[helterskelter]

Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses.

Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.

[cwnyth]

My problem with Anki is that it's very, very inefficient. It will take much more time and effort to memorize the vocabulary words you learn, and losing those words is very quick. It's much better to use SRS with actual and varied sentences.

[pferde]

I have the exact opposite experience with Anki. I use it to memorize vocabulary of a language I'm learning, a language completely different to other languages I know, and my retention before and after I started using Anki is night and day. Frankly, I was floored once I realized how much faster I was learning, and how easily I can recall even words I last practiced or used months ago.

I make and maintain my own cards/notes, which I think is part of why it works so well - it's tailored to my learning, not to someone else's.

[cwnyth]

Well, I should have qualified my statement: Anki is inefficient compared to better methods, but more efficient than haphazardly trying to memorize things. Yes, it's better than nothing, but there are better SRS implementations, including most readers.

I saw a lot of this from personal experience. I had to learn not only Latin and Greek, but also French and German just for my doctorate, and I learned Russian, Thai, and Swedish separately. And then I taught Latin and Greek for years, inquiring often how my students were learning. Anki (vel sim.) is fine, but there are better ways (and none of those ways start with the letter D and end with the letters lingo).

[pferde]

I guess my (badly conveyed) point was that Anki is already so efficient for me that I don't feel the need anything more.

Well, not for vocabulary, anyway. There is more to learning a language than vocabulary. :)

[cwnyth]

Hey, fair enough. To each their own. If Anki is fine for you, great! Do what works.

[socalgal2]

> including most readers.

Can you be more specific? Do you have any recommendations?

[StefanBatory]

> but there are better ways

What are those?

[SubmarineClub]

You know you can just…create Anki cards with sentences, right?

Anki doesn’t force you to make cards with vocab words in isolation.

[potro]

It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word. I tried this (use sentences instead of words), it sucks: you spend more time per card, but you learn less efficient, as you learn not just a word but all the hints coming from the same sentence.

I wrote my own program 2 years ago, that generates new sentence on each review using AI (at that time I used Anki as scheduler). That was fun and quite effective as far as I can tell. I would recommend others learning language past A1, maybe A2 level to do the same. This day you don't need Anki for this, just use one of FSRS libraries for scheduling.

[pessimizer]

> It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word.

Anki doesn't create either words or sentences. Drilling words doesn't work. You've drilled words and found it doesn't work. Try using clozes. It is not "less efficient" than drilling words, because drilling words does not work.

No word in French means anything in English. The meanings of words are just surveys of the contexts in which they are used, and French words are used in French contexts. Learning that a French word means an English word is just bad information that is cluttering up your brain.

If you're learning Spanish, French, German or Italian, try these.

https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/

20,000 clozes, words are repeated all the time, treat them as disposable. Read the sentences out loud and say the answers out loud to keep yourself honest.

edit: you don't need AI to generate sentences. There are already sentences available in every language.

https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d...

[BalinKing]

I ran into that issue too w/ sentence-based flashcards, where I almost immediately memorize the sentence itself and the whole thing becomes self-defeating. Similarly, I thought to use LLMs to generate fresh sentences on-the-fly, but the output was never reliable enough for my use-case... e.g. I came across some grammatical construction that the LLMs refused to use correctly. But, this probably depends on the language in question, since it sounds like you had success with it! Maybe I should try again at some point, now that the consumer models are a lot beefier than they were even six months ago.

[potro]

I used it for practice Spanish. LLMs have no issues with generating decent sentences in it. Also as I practiced vocabulary building, I didn't need specific grammar constructs or even to be very sensitive to the occasional mistakes in this area (which I don't remember to notice).

It took me quite a bit of iterations to get AI to generate output I found good enough and with acceptable errors rate for my practice but that was the part of fun.

If anybody wants to try the same route, the biggest mistake not to repeat is to trust LLMs to generate words definitions by them itself. It does it quite well, but still gives wrong definitions from time to time (~1% in my case for the OpenAI models 2 years ago). This wasn't acceptable to me and took a lot of effort to review and correct cards I already had. Feed vocabulary article with word definition to LLM instead if you want it to generate word definitions suitable to your level instead.

[zmmmmm]

I'll throw a shout out to the new Google Translate practice feature - it generates sentences around a theme you specify and speaks them to you at varying speeds in your native and learning languages.

[eisleggje]

Personally, I feel this isn't really an issue, as someone who has learnt multiple languages to proficiency (some with anki involved, some without). I mean I'm at a level where I speak mostly fine, read historical literature, novels, academic/political works, and engage with significantly divergent dialects without any trouble (I'm interested in such things, so.)

You find a word you don't know, you add a sentence. Find a different use in the wild or in the dictionary, add a sentence. Want to harvest many examples at once? If your dictionary lacks example sentences, you should really find a better one (of course, dictionaries with historically oriented/early-attestation examples are not neceessarily bad - many of the best dictionaries are such - but they're not great for mining examples of usage). (Granted, some languages simply don't have dictionaries that meet this criteria, in that case you must work with what you have.) Corpora of speech or literature can also be used if they exist. Most of this process can be automated to 1-2 keypresses.

Yes you get hints from the sentences, but you do too when reading/listening. Seeing a single word in the wild is also likely to lead to some free association shenanigans - ask any native speaker of whatever to define a polysemous word. Multiple sentences can just be added for one word, as needed, though the 'bulk' of sentences for 'review' is going to come from exposure in the wild.

In my own experience, word cards are less efficient because they accrue many more reviews - even for languages closely related to my L1 - having higher average difficulty and a higher fail rate. I would hazard a guess that I could review ~20 sentnece cards across my lifespan in the time it takes to learn ~1 non-trivial vocabulary card (ie. not words with zero polysemy, technical terms, things that don't occur in idiosyncratic phrasal constructions with specific converbs/clitics/prepositions/case usage abnormalities or syntactic abnormalities). And you get reinforcement of ~15 other words for free (depending on how long the average sentence is in your TL). I never worry if I end up adding a couple of sentences 'for' a single word.

It's basically targeted re-reading/listening, those being things that one does anyway and which accounts for the bulk of learning vocabulary.

AI is a non-starter for me (personally) in this for two regards: 1) they're awful at most of the languages I've studied at a trivial level. 2) those that they're 'good at' (in terms of grammaticality) they're often just horrible stylistically. I would like to be able to speak/write in a way that is pleasing in nuance/idiom, not just comprehensible.

But if these don't really apply to you or don't match your experience with your TL (they're better with some languages than others), more power to you!

[cwnyth]

That's why I used the word varied. But at the end of the day, you're still memorizing sentences, rather than how the word actually functions. It's inelastic.