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by bluquark
881 days ago
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For what it's worth I've gone the opposite direction (one language, 70k Anki reps). For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time (which can a surprisingly large proportion of study time per card, given how brisk reviewing usually is) and I've been bothering with it less and less. The default simple cards my dictionary plugin creates are usually good enough for me. I go out of my way to add context on the front of the card now mostly when it's a specialized word almost always seen within that context (so there's zero added value in learning it independently). I do agree with the general idea that laziness and going easy on yourself is good though. I give myself quite a lot of slack when grading my answers, applying a "my understanding of this word is close enough to avoid confusion in practice" threshold rather than some impractical ideal of native-level mastery. |
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I actually had several custom tools that heavily automated card creation—I could grab a sentence from a web page, or bulk import highlighted phrases from an ebook. Then I had a UI which allowed me to easily highlight an interesting word, and either cloze it, or add a Wiktionary definition on the back. Then I had an Anki plugin to bulk import the cards. This could all obviously be combined into a single tool, and occasionally someone tries.
For my most heavily automated experiment, I used a tool similar to subs2srs to import sound, bilingual subtitles, and tiny screen captures from 4 episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. That was a fascinating experience, and I'm still earwormed with the dialogue of those episodes a decade later, after only a couple of months of Anki reviews. (See elsewhere in this thread for a link.)
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that there's a good startup market for language-learning tools. Language learning is normally aspirational, much like a gym membership. And customers don't have any serious plans on how to reach their stated goals. (Again, like a gym membership.) Duolingo isn't terrible, but I suspect—based on lots of Anki experiments—that it should be possible to build much more effective tools than Duolingo. I'm just not convinced that anyone but serious ESL students would pay for them. Too many genuinely good tools in this space have sunken quietly, despite a user-friendly UI and a good landing page.