 20 February 2014 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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While I definitely see its usefulness, I don't like spending more than 10 minutes on anki every day. My solution: I set my review limit at 50 cards per day and my "new card" limit at 10. At my current level, I'm only adding a handful of words per week, and those come directly from conversations with tutors, since those are the words that I need for my active skills.
It's nowhere as elegant as some of the solutions suggested on this thread, and it could be argued that it corrupts the algorithm of SRS, but it works for me! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6392 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 29 of 52 20 February 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
And why keep boring sentences when you can either find a good sentence that illustrates the same thing or wait until a better sentence finds you? If it doesn't, then it's probably too obscure for you anyway. It also sounds like you don't know what sub2srs is. It's a program that creates a multimedia deck out of a movie with subtitles. I think this explains why the 90% deletion rate makes sense in this case. Edited by Serpent on 20 February 2014 at 9:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 5911 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 30 of 52 20 February 2014 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I agree with the sentiment that you should quite anki if it starts feeling like a pain and if you feel frustrated when using it. I personally have done the same because I would dread opening anki when I knew that only those horrible cards that somehow wouldn't stick would await me.
Suspending these cards really helped me to feel motivated again to use the program. However, while I do think that there is nothing better then learning words through native speaker material there is one problem I have with Japanese where I feel I "need" Anki in order to deal with it. Kanji reading. I am at a point where I can read easier native material even if it doesn't have furigana because I am familar with the kanji meanings or I can sort of guess what the author is trying to say. However, how to study the readings of certain words is still beyond me. However, I do feel that when studying a language that doesn't have the same problem as Japanese it should be rather easy to improve without Anki once a certain level has been reached. After all, that's how I managed to improve my English all those years ago. If a study method annoys you and makes you not want to study you should move one to something else. You still can come back to it some other time but please be aware that you don't have to. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5023 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 31 of 52 20 February 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You're absolutely right. I withdraw my objection to that comment. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5561 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 32 of 52 20 February 2014 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's exactly the problem I have with SRS. That, not being able to decide which words are important enough to memorize them now, and the algorithms being sligthly out of synch with my learning - (my short term memory's too good, but then my memory deteriorates at a faster pace than the algorithms expect)
My experience with English makes me agree with emk. Words don't become easier, but I acquire the mental connections necessary to remember them without too much effort. If you take a word like camel in English, I might have trouble learning it initially (well I didn't, the German word is Kamel), but after some exposure to the language I might learn what a camel hair blanket is, and what a camel toe is, and with each of the new words the original camel becomes easier to remember. Maybe I'll watch or read a documentary about nomadic peoples, about camels, about dromedaries. About zoos. About animal hair fabrics. Eventually, I will. It would be good to get all of this additional information when I first enounter the word camel, but that's not something I can do for every new word or expression, especially when reading about it would mean I encounter dozens of other unknown words. 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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