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Comment by cehrlich | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Anki for language learning and it's a superpower. After just over two years I passed an exam that requires a passive vocabulary of about 10,000 words. Other people who grinded harder than me have managed it even faster, some in under a year.

However one big mistake people make is to think an SRS helps you learn. That's not true. It helps you not forget things you've already learned. You still need some real world interaction with the material.

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>> It helps you not forget things you've already learned.

The argument is quite weak when we discuss learning words in a foreign language. You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in Spanish, but is it learning or just memorization/association? To me the lines are blurred, even at first sight of the word.

I used Anki myself to learn foreign languages and it is tremendously effective for words and short sentences too. I use it also for words in my mother tongue, and it made be much more articulate than I used to be.

I did Anki religiously every day for 2 years, I managed to internalize a bunch of facts about Japanese and no skills. I knew tons of vocab words and grammar points but I couldn't make a sentence in the heat of the moment to save my life. I know memorization is a part of the game, but it's not the whole game. It's like learning a bunch of music theory without actually touching an instrument.

I am learning Mandarin now and my approach is completely different. Speaking and listening are the most important, I'm letting muscle memory of mouth (and sometimes gesturing tones with my hand) be my memorization technique. Six months-ish in and I can already express myself in rudimentary ways, it's way better than my Japanese was in that time frame. I have some Mandarin Anki decks that I do in the cracks of my day but I never finish my daily cards anymore and I don't spend a lot of time on it. I'll schedule an italki lesson or listen some speak-and-repeat courses instead.

Memorizing the notes in a song isn't learning to play music, memorizing a bunch of vocabulary isn't learning a foreign language.

I agree with the comment, but my point was about understanding and memorizing words, not becoming fluent in a language. Listening, speaking, and memorizing words and grammar rules are all necessary to become passable or fluent in a foreign language. I always jot down words and strive to memorize the phrases or idioms of native speakers. Then, there are ups and downs, one day I sound like Obama, another day I sound like someone who started learning the language two weeks ago. It's all part of the business.

Try Duolingo. They do the rote memorization part, but they also provide a lot of sentences. Their Japanese course reportedly is also quite advanced.

>You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in Spanish, but is it learning or just memorization/association? To me the lines are blurred, even at first sight of the word.

I think there's a difference. "Almuerzo" -> "al muerzo", I know "al" means "the", from Arabic, I look up the etymology, the "muerzo" is from Latin "morsus", from which we get "morsel" in English. Mnemonic: "the morsel". Then I can guess that the form of the verb is almorzar, which is indeed the case. Even learning a simple word embeds and thickens a web of associations in one's mind. SRS strengthens this, makes it scale better.

It is interesting from a linguistic point of view, no doubt, and I am an amateur etymologist myself, but let's look at reality with honest eyes: apart from a very small group of people, languages are not learnt, and learnt effectively, starting from the etymology up. I know it is almuerzo, I use it 20 times, and it is "mine".

I think we should try, and I include myself among those who have an approach to learning that is at times too cerebral, to look at how things work more than how interesting would be if they worked in a particular way.

This is language dependent. For learning Chinese, recognizing radicals (like waht represents water, and what represents tree) can go a long way in helping recall of both meaning and pronunciation. Then moving on to learning Korean, where Chinese characters make up ~25% of Korean words, recognizing the Chinese character, then recognizing the typical phonetic alterations to Chinese pronunciations, can go a long way in helping recall of both meaning and pronunciation.

I am still skeptical. One thing is to recognize common roots, for example "to live" is "vivere" in Italian and "vivir" in Spanish, another it is to know that they are both coming from the latin verb vīvĕre. It is sufficient to recognize the commonality, without getting to the etymology of the word, which, in practical term, does not help.

Etymology by itself is not going to be useful. As one more flashcard, another pillar, additional context, they will to deepen your understanding. It is creating more inter-connections between your neurons.

I think we should not confuse the process of hypothesis building with hypothesis testing.

>> As one more flashcard, another pillar, additional context, they will to deepen your understanding. It is creating more inter-connections between your neurons.

This is a hypothesis, identifying a mechanism that leads to an effect. But I don't see any tested hypothesis for either the mechanism or the effect. And we have millions of people who have mastered other languages as children and as adults who have no idea what etymology means.

I mean, it sounds reasonable, in theory. Like knowing the evolution of tactical formations in soccer would like one to become a better player. But it is common sense it has no effect whatsoever on soccer abilities.

There's a guy who did a book like this: http://yong321.freeshell.org/lsw/

preview: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Learning_Spanish_Words_...

It's just a bunch of vocabulary paired with etymology notes and observations/sounds-likes to make the vocabulary memorable.

Oooh, this looks lovely, thank you for showing me this.

EDIT, hm he seems to be missing some obvious cognates, e.g.

>propio, own (adj.); proper (cognate). Proper in modern English no longer has the meaning "own", but this word in Spanish, propio, still retains it. if this knowledge is too uninteresting, use a mnemonic such as "A truly proper lady behaves in her own natural style."

wtf? What about just the English word "property" instead of this silly lady business?

There's something to be said for using strange or even ridiculous mnemonics as a memory aid.

I'd often come up with little stories to teach myself some of the more complex Chinese characters when I was learning quite intensively and found I never struggled to remember those words after doing so.

To use a language you need "over-learning". It's not enough to be able to recall a word.

You need to be able to recall it very fast, and that only comes through repetition beyond the "I won't ever forget this" stage. SRS doesn't make a statement about this, and you can still use it to achieve that over-learning, in my opinion. It may be better to achieve it through reading texts in the foreign language because the repetitions are faster.

One way you can achieve this using SRS is forcing very short recall times. I average under 2 seconds a card in review: my view is that if I can't recall it in under 2 seconds (what would be realistic in a real-life scenario when speaking a language) then I don't know it. It's a method that's trained me to be very fast at recalling words when needed.

Interesting idea.

Do you manage that yourself. I.e. you time your own response, and if it feels slow you mark the card as forgotten?

Yeah, it's something I can time myself: I'm on about 6 years of daily usage at this point so it comes very easily. Anki also lets you set a time-out on cards as well. I'll know just from looking at the front of the card whether or not I know the word. If I do, space then 'good'; if I don't, space then 'again'. Very rarely I'll know a card but only after a longer moment to think about it - that's a 'hard' card.

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