[kentosi-dw]

The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated. However I can see how this might be a burden to some when it comes to entering in your own sentences.

For this, I highly recommend making use of your OS's dictation (speech to text) feature. You get to practice speaking _and_ enter sentences much quicker.

[bluechair]

The importance of SRS is often overstated.

To my knowledge, there isn’t a single study showing SRS as effective for language learning where it was an experimental variable.

There’s anecdotal evidence thrown about, which gives us some indication that it’s helpful. But I have doubts that it’s a good return on investment.

To avoid diving deep into long arguments about this or that, I’ll keep my advice short: If you use an SRS, make sure that the item your test goes through the brain structures you want to get good at, eventually reading can help with listening, but because you’re not processing the language through the typical brain structures that handle it, you’re delaying getting good until you’ve exercised these “muscles”.

Also, don’t learn words in isolation. Better is to learn the words in context. Better yet is to vary the practice, maybe hookup an LLM to vary the cloze word, if that’s your cup of tea.

Use audio if possible. If you’re comfortable with the language, use a TTS.

[keiferski]

These criticisms are all of text-only flashcards, not of spaced repetition itself. It is a common mistake to conflate the two, but it's perfectly easy to have videos, images, and audio on your flashcards in Anki.

Spaced repetition is a fundamental learning method that is attuned to how the brain works. It's not really tied to a specific method like flashcards. Rather, flashcards are merely the most logical and easy implementation of spaced repetition.

[cblum]

I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.

These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.

Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.

I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.

[pessimizer]

> Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.

For me the new habit has been to not guilt myself too badly for skipping my cards if I know I spent an hour or two on native materials. Key to this has been to make sure that while all of my subdecks under my combined deck offer me a set number of new cards every day, the combined deck is set to zero new cards per day. If I'm missing days, I need to stop adding cards for a while until my daily load is tolerable enough that I'm not tempted to skip out.

Also, I like to get new cards of the same type at the same time. After I've cleared them once, let them be mixed in with the other cards, but when they're introduced, I should be focused.

I hope that FSRS* eventually solves this: they've pretty much done away with manually-chosen "ease" as a concept (although not everyone has accepted that yet.) I hope they'll ditch the idea of people regulating the number of new cards they get per day and move to allowing users to select an amount of time they want to spend, or a date by which they want to have a particular proficiency (defined by card recall), and instead have the algo choose how many new cards you should have. e.g. I'm looking for 45 minutes a day of review, optimize for that; or, I want to be able on the 15th of October to be able to get 95% of this set of cards correct, drill me on them repetitiously for as long as it takes.

There's been a lot of thoughtful discussion about pushing the app forward in ways like this.** Simpler is better, and the scheduler should be scheduling, not the user; the scheduler's job is to adapt to the user.

The next frontier for SRS after polishing the schedulers is to gain an understanding of what makes a good card or a good deck, rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader along with a bit of handwaving about how it's better to learn from one's own cards than ones that others have made. I'm about 3 years into daily SRS and this is not my experience. I'm eternally grateful to people who come up with innovative decks or just well written and focused cards.

-----

[*] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/

[**] https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/pass-fail-grading-as-default/ https://forums.ankiweb.net/t/how-to-prevent-users-from-misus...

(sorata seems to be a contributor to AnkiDroid, and Expertium the lead of FSRS. It's really nice to watch this be worked out in public.)

[jarrett-ye]

FSRS-based simulator could help user regulate the number of new cards they need to learn per day. The simulator will be integrated into Anki natively in the next release. But it's still an experimental feature. If the simulator is accurate enough, I plan to make it more automatically to support the idea that let the algorithm choose many new cards the user should have.

[g9yuayon]

> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated.

I'm not sure if I agree with that, as no native speakers need to have an SRS to learn their native languages. No doubt that SRS will allow us to remember words, yet few can really acquire those words intuitively. When starting to learn English in school, we used some kind of SRS system to memorize words and phrases and sentences, and man, the result was abysmal. We spent 10 years learning English (3 years of middle school, 3 years of high school, and 4 years of college), trying to memorize new words every day, passing TOEFL and later GRE through intense SRS, yet few students could understand TV shows, read fictions, or communicate with English speakers. And the learning was arduous, to say the least.

In contrast, I was lucky enough that my mom gave me a set of graded readers compiled by National Geographic, and simply asked me to read them through. And then Sidney Sheldon's books, Friends, etc and etc. So basically I immersed myself into the language, never having to do SRS, and I could easily pass TOEFL and the GRE Verbal years before graduating college. As a bonus, I started to enjoy TV shows and movies early on, and was able to socialize with my classmates and professors without even trying. I also used the method to learn Spanish and Japanese, and the results are similar. No SRS needed but consistent exposure to the languages. In less than two years, I can read books like The Alchemist, If Tomorrow Comes, and Project Hail Mary. Another interesting contrast is that I couldn't understand much conversation in those languages, precisely because I spent most of my spare time in reading.

[keiferski]

Native speakers certainly use spaced repetition, as they hear the same sounds over and over again until they learn them. All an SRS is, is a piece of software that optimizes this process.

[watwut]

All SRS softwares are flashcards. And when people say srs, they 99% mean flash cards. Pretty much no one uses SRS for "reread book multiple times".

[keiferski]

I don’t think you’ve understood my point.

Spaced repetition is a scientific phenomenon that has nothing inherently to do with a piece of software. It’s a description of how the brain works and is based on the spacing effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

SRS is an application of this effect in software form, hence the name, Spaced Repetition Software. So yes, no one uses a term meaning software to describe reading a book.

[watwut]

Importance of SRS system definitely can be overstated. You can learn language without them and depending on your personality, they oftentimes turn into demotivating tiring drag that wastes your effort. If you like it, it is perfectly fine to use it, but if you don't, there is really no reason to force it.

[ziddoap]

>SRS

Spaced repetition system (or maybe software?) for people like me who were not familiar with this acronym.

[naniwaduni]

> The importance of an SRS system like Anki cannot be overstated.

This is definitely an overstatement. It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations. This is a hurdle people frequently run into when deciding to learn a language, but it's a pretty tight problem to be having and SRS is not like, critical.

[owenpalmer]

> It is a useful tool for the specific purpose of blindly memorizing associations.

Then you're not using Anki correctly.

[naniwaduni]

Look, all I can say to that is that the name isn't a coincidence.

[Trufa]

I'm learning Indonesian the right way after having learned German in the wrongest possible way and ANKI is just amazing for language learning, 4 months in and I'm having basic conversations.

[alanwreath]

Sorry maybe this is the wrong question. But with regard to ANKI (all caps) are referring to some app?

[keiferski]

https://apps.ankiweb.net

[latentsea]

I actually think the 6 days a week of tutoring is the thing that needs to be emphasised more. That's the thing that really makes it all come together.

Particularly if you have extremely fast lookup methods like rikachan or language reactor, you can basically just recoup the time on spamming input and re-doing the lookups until they stick, while it being more fun and lower stress.

A grammar deck up to intermediate level grammar is worth smashing out as fast as humanly possible though.

[thatsnotmepls]

I have ChatGPT create 20 sentences for a new word I want to learn, works super well with Anki.

Front -> Word. Click button, shows random sentence out of 20.

Back -> Word and sentence translation.

[cblum]

The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife).

I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)

[StefanBatory]

I had ChatGPT fail on basic Spanish sentences, to the point where I with week of Spanish could tell it's wrong (as it, basic grammar was mangled).

I can't recommend it for language learning at all, I'm afraid. :(

[udit99]

Wait...how do you do this in Anki? The randomization part.

[qingdao99]

Anki supports HTML and JavaScript so technically anything is possible.