[jacobsenscott]

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me.

If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess.

Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.

[Evan_Hellmuth]

I agree with your first paragraph.

But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?

[leke]

I've never had luck with flash cards for learning Finnish. The time->recall thing has never worked for me in this respect. If, for example I get Perehdytys, then Kuljettajaohje I've forgotten them straight away. After half an hour, I still can't recall how to spell them - at which point I'm going crazy.

However, after a couple of weeks coding a project related to Perehdytykset and Kuljettajaohjeet, I now know the words.

[navait]

I think you have to do the flash cards multiple times to be effective. I've manually written out 1000 hindi flash cards. I would go through them a few times each day. I usually add a few of the older cards randomly, and I've had good progress over the course of a year. I think it was better for me to use that than Anki since I had to learn to write the devegnari.

I also heard finnish is a really hard language, so maybe it's that.

[leke]

For speakers of European based languages with Latin character sets, learning to read and write Finnish isn't so hard IMO. It's phonetically spelled, and the character sounds are more or less the same as other European languages. The grammar is tricky, but literacy is simple. Or at least it should be.

[piva00]

How have you been making these flashcards? Finnish word in front -> English word on the back?

I have used the technique from "Fluent Forever" [1] to create my flashcards using images, not only translations for learning Swedish the past years and it works surprisingly well. Much easier to fixated words when you have a more personal connection to it, finding the right image for them is part of the process and it's worked for me, personally.

Of course, using the language and having reasons to learn a specific word help even more. I've used my deck to learn words that I came across in newspapers, in government articles and so on, to expose myself to words outside of the daily conversation usage.

Another technique from "Fluent Forever" that I think helped me a lot was listening to minimal pairs to train my ears to the sound of Swedish and intuitively know how words sound when spoken.

[1] https://blog.fluent-forever.com/simple-word-flashcards/

[leke]

Thanks for the link.

It's been a while since I Used Anki, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. If I remember correctly I tried it with both text and images. I also remember using TinyCards, which had multiple choice and I had more success getting correct answers with that, because I didn't have to pull the word out of my head and remember how it sounded/looked. However, even though I could guess correctly, I still had problems with recall.

[varjolintu]

I'd love some flashcard with native language. For example, I'm from Finland and I've been using Anki to leard Japanese, but there's no Japanese to Finnish sets available. So, the only way to learn using Anki is to translate Japanese -> English -> Finnish. And there's often new English words for me which will need a translation. I guess this kind of double learning is effective, but sometimes a little frustrating. I have decided to write some Finnish explanations to each kanji, which takes time.

Still, I think Anki is great for remembering new words. You'll just have to use it daily.

[justnotworthit]

I think drilling words will always be more direct than reading but at a higher "cost" (the overhead of building, maintaining and drilling via anki). Ideally, words that are more important will naturally appear more often -- a "natural" anki with little overhead.

But many things are list-like, or maybe just don't stick in your mind via reading, or need to be memorized quickly, or are better memorized in a digital/artificial context, or can only be memorized "naturally" at a high cost (just theorizing here). In this cause Anki is worth the overhead.

If anki were cost free (every interesting thought I heard in a podcast were automatically added to the deck), I'd use it store everything I didn't want to forget.

[ramblerman]

I think the static nature of an Anki deck is it’s downfall.

The advantage of reading is seeing a word in different contexts, and grasping the many nuances.

[porknubbins]

One thing I found from language learning is not all words are created equal in this respect. Concrete nouns (ie items which you already know in your native language) can be learned by drilling but other words are more context dependent, or have a commonly found inflection, or function more grammatically and should be learned as part of a surrounding context.

[asab]

There's certainly truth in this notion - if you have a goal in mind, going directly after it is often the most effective and straightforward choice. What I'm advocating is that the most direct path isn't always obvious.

Many masters say the fastest progress can be made in chess by doing "find the checkmate" exercises on tricky or otherwise interesting positions. This aspect of chess disproportionately contributes to success, compared to how much time is spent on each of these positions in the natural course of play. A bit of meta-knowledge about what makes someone successful at chess lets players play more effectively by focusing most on whatever helps them win.

Similarly, if you're learning a language and find yourself constantly groping for the right word, you might make a connection between your ineffectiveness at communication and lack of a memorized vocabulary, then shore it up by focusing specifically on that.

While there's a very strong correlation, there's no special rule of nature dictating that the best way to learn a thing is the same as doing it.

[HumanReadable]

I believe this to be the case for any competitive endeavor.

Go players practice life and death, basketball players practice shooting hoops, football players practice dribbling.

I designed macro exercises to give my students when I taught Starcraft.

The problem with these exercises is they are rarely very fun. To be great at something, you have to put in the hours. You won't if you aren't enjoying the time spent.

[yowlingcat]

Yeah I agree. That's not to say that tools like Anki don't have a use -- they do! Use of Anki and memory palace type techniques is really useful for when rote memorization is a /required/ foundation for further progression -- language learning and so on.

But I do agree with you that it takes you there and no further. Moreover, I find the branding of this site (and others of its ilk, these seem to pop up every now and then over the years) to be really disingenuous. I don't think it's on purpose, more out of naievete.

An implicit assumption with these kinds of things is that it's cognitive fitness getting in the way of whatever it is you want to do. That's deeply presumptuous, IMO. The truth is more likely to be as you say -- it's not a lack of "cognitive fitness" -- it's a lack of experience doing the thing you want to do! And so if you want to get better at doing that thing, the difference between success and failure is figuring out a way to practice it consistently and slowly pick more challenging things to do. Not look at it like a leetcode problem with a trick that must be found which magically makes the problem tractable.

[andreilys]

Who says you can't do both?

At a certain point doing the "fun thing" will lead to stagnation of your skills.

It takes effort to get good at something, and that effort is not always going to be fun.

[Jugurtha]

The paper "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" by K. Anders Ericsson et al[0] goes into more detail. The article was stretched into a book titled "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".

The gist of it is that there are several types of "practice". "Naive", "purposeful", and "deliberate".

- [0]: https://mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesnew/8.%20Research/Explici...

[RootReducer]

How do you remember the new words you look up when reading books? Making an Anki card for each will make sure those words are permanently etched into your memory.

[dmart]

Words tend to come up again with varied enough reading. It's built-in spaced repetition!

[hinkley]

I think that depends on your learning style, doesn’t it? In school they always want us to use the word in a sentence, and from my own experiences learning foreign languages and eastern philosophy, some words just don’t translate.

It’s a big reason why when you ask your friend what the two foreign characters in the movie are muttering they may pause and say, “this character is really mad at that character.” Because translating their swearing just does not make any sense in English, or sounds even harsher than it really is (according to screenplay writers, the French like to slip the word “whore” into any exclamation, from jovial mocking to impotent rage. Or perhaps more illustrative, there’s a “dang it” that refers to either a cow, or a dog’s name.)

Or going the other way, you want to explain “Bob’s your uncle” to a Swede? There’s a political history lesson in that explanation. They’re so weird you just learn them in context and go on, mostly.

[shard]

Something like Anki becomes useful when you've gotten to the point where the new vocabulary you are encountering are so rare that you only see them once every few months. I've read somewhere that it takes about 10 exposures to learn a new word. I was seeing certain words once a year (I track how often I look up vocabulary), it would have taken me a decade to learn those words naturally, and those obscure words are likely to be the most important words in the sentence, which means that if you don't know it, you miss the point of the sentence entirely. Anki exposure isn't like real in-context exposure, so it might take more than 10 passes to learn the word, but it should take less than a decade.

[bronco21016]

I think SRS comes in handy for things where you need to be up to speed now and do not have time to learn through repeated, natural practice.

As an airline pilot I’ve had to learn new aircraft a few times over the last 5 years. The airlines can’t afford to give you 100 hours in a simulator to drive in every little detail. You have to spend time in the manual using rote memorization to be up to speed on things before you’re out in the world operating the machine.

Learning by doing is my preferred method as well and it has its place. Just trying to point out that sometimes rote memorization, and tools to make it easier, are an important piece of learning something new.

[dgs_sgd]

Regarding vocabulary expansion, more than once I've come across the same word during reading, looked up its meaning, and then forgot about it. A quick dictionary lookup in the moment will help me understand it then and there, but the time gap until I encounter the word a second time is large, and I'll likely forget it before then.

A good approach is to use Anki to memorize words but only add words that you've actually encountered in the wild.

[bnjms]

I generally agree with this position an think it’s the better default but I think this position misses the value in a tool like Anki by discounting the value pf rote memorization. Tote is undervalued in American culture.

[misiti3780]

i read a lot of books and still use anki to keep my vocabulary by studying them everyday.