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Fluent Forever book has helped me a lot with Language learning. It shows you how to learn a language mainly using flashcards, apart from other things.

I'm recommending you some things that have completely changed my experience using Anki for language learning:

- Don't use translations. Use images instead. For learning how to say dictionary put a picture of a dictionary. It will be easier to remember. Also, you usually won't find a perfect translation for a word.

- Use cloze cards for grammar. Instead of learning the rules, understand them and put four sentences with placeholders and repeat them. This process will make this way of constructing sentences stuck in your head.

clozemaster.com is a website that does exactly this (your second point).

Anki is great for higher level learning as well. Instead of having just individual words, have full sentences or even paragraphs. If you can read it aloud and understand it, then you can mark it as learned, but if you need to use the definition or explanation for any of it, mark it as unlearned. Once you have a decent initial vocabulary and grammar, this is far more effective at pushing things into long-term memory. Most of language is contextual, so anything to increase the amount of context on an individual card will help with getting better holistic knowledge of the language.

I dont understand why some people still go by brute force memorization when there are better methods. Those that our brain naturally uses. You won't see memory champions using Anki for competitions as their main memorization tool that's for sure.

I've studied a few languages, and by far the easiest, fastest and most long-term proof way to memorize words is by free association.

It takes some initial effort to be able to create these associations, but when done, it's done. There are some words I now basically can't forget, because the association is just too strong.

Example:

Waarschuwing = dutch word for warning. With free association i did it like this.

the "waar" part of the word immediately made me think of english word "war"

schu, shoe

wing, wing

So i vividly imagined a flying shoe with a trompet warning about an upcoming war. Done. Unforgettable for me. The more ridiculous, emotional (funny, stupid, ...) and obvious the better.

Some words are easier than others, and the ones that don't have a quick association jump out quickly are at a higher risk of being forgotten, but even then, they will stay way longer and without much less effort than with brute force, which is basically just creating memories out of nowhere, with no associations to anything on your brain. Our brain loves to relate things to others. Unrelated things = useless things. Everything that is useful has a relationship to something else.

So when you try to memorize by a way that is not based on association, indeed, only brute force works, which is a way to tell your brain "welp i can't really tell you what's the usefulness of knowing this, but somehow it keeps coming back into consciousness, so i guess i need to keep it in here somewhere. A self sustaining island, a dot of knowledge with no connection to anything else i know or care about."

> I dont understand why some people still go by brute force memorization when there are better methods. Those that our brain naturally uses. You won't see memory champions using Anki for competitions as their main memorization tool that's for sure.

Thats because Anki isn't for memorization, it's for time optimization and scheduling. Nothing about Anki makes you remember a fact better, that's still on you, and the memory champions use ALL those tricks and techniques.

Anki just schedules the non-memory-champions needing to mostly remember most of the things, and minimize the time taken to try and do that.

Said as a multi-year daily Anki user getting really close to a 1000 day streak.

I learn a lot. The way I've learned best for me is to mimic children. Especially small children.

They focus intently at seemingly incomprehensible complexity. Then they play with the small fragments they can get their hold on. "ba-ba-ba-ba" when they're learning to speak.

They play. They combine two (or more) different things they're interested in into a single experiment which we think of more as play. Mushy food? I wonder what happens when I throw it on the floor? Oh look how it landed all funny! Look how mum and papa reacted!

Grinding through cards learning languages never really did anything for me. Immersion and regular (but not exhaustive!) play stretched over time makes the neurons of my mind much more reliable.

Arguably, the whole point of play is learning.

For some, yes. And their secondary benefit is joy.

For others, no. It's joy. And their secondary benefit is learning.

Learning is often a byproduct of play, but the actual point of play is highly subjective to whoever is doing the playing. Although, in my experience, if you need to learn something, making it into a game is a highly effective and fun way to go about something that might otherwise be pretty dull.

To learn a word or character, you need to be able to understand it immediately and be able to form a sentence with it without delay (at least not more than the occasional "uh..."). Remembering the meaning after some fiddling is not good enough.

That has to be achieved by actually practicing the language, either via listening, speaking, or writing.

Anki is there to help after that step by keeping you refreshed with the exact tones, strokes, multiple pronunciations or more ambiguous CJK characters etc. but it can't be the motor behind the process.

For spaced repetition, although it is a form of rote memorization, the key insight is that memory is formed through recall, not review. The system then (purportedly) hits you at the very moment you are about to forget the card. It's counter-intuitive but it's easier to encode things in long term memory by recalling them at that point as opposed to when it's still fresh in your mind.

This is analogous to studying in university via explaining things to yourself versus just highlighting and rereading the textbook. Every student knows the former is more effective.

A friend who is amazingly good at languages made the analogy, you can't read about how to play a musical instrument and get better at playing it. You actually have to play it.

Anki might help some, maybe reading, but speaking and listening require actually speaking and actually listening.

The analogy can be taken too far; if you can recognise a note by sight on sheet music, you’ve learnt everything there is to directly memorise in paying an instrument. All the rest is practice. This is not the case in language learning. A language which is not closely related to one you already know has tens of thousands of words, the meanings of which can’t be deduced from other things. There is no use to doing listening practice if you do not understand almost all the words being used; you will be stuck looking them up one at a time in a dictionary. It is also very difficult to correctly pick out words you don’t know in a language you are new to.

> Is there something we can do when learning new information that will help make it "sticky"?

For me, a big part of learning a new word involves creating chunks. Those chunks then form bigger chunks. Let's use 辞書 as an example: 辞 is talking/words (and also used as kanji for quitting) and 書 is books. So word book = dictionary.

The kanjis are also broken down by radicals. 辞 is 舌 (tongue) + 辛 (spicy). There isn't a logical connection between the combination of radicals and the kanji, so I'd make a memorable story instead [1]. Thus the only things I have to purely memorize are the radicals.

I go through above process when I'm creating a card and I believe the process itself helps me learn the word much faster than just rote memorization. Of course, you need to start using the word in your daily life too!

Edit:

[1] When I create a story, I close my eyes and try to imagine the story happening as vividly as possible. I also have a rule where radicals in the story must appear in the same order as in the kanji

It seems like you've gone pretty far. I assume you started with something like radicals (constructive strokes) and built up to more complex Kanji/pictograms. I know in speaking to native Mandarin speakers that they see stroke order in the characters and were intrigued that I don't see that in english. Often we just learn the sound/typed elements (e.g. pinyin), which I guess might be like modern asian kids.

Have you looked at something like wanikani.com with the mnemonics or some of the more historical derivations of the different characters? Those might help build an internal story for why those characters mean what they do. As an adult, that helped me.

Stroke order sounds like a burden to Westerners but it actually helps with memorizing characters, and makes your handwriting less awful.

Yeah it needs to help you do better "encoding". This is what determines how sticky information is straight after learning it.

One way that Save All (a company i run that's like anki, https://saveall.ai/) helps you with encoding is that it suggests alternative ways that we can quiz you on a card you just made. This helps you engage with the card a bit more as you're making it which makes it more sticky.

Other than that a good way to also improve encoding is to link new knowledge to existing knowledge. Things like Roam help you do this with their backlinks

I thought active and free recall were both superior to mixed encoding and interleaved practice. Is there a study linking more encoding to enhanced active recall? From what I understand, the suggestion is to add desirable difficulty (which I guess leads to better encoding, but different encodings dont nefessarily add desirable difficulty).

Not sure about the relative importance, but save all also has active recall & interleaving. The encoding happens when you first learn something & create a card, and the active recall, spaced repetition & interleaving happens later when you review cards.

Anki is great, but it doesn't hold a candle to full sensory integration. If you moved to Japan or China and rid yourself of English, you'd be forming all sorts of associations a white screen with text can't replicate.

SRS is great for the characters -> definition pathway, but we need so much more. Listening, speaking, interacting, using the language to describe the world around us in conversation and navigate through it.

Don't stop using Anki though.

To answer your edit:

I think you are understating the difference this "more efficient time" makes. SRS outclasses every other approach we have for long-term memorization by several zeroes.

Bringing your car to the shop when the "check engine" light is on and bringing it into the shop after every single drive is superficially the same, but only one of them makes actual sense...

The answer is yes. I’m working on it with https://reader.manabi.io which aims to enrich memorization with more colorful contextual anchoring. Working on a SwiftUI rewrite with Anki integration currently.