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Sentence mining: direction of cards

  Tags: Anki
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
cod2
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 Message 1 of 8
10 June 2015 at 12:00pm | IP Logged 
Before I found my way, I pondered long and hard for many months which direction is
best for my Anki sentence cards: L1 > L2, or L2 > L1?

Like all Holy Wars that demand to know whether you are with them or against them, here
too the answer was: "Both".

Here is the answer in more detail:

1. For sentences that you expect yourself to be able to produce, use L1 > L2.
E.g. "Is the train cancelled?"
"I think there is a misunderstanding"
"I really don't care"

2. For sentences that you are unlikely ever to say, but are likely to encounter, use
L2 > L1.
E.g., (the equivalents of)
"A crude imitation"
"Do not obstruct the driveway"
"Abolition of the death penalty"


3. Everything else: Just ignore.

Now I know what you are going to ask: "But I can say "I really don't care" in 20
different ways in L2, how do I mark myself?"

Very simple. Of the twenty ways, choose the one or the two that you like the best,
make them your way of saying "I really don't care" in L2, and keep them in the L1 > L2
deck.
Move the other 18 in the L2 > L1 deck.
When reviewing your L1 > L2 deck, mark the card as correct if you have chosen any of
the 20 variations you know of - not necessarily just the two in the L1 > L2 deck.

Edited by cod2 on 10 June 2015 at 12:07pm

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chaotic_thought
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 Message 2 of 8
10 June 2015 at 12:43pm | IP Logged 
For sentence mining as I use it, I take a sentence from material that I'm familiar with and just highlight one target word or phrase. As an example, I found this one from Japanese study:

      akindo ha okami ate no tegami wo watasimasita

Then I translate the phrase with the help of dictionaries, etc. I usually prefer to translate from the learning language into the same language because it tends to be more logical, especially for not closely-related languages.

      : okurisaki wo arawasu go

The problem with using the "forward" version of this sentence in Anki is that it is extremely boring. This is because the sentences I choose are simple and familiar, so of course, remembering what the above underlined word means in the context is not difficult. Therefore the only way that works for me is to use the gap-filling option in Anki to make cards that look like this:

      akindo ha okami ___ no tegami wo watasimasita

      : okurisaki wo arawasu go

      >

Then I like to use the "typing" option so that I actually have to type in "ate" in the space marked with ">" to review it. I find this reinforces my memory of the word better.

I use this format now for all vocabulary review in Anki. Occasionally words are not accompanied by a sentence. In that case the "sentence" is just a single phrase entry that must be typed. If it's a long phrase I'll usually leave a small hint so that it's not so frustrating to type out the answer or feel like I need to remember every bit of a long phrase, e.g.

      ____ shou

      : Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

      > monbu kagaku

E.g. the full answer is もんぶかがくしょう【文部科学省】, but I only felt like typing もんぶかがく for review purposes because the しょう provides the rest of the context for this phrase.


Edited by chaotic_thought on 10 June 2015 at 12:52pm

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smallwhite
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 Message 3 of 8
10 June 2015 at 1:48pm | IP Logged 
cod2 wrote:
2. For sentences that you are unlikely ever to say, but are likely to encounter, use
L2 > L1.
E.g., (the equivalents of)
"A crude imitation"
"Do not obstruct the driveway"
"Abolition of the death penalty"


> "A crude imitation"
> "Abolition of the death penalty"

These are noun phrases to me, and thus word cards and not sentence cards.

> "Do not obstruct the driveway"

The "do not" part is too easy to be worth SRSing, so I would SRS "to obstruct the driveway" instead, which is then a verb phrase, and the card again becomes a word card instead of a sentence card. I'm also likely to break this verb phrase up to ensure that I remember both keywords without any hint, ie. "to obstruct" and "a driveway" as two cards.

End result is I don't have sentence cards.

Edited by smallwhite on 10 June 2015 at 1:50pm

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Serpent
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 Message 4 of 8
10 June 2015 at 5:19pm | IP Logged 
Yeah, I generally do cloze deletion. I also don't really aim to translate a sentence, just to understand it. And I don't do L1->L2 at all.
SRS'ing sentences is not about memorizing them but getting used to them, to the idiomatics, grammar, vocabulary. If you translate anyway, it's much more efficient to translate different sentences than the same ones over and over.

Edited by Serpent on 10 June 2015 at 5:22pm

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garyb
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 Message 5 of 8
10 June 2015 at 6:24pm | IP Logged 
I always use L2->L1; I also don't see much use for L1->L2.

For things I want to be able to recognise, I highlight the word or expression and have an explanation (usually an English translation, but could also be a target-language synonym or explanation, whatever seems appropriate at the time) on the other side.

For things I want to be able to produce, I use close deletion, almost always partial words rather than full and with a hint/translation underneath, again usually but not necessarily English. A quick example I pulled out of my Italian deck for the word scorrere:

Quote:

Comincia a sc[...]ere con lo sguardo l’elenco dall’alto in basso.

browse, scan, glance over etc.


I prefer to make them relatively easy, I see it as a reminder more than a challenge. In this one, the "ere" at the end makes it clear that it's an infinitive of an "-ere" verb (I could infer that it should be an infinitive from the position in the sentence, but I'm testing vocabulary not grammar here); the "sc" at the start is a clue/reminder and also makes it clearer that I'm after that particular word as opposed to another one that would also work, since again I'm trying to test particular vocabulary.

Anyway I'm not claiming that this is the best method; it's just what I've settled on after some experimentation, as I find it relatively painless and somewhat effective.
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Arthaey
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 Message 6 of 8
11 June 2015 at 6:11am | IP Logged 
Huh... I haven't read many threads on this particular Holy War, so I've been using L1 -> L2 because it annoys me to spend the time doing both directions so I picked the one that was "harder" (ie, required production, not just recognition).

So to read folks writing that they find the L1 -> L2 direction to be less useful surprises me. Maybe I should read up on some of the older threads on the topic after all...

Thanks for the food for thought!
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Serpent
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 Message 7 of 8
11 June 2015 at 2:52pm | IP Logged 
Note that this thread is about sentence cards.
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Lemberg1963
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 Message 8 of 8
16 June 2015 at 5:43pm | IP Logged 
I only use L1 > L2 because of the benefits to production. I find L2 > L1 to only be useful
when you've encnountered a version of word that has several common synonyms (ie. angry in
french can be either en colère or fâché) for the first time.


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