I often feel like learning things with Anki puts memories into the wrong part of the brain. It happens way too often that I can perfectly recall something from Anki (on a PC or phone), but have a lot of trouble recalling it 'in action'.
I use Anki to study Russian, with great results, following Gabriel Werner's Fluent Forever.
In the book, he teaches how to learn the words and the grammar of a language using Anki. One of the fundamental ideas is to both create recognition and production cards.
The recognition cards are the ones with a word in your target language, of which you have to remember the meaning. This is what most people use SRSs for.
The production cards instead show you an image, or a sentence with blanks, and you have to come up with the correct word by yourself.
Before reading the book, I have never seen anyone using the latter, but it makes sense. You have to train your brain not only to recognize the information, but also to take it out when needed, and those are two separate paths.
[Update: fixed the book's author name]
I've used some spaced repetition/Anki stuff to put an initial dent in Portuguese. Compared to learning French the old fashioned way of practice with humans and repetition; it's a huge basket of fail for me. Virtually no useful results. Stopped with Anki, moved to Portugal; zero lessons, but making some attempts with the locals with a shitty phrasebook and dictionary -I actually got decent results. Maybe you can call that "spaced repetition." In which case everything is spaced repetition.
I believe people can remember lots of facts via flashcards, as I've done this myself in the past. I'm not so sure it works on languages.
The only advice that I find a bit rushed is to read books with the audio after you learn the top 1.000 words and half of your grammar book. That's still too hard for me.
But I can listen to this Russian-only podcast and undertand almost everything: https://russianpodcast.eu
Such methods of learning the language would make you a practitioner of the Skill-Building Hypothesis in your SLA (Second Language Acquisition) journey. Often which methodology to follow is decided unknowingly by the L2 learners, since the sources they utilize often dictate the methodology.
I believe it'd be my duty to inform you there's also a competing theory in the SLA field that you may fancy, called the Comprehensible Input Theory.
The learning through an SRS happens only for the 1.000 most common words of a language and its grammar.
After that, learning is intermixed with speaking, reading, writing and listening to learn vocabulary through comprehensible input.
Still, I have to say that learning the top words and grammar, I got to an impressive level, giving the effort. I can listen to some podcasts, read what people write on Facebook and some articles, and speak with friends in noisy contexts.
Like trying to learn a foreign language by only reading.
There was a sheepish point in my life not too long ago where I had a bookshelf full of Spanish books that I had read, yet I couldn't follow a conversation or speak much at all.
Of course, nothing that can't be quickly fixed by dating a native-speaker that doesn't want to or can't use English. :)
I found that the method worked really well for the basic vocabulary (pictures for easily identifiable objects), cloze deletion for basic grammar and other common words. However, I have recently noticed two related problems as my deck and knowledge of the language grows is size (I have about 5000 unique cards at the moment) surrounding words with similar meanings:
- I often find that in the cloze deletion cards I insert a word that correctly completes the phrase but is not the term used on the card
- I have found that with some words I know that the word belongs in a phrase but I don't know the words specific meaning. An example using English: if the phrase was "I bit the apple" I would know that "bit" is somehow related to eating, but wouldn't remember how it differs from "eat", "chew", ect.
I'm curious if you are anyone else has had similar problems. Particularly in regards to the second problem, as it is seems to have the biggest downside. I am thinking of breaking the gold rule of the FF method and just putting definitions on the cards to make sure I actually know exactly what a word means.
I have the second problem as well, but I don't know if it's really a problem. I remember learning many patterns in English before fully understanding their meaning, and the same applies to Russian.
That's probably a "feature" of learning a language. The more you will see the word in conctext, the more you will refine your understanding.
It's better to learn things in or close to the contexts in which you will use them. That's the heart of situated learning / problem-based learning / simulations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning
I find the best thing is to make as many connections as possible to and amongst the things you want to learn. For vocabulary: find patterns in the spelling of the word, draw the word, use the word in a rhyme, make a joke about the word, etc. Also, connect the words together such that you can traverse a network of them in your head.
I've since transitioned to rely on actual usage examples from books / in the wild. It's really the only way to actually learn, imo.
Else you'll learn that a word means "wide" but have no idea how to apply it. With usage examples, you train yourself to realize you might use this word to describe a wide road, but this other word to refer to a thick stick. And the correct word starts coming to mind in the wild, incidentally, without a deliberate step to understand the difference.
Definition alone is basically useless.
From my podcast on SRS I linked in another comment:
> [00:11:27] These SRS flash card apps are very good for learning vocabulary and depending on what's included in the flashcards, they could be for grammar as well. But the problem for a language learner is that it's de-contextualized. So say if you just study vocabulary words, then they're going to be a lot of things that you'll miss like collocations. You won't know which words are normal to use with which other words. For example, in English, if someone asks, "How are you?" it would be completely normal to answer, "pretty good". It would also be fairly normal to answer, "absolutely fantastic". But it would be strange to answer that you're doing "absolutely good". There's no grammatical reason. It's just not something that English speakers tend to say.
> [00:12:17] And there are many, many, many language features that are like this. There are also questions of word boundaries. For example, in English, the word "nose" refers to a person's nose or a dog's nose, but not every kind of animal. For example, an elephant in English doesn't have a nose. It has a trunk. In Japanese, the same word, 鼻 (hana), is for a person's nose and the elephant's nose. So the question is, what exactly does "nose" mean? Well, really tedious language teacher could explain this for every single word that you study, or even put this on the back of every flash card for every word that you're reviewing. But, it's not going to be efficient. You'll spend so much time worrying about edge cases for every single word that you're learning that you're actually not going to get anywhere.
Extensive reading avoids all of these problems. It feels slower than cramming words at the beginning, but over time, it's a much faster way to build a functional vocabulary.
(I think it's called Memory Palace.)