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Comment by _gfwu | Hacker News Reader

General advice for spaced repetition is to make flashcards atomic i.e. as small as possible, as in the OP, but general advice for language learning is to always learn words in context instead of on it's own, for example in example sentences. Have you figured out a solution combining those two goals?

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For language you might be interested in the Clozemaster[0] approach. Basically, you are shown a sentence, both in English and the language you want to learn, and one of the words in either one is a cloze deletion, e.g.:

    English: there are thirty days in April.

    French: il y a trente ___ en avril

And you have to complete the cloze with "jours".

The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This combines vocabulary with grammar.

I didn't like the Clozemaster UI so I wrote a script to make the clozes myself: https://borretti.me/article/building-diy-clozemaster

But automatic approaches are not great. Later I asked GPT-4 to make these flashcards for me, that gave me much better/more meaningful results.

[0]: https://www.clozemaster.com/

[1]: https://tatoeba.org/en/

[2]: https://www.clozemaster.com/faq#how-are-the-blanks-in-the-se...

This is very nice.

For language I've always used the sentence in target language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card and the translated sentence in the back of the card but I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around.

Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach

> I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around

It should be both ways round. This is especially true for languages (where your brain needs e.g. French -> English for reading/listening and English -> French for writing/speaking). It's also useful even where you only need one direction because learning both directions actually strengthens the memory for the direction you need.

Could you detail a bit more your gpt4 usage for language learning?

I was wanting to get back into French and thought about using chatgpt, but I'm worried about it's hallucinations and teaching me wrong.

I asked it to list an outline for a French course, then for each item in the outline I asked it to make a table of English-French sentence pairs of increasing complexity.

This is a common problem. My preferred solution is to quiz myself on that specific word, then see the word being used in a context with example sentence(s). That could be extra info on back of the card. While it is right to make flashcards atomic, one might misunderstand that so as to not include information that doesn't directly play a role in Question -> Answer.

Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.

As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.

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