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Comment by Evan_Hellmuth | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your first paragraph.

But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?

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I've never had luck with flash cards for learning Finnish. The time->recall thing has never worked for me in this respect. If, for example I get Perehdytys, then Kuljettajaohje I've forgotten them straight away. After half an hour, I still can't recall how to spell them - at which point I'm going crazy.

However, after a couple of weeks coding a project related to Perehdytykset and Kuljettajaohjeet, I now know the words.

I think you have to do the flash cards multiple times to be effective. I've manually written out 1000 hindi flash cards. I would go through them a few times each day. I usually add a few of the older cards randomly, and I've had good progress over the course of a year. I think it was better for me to use that than Anki since I had to learn to write the devegnari.

I also heard finnish is a really hard language, so maybe it's that.

For speakers of European based languages with Latin character sets, learning to read and write Finnish isn't so hard IMO. It's phonetically spelled, and the character sounds are more or less the same as other European languages. The grammar is tricky, but literacy is simple. Or at least it should be.

How have you been making these flashcards? Finnish word in front -> English word on the back?

I have used the technique from "Fluent Forever" [1] to create my flashcards using images, not only translations for learning Swedish the past years and it works surprisingly well. Much easier to fixated words when you have a more personal connection to it, finding the right image for them is part of the process and it's worked for me, personally.

Of course, using the language and having reasons to learn a specific word help even more. I've used my deck to learn words that I came across in newspapers, in government articles and so on, to expose myself to words outside of the daily conversation usage.

Another technique from "Fluent Forever" that I think helped me a lot was listening to minimal pairs to train my ears to the sound of Swedish and intuitively know how words sound when spoken.

[1] https://blog.fluent-forever.com/simple-word-flashcards/

Thanks for the link.

It's been a while since I Used Anki, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. If I remember correctly I tried it with both text and images. I also remember using TinyCards, which had multiple choice and I had more success getting correct answers with that, because I didn't have to pull the word out of my head and remember how it sounded/looked. However, even though I could guess correctly, I still had problems with recall.

I'd love some flashcard with native language. For example, I'm from Finland and I've been using Anki to leard Japanese, but there's no Japanese to Finnish sets available. So, the only way to learn using Anki is to translate Japanese -> English -> Finnish. And there's often new English words for me which will need a translation. I guess this kind of double learning is effective, but sometimes a little frustrating. I have decided to write some Finnish explanations to each kanji, which takes time.

Still, I think Anki is great for remembering new words. You'll just have to use it daily.

I think drilling words will always be more direct than reading but at a higher "cost" (the overhead of building, maintaining and drilling via anki). Ideally, words that are more important will naturally appear more often -- a "natural" anki with little overhead.

But many things are list-like, or maybe just don't stick in your mind via reading, or need to be memorized quickly, or are better memorized in a digital/artificial context, or can only be memorized "naturally" at a high cost (just theorizing here). In this cause Anki is worth the overhead.

If anki were cost free (every interesting thought I heard in a podcast were automatically added to the deck), I'd use it store everything I didn't want to forget.

I think the static nature of an Anki deck is it’s downfall.

The advantage of reading is seeing a word in different contexts, and grasping the many nuances.

One thing I found from language learning is not all words are created equal in this respect. Concrete nouns (ie items which you already know in your native language) can be learned by drilling but other words are more context dependent, or have a commonly found inflection, or function more grammatically and should be learned as part of a surrounding context.

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