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by david-gpu 1770 days ago
In my opinion people often make the mistake of using Anki to memorize one-to-one translations of foreign words. It is more effective to use it to learn the mapping of whole sentences.

For every word you want to learn, add a few idiomatic and representative sentences in Anki. You can do the same for every new grammatical concept you want to learn.

And don't forget to use Anki's text-to-speech tools to practice listening as well as speaking.

Does it replace other forms of learning entirely? No, but it can be a great component of learning a new language.
2 comments
hobo_mark 1770 days ago
That's exactly what I do. From videos I use losslesscut [1] to isolate the sentences I want to practice on and then turn those into anki flashcards with some custom tools I wrote.

[1] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

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solarmist 1770 days ago
What else do your tools/scripts do? Does losslesscut work with streaming video or only downloaded files?
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hobo_mark 1769 days ago
Speech to text (via google cloud speech) and dictionary lookups (via a custom gui). Only downloaded files, luckily the sources I use make their content available online for free (and I wrote some python to automatically download new episodes).
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scns 1769 days ago
If you want to download from YT i recommend NewPipe, better than every dodgy browser extension (i shall install another program on my machine? GTFO) i tried. You can just get the audio too. Android only though .
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wsinks 1770 days ago
Any chance you've studied either Spanish or Russian and have decks to share? I've never fully gotten started with Anki, but would love to get back into it to use it to expand my vocab with full sentences.

I'll also be checking online now that you've spurred my curiosity, just curious if you have ones that you like too.

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lethologica 1770 days ago
Keep in mind, the full value from Anki really comes from creating your own decks rather than using preconfigured ones.
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trickjarrett 1770 days ago
This was a huge eye opening moment for me. I thought it was about using a deck, and I always found it less than fantastic. Now that I am making my own deck, it is far more useful.
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adrianN 1769 days ago
There is this guy who turned the Tatoeba database into Anki decks: https://digitalwords.net/anki/tatoeba-audio/index.eng.html
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