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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

It might be becasue you are just training recognition and not production.

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]

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What you describe is intentional vocabulary acquisition. However I'd like to point out that such words learned via this method consist only of a small portion of the vocabularies of both native speakers and L2 learners. Majority of vocabulary comes through incidental vocabulary acquisition [0].

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.

[0]: https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/747758

The book is actually also based on comprehensible input.

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.

I have been using Anki for the past six months for French, more-or-less following the Fluent Forever method.

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.

The book actually allows putting definitions on cards. They just need to be in the target language, so you need a monolingual dictionary.

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.

I'm also studying Russian. Are you using the Fluent Forever app along with the book? How are you storing your anki cards (anki app or something else).

What I'd really like isn't "I am studying Y using X" -I'd like "I am fluent to level Z in Y from using X."

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.

I am just following the book and using Anki as he describes, creating cards with images from Google and sound files from Forvo.

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

> It might be becasue you are just training recognition and not production.

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 think you meant Gabriel Werner's excellent Fluent Forever.

Ah, you're right. I fixed it. Thanks.

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