|
 |
Letting go of SRS | ||
Tags: Anki | Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| ihoop Newbie United States Joined 4405 days ago 29 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 26 09 August 2014 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||
|
Hey all,
Some of you may have seen my recent thread on wunderlust in language learning. The responses there got me thinking about a lot of different things, mainly why my relationship with Mandarin has changed. After a lot of reflection, I realized that the process of learning the language was no longer fun to me because of the methods I was using. The truth is, Anki has been the vehicle for the majority of my studies. I have tons of flash cards to do every day from a bunch of different decks. One deck is all sentences from movies for listening comprehension, another deck is FSI sentences, another deck is vocab from Glossika material, another deck is random vocab, one deck is Characters from Heisig's books, etc. I realized I have started dreading doing my Anki reps every day. I feel that I don't really enjoy doing them and they are not as beneficial as to me as they used to be. I also dread "missing" a day or two of Anki if I want to go traveling, or spend an entire day with friends, or do anything else that prevents me from getting in my daily reps. So, after some careful thought, I have decided to do an experiment and essentially give up Anki for a couple months. Aside from Character study (my Hesig RTH deck) I will completely eliminate Anki from my life. Even thinking about it gives me a sense of relief! I won't, however, stop studying Mandarin. I plan to change my study method completely so it is more enjoyable to me, and hopefully, in return, more beneficial to me actually learning the language. I will try to do an hour a day of Intensive Reading with a pop up dictionary. I will make no effort to put newly learned vocab into any sort of flashcard mechanism and will let myself naturally acquire new words through tons of reading. For listening comprehension, I will take a small news segment every day and make it 100 percent comprehensible to me. On the following day, I will do the same thing with a new segment of news. This way, if I miss a day of study, I won't feel so guilty about it and dread coming back to a pile of flash cards. Has anyone else given up Anki in favor of more natural language acquisition? How did it work out for you? Edited by ihoop on 09 August 2014 at 6:17am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6345 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 26 09 August 2014 at 7:03am | IP Logged | ||
|
Excellent plan. It's good to experiment and see what works best for you, or even just try something new to keep things interesting and maintain your motivation. I have deleted all
my SRS/wordlist material at certain points in the past. To make a long story short, I found that isolated vocabulary study is very helpful and rewarding as long as I don't let it exceed about 25% of my total time spent studying. The only other point I'll make is that I think you are wise to keep your single character decks until you become very proficient with them. We had a related discussion about this recently here: Do you have an exit plan for isolated vocabulary study? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4134 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 3 of 26 09 August 2014 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
|
I just wrote about this in PM's language long.
I haven't dropped it completely because I occasionally get bursts of motivation to use it, and when that happens I usually get a lot done with Anki. But yeah, for the most part, it's out of my life. I had a similar experience to you with Japanese though. When I started studying Japanese, I didn't know about Anki. I did whatever I wanted and somehow stumbled up to a decent level in Japanese. Then I learned about Anki and things started going downhill. Anki slowly became my main focus for Japanese, and about two years, I couldn't take it anymore and pretty much dropped Japanese altogether. At the time I thought I was just not cut-out to learn Japanese to a high level. I've spent a lot of these last two years studying French without Anki (except on occasion) and things have gone superbly. I'm actually comfortable telling people I speak French, even if I'm not perfect. And my main focus was studying in fun ways. Videos, books, friends, family. There was some Anki and some classes in between, but only when I was motivated. Honestly, this could have been my Japanese if I hadn't focused on Anki. Now when I look back on my Japanese studies, I'm a little confused by my reaction. Of course I was frustrated: I was spending all my time doing something I hated! I don't know what you're currently capable of doing in Mandarin, but seeing as you're daring enough to tackle the news, I'd start by looking for things to do that are sustainable and fun for you. Tv shows, books, whatever, you know the drill. Things that you can enjoy without studying, but that you could study if you wanted. Once you've settled into a kind of groove, then you can look at studying the news as you've said. If not, reading the news every day will take the place of Anki in your life and you'll have to look for something else to replace it with it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4144 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 26 09 August 2014 at 8:59am | IP Logged | ||
|
I tried to drop Anki (for Japanese) somewhere around May, current year. Having studied
around 9k words, I thought I could just move on to extensive reading, looking up only frequently occurring words I couldn't guess. And for the first few weeks, everything was fine. Every week I'd set a new daily minimum page-count (starting from 12 a day), and the first three weeks I'd often exceed it, even double. Then, I started doing just the minimum, then I started missing days, then not making the minimum... I think the problem was, lack of vocabulary. I could get the gist, probably even more than just that; but that wasn't enough (for me at least). So currently, I'm planning to stop forcing myself to read, and learn a couple thousand more words. I don't understand why learning has to be fun. Personally, I'm not learning languages for fun (directly). I want to learn a language, so that I can have fun WITH the language, not STUDYING the language. Of course, if learning is fun, we can spend more time on it, but that doesn't mean we'll make more, or even the same amount of progress. So, I'd suggest trying to do Anki faster. You can download a free plug-in called "Automatically_show_answer_after_x_seconds", and then gradually lower the time you spend on each card (you can set different time for each deck). Before, I'd spend 19.8s on an average card. Then I've set it to 7s. Then 4s. Now it's at 2s. Currently my average time per card is just above 3 seconds (more than 2s, because it includes also reading the answer and judging the card). My retention seems to have actually gone up, and I can speed through 500+ reviews in just half an hour. It's literally "study less, learn more." Of course, if you've had a deck with thousands of cards for which you need a good couple seconds to recall the answer, at the beginning you'll fail a lot of cards. And doing sentences this way also may prove a bit problematic. Plus, at the beginning you may feel a bit stressed, having a time limit for answer, but personally I find it quite fun. It makes me do Anki "on the edge of my seat." You get used to doing it this quick, though... You can try to delete your old, slow decks (except for the character one, of course), set a time limit per card, lower than what's been your average so far, and try to lower it every time you start feeling comfortable with it; until you're satisfied with your pace. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4328 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 26 09 August 2014 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
I used Anki for a year and learnt about 7000 cards in that time. After a while I started getting really sick of it, but at the same time was worried if I stopped using it I would lose most of the progress that I had made. However, that fear proved unfounded. I have been reading extensively with a pop-up dictionary for the last eighteen months and my vocabulary and grammar continues to improve so don't fear giving up Anki too much. It's not like you can do Anki forever, at some point you need to move to the next stage of learning, which is really quite enjoyable. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 August 2014 at 11:14am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4567 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 6 of 26 09 August 2014 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | ||
|
In the beginning of this year, my fifth year of learning Japanese, I started to gradually phase out Anki out of my learning process. Since I'm getting frequent exposure to Japanese I decided to stop adding sentences that don't directly relate to vocabulary or grammar points likely to come up on the test I was studying for. In March I went further and suspended my biggest Japanese vocab decks, and immediately after taking the test I suspended all off my decks for modern Japanese. By now I've actually deleted them all, except for the deck I created specifically for test preparations, which I might unsuspend if it turns out that I failed the test again (the results will be out in three weeks).
I believe that I have only three uses for Anki: building up core vocabulary in a new language, memorizing information for formal tests (and not just for foreign language ones) and reinforcing languages that I'm too busy to regularly expose myself to at the moment. Since my Japanese doesn't require any of those right now, I don't feel the need to use Anki for it, just like I don't need to use Anki for my English. Now I wonder when I'll be able to say the same about any of my other languages... Edited by vonPeterhof on 09 August 2014 at 12:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5103 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 7 of 26 09 August 2014 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
If "enjoyable" is the main goal, and "beneficial" just a nice-to-have goal and not a must-have, I'm sure you can achieve your goals by dropping Anki. However, judging from the paragraph you wrote about Anki, it appears that you're not understanding Anki correctly, and you're not using it correct. Eg. missing a day or two of Anki is absolutely nothing to dread about. You're probably not dreading using Anki, but instead, dreading mis-using Anki. It might help simply to use it correctly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5031 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 26 09 August 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I started a thread about the effectiveness of SRS in order to see how others use things like ANKI, which I personally dislike because SRS quickly become boring or a burden.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Anki software and I've donated just because I like it so much. But generally for me SRS's aren't fun. So the way I've been using them may or may not be of some use to you. Firstly I only use my anki card on my phone and only when I walk my dog. Once in the morning and once at night (and yes the dog gets more than 2 walks, but I'm not using anki) and I only select one set of cards to do. I have setup my system to only do 4 new cards a day so I don't get swamped with cards. I do as many cards as I can while I'm walking the dog, but if I don't complete the deck, or look at any of the other decks that day I don't care. The problem I had before was getting obsessive about completing each deck, every day. Now I don't worry about it. The first exception to the dog walking rule is when my wife drags me out shopping. My only activity is holding the stuff she buys, and answering the occasional "what do you think of this?" while she is digging through the sales rack. This is when I will open a "custom study" session and try to look at one entire deck, if she isn't done by then I move on to the next deck and so on. The second exception is Mandarin. Because I have just started to learn Mandarin (in the last week), I've loaded up the first 3 lessons of Pimsleur from a transcript and I'm learning the Pinyin, the audio and the characters using Anki. I'm using this deck A LOT and I'm trying to memorise all the characters. However, once I've gotten to the point where I can read native materials then I'll park the Mandarin anki decks and put in the first 3k-5k most common characters and review them on the dog walks. One of the decks which I use most frequently is a deck of "Islands" in French & Italian which are based on the advice of Boris Shekhtman in "How to Improve your Foreign Language Immediately" a great book which I highly recommend. I have created a deck with paragraphs of Islands I'm memorising by heart in order to have something to fall back on during a conversation. I use cloze deletion on these cards. So my advice is don't "let go of anki" but rather "let go of obsessing about doing every card, every day". Try to pick an activity you do each day and when you'll be able to do 10-15 minutes with anki. Use that time for anki, then ignore it the rest of the day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
