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Comment by reactspa | Hacker News Reader

Anki is great... however:

... having used it for the last 4 years to try to memorize vocabulary in certain languages (Spanish & French, recently started Chinese), I think it's a base layer... (much like how Bitcoiners like to talk about BTC's Blockchain). Reasons:

  1. I've tired of it. I need a layer that makes me excited to use it.

  2. I've found it far-far less useful for learning other things than rote vocabulary memorization. It needs a layer that makes it easy to store and "pull up" everything I need to know.

That said, I don't want to sound like I'm looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Anki truly is a great piece of software, and my sincere thanks to the devs.

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In my opinion people often make the mistake of using Anki to memorize one-to-one translations of foreign words. It is more effective to use it to learn the mapping of whole sentences.

For every word you want to learn, add a few idiomatic and representative sentences in Anki. You can do the same for every new grammatical concept you want to learn.

And don't forget to use Anki's text-to-speech tools to practice listening as well as speaking.

Does it replace other forms of learning entirely? No, but it can be a great component of learning a new language.

Any chance you've studied either Spanish or Russian and have decks to share? I've never fully gotten started with Anki, but would love to get back into it to use it to expand my vocab with full sentences.

I'll also be checking online now that you've spurred my curiosity, just curious if you have ones that you like too.

Keep in mind, the full value from Anki really comes from creating your own decks rather than using preconfigured ones.

This was a huge eye opening moment for me. I thought it was about using a deck, and I always found it less than fantastic. Now that I am making my own deck, it is far more useful.

There is this guy who turned the Tatoeba database into Anki decks: https://digitalwords.net/anki/tatoeba-audio/index.eng.html

That's exactly what I do. From videos I use losslesscut [1] to isolate the sentences I want to practice on and then turn those into anki flashcards with some custom tools I wrote.

[1] https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

What else do your tools/scripts do? Does losslesscut work with streaming video or only downloaded files?

Speech to text (via google cloud speech) and dictionary lookups (via a custom gui). Only downloaded files, luckily the sources I use make their content available online for free (and I wrote some python to automatically download new episodes).

If you want to download from YT i recommend NewPipe, better than every dodgy browser extension (i shall install another program on my machine? GTFO) i tried. You can just get the audio too. Android only though .

Totally agree with this.

When learning Japanese grinding vocab was extremely boring but did a fantastic job of bridging the gap between textbook literature and actually being able to read simpler (middle school level) native literature / comics / news stories.

And I didn't even need that many words to bridge that gap. Maybe like 1000 or so over what I'd already picked up from textbooks.

Now? There's no way in heck I'm going back to grinding vocab and instead slowly pick up new words by reading tons and tons of books.

I still need to rote memorize a bunch of kanji since picking them up naturally is pretty brutal, but like with vocabulary I'll only do it to the point where I can stumble through YA-level books without looking something up every other sentence.

It's much more fun to watch native video / read native materials and put in whole sentences that are just on the tip of your foreign language understanding (i + 1 theory from stephen krashen).

Instead of just 1 to 1 vocab mapping, look for chinese tv shows that you enjoy and start to slowly build up vocabulary by mining sentences.

Then when you do reviews, not only will you remember the vocabulary, you will also remember when it occurred in the story and have a cool memory of some of your favorite tv shows / books / etc.

I highly recommend this. A swedish girl told me that the reason for them being good at enhlish is they don't get localized movies. Helps picking up colloquial uses of language too, realized that watching japanese movies.

I've used Anki every day for almost a year now for Spanish vocabulary. My deck has over 4000 cards. Most are one-to-one translations of nouns and verbs, but some are phrases and Spanish idioms.

To your first point, it has basically become a habit for me. The key is to really commit to it for the first several weeks and establish the habit, then you won't feel tired of it as reviewing your cards daily becomes something you "just do".

Definitely agree with point 2. The Anki practice really shines when I combine it with my conversational practice. Memorizing the words alone doesn't make me a better speaker, but it does mean there's a lot fewer "what's the word?" moments in the middle of a conversation.

I believe Anki memorization + regular conversational practice is second only to full immersion as the best learning strategy.

> I believe Anki memorization + regular conversational practice is second only to full immersion as the best learning strategy.

I'd extend this:

  Memory + Synthesis = Useful learning strategy

Blindly learning facts with no intent to synthesize them into something else will help you win at trivia contests. Learning to integrate those facts into something else (like conversation, with languages) is how you effectively learn. Both aspects are needed in order to become effective at whatever subject you're studying.

That said, with Anki or any other tool these rules are incredibly handy:

https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

When I first heard the term "revising your notes" I assumed it meant the kind of synthesis you speak of, or at least finding errors in lecture material. No, apparently it just means looking at them again, at least as a minimum.

I believe "revision" is used in British English to mean reviewing or studying.

Nice man. Yes, why not use both immersion and spaced repetition?

Immersion is great if you can do it. When I traveled up Argentina to visit my wife’s family I wrote down a lot of words and phrases that were new to me for cards.

I'm building a prototype that does that. It's not done yet, but you can check out last month's demo of the "pull up". https://www.conceptionary.app/

(Please don't squish my website HN)

Give Lingvist a shot (commercial, but there is a free trial).

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