The Most Effective Way to Learn New Words | Hacker News Reader

The Most Effective Way to Learn New Words

marcnitzsche.de

28 pointsmrccc12 comments

I’m learning French and have employed almost the same methods. A few suggestions:

Record your own voice pronouncing the word in French. Anki make this easy to do and recording it correctly makes you really focus on getting it right.

Say the French word twice when recording with a few seconds pause between. When practicing/testing cards, try to get to where you can pronounce it first before the recording tells you the correct pronunciation. It is a great confidence builder and adds an interesting dynamic to the experience.

Learn the unique sounds required to speak French. This website provides those sounds and example words in correctly pronounced recordings. https://www.mimicmethod.com/the-flow-of-french/

As an additional suggestion for audio practice, try to get Google Translate audio input to recognize your speech. I have found it to be more strict than a native speaker in recognizing words. So, if I can get Google Translate to recognize my speech, it is likely a native speaker can also recognize it.

Thank you for the suggestions!

Personally, I like using recordings of native speakers to get used to their sound. I am not sure if I can always get it right myself in the beginning.

BUT recording yourself is invaluable nonetheless! I usually do this in a separate exercise by using transcriptions (which I encountered first in jazz – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_(music)). As you suggested, saying the word out loud before Anki plays the recording is important, too.

I’ve been doing this for a couple years as directed by Fluent Forever[1] (highly recommended if this article vibes with you), and the results have been really good to say the least.

Some great additional content here, I wouldn’t have thought of the stable diffusion trick— very clever!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Forever-Learn-Language-Forget/...

One of the important Fluent Forever tips missing from this blob post is optimizing, as far as possible, the process of getting things into Anki, which is discussed here:

https://blog.fluent-forever.com/multi-search/

Extending the multi-search idea, with AnkiConnect (a REST API into your own local Anki database) and a little code (and a few tricks like disabling X-Frame-Options on sites like Google Images) you can get to the point where you just click on on the images/audio files you want in the flash cards.

After thinking more about the process, I also found that it is quite cumbersome. Especially in the beginning, it takes a lot of time to create new cards. And because of the effort, most people will probably not attempt this. But after a bit of training, I can create new cards in a matter of seconds. When you've already opened all the tabs to Dictionary/Google Images/Forvo/Reverso, it's actually simple enough.

But yeah – I'm still thinking about how to automate the boring (i.e. non-valuable) part.

Hey HN! At the beginning of this year, I decided to learn French. In Mai, I moved to Aix-en-Provence (which is in the south of France) and spent three months learning the language. I think I've succeeded

During this time, I found a method that worked very well for me to quickly learn new vocabulary.

In short: - Use a spaced repetition system like Anki[1] that quizzes you on words the moment before you forget them - Use images instead of translations on your flashcards to make them super memorable - Create mnemonics if words don't stick, either through a story or visually using StableDiffusion/Midjourney

I'm just getting started and will continue to write more posts on language learning in the next few weeks. I already wrote an article[2] about the principles of language learning that might also be useful to you. I'm curious about your thoughts.

I wish everyone a great weekend :)

PS: I'm resubmitting this in hope for a bit more traction. I hope that this is okay as stated in the HN FAQs?

[1]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2]: https://www.marcnitzsche.de/how-to-become-fluent-in-just-thr...

> In Mai

Maybe you got a little too into it? :)

Maybe. ;)

Pictures to words so your brain skips the intermediary of your native language is a nice concept. Is there any peer-reviewed evidence that supports this author's claim?

Likely the article is referring to the picture superiority effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_superiority_effect

Thanks for posting this link!

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