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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! |