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Comment by mderazon | Hacker News Reader

I have weekly Portuguese classes in Skype. During the lesson, when there's a word I don't know, the teacher explains and writes it in the chat.

After each class, I take these words and put them in Anki. However, I feel that this is not a great system, a lot of times I need the context of the conversation, the word needs to be in a sentence or sometimes I would prefer the reverse card (English and Portuguese on the back)

Any recommendations for using Anki for learning languages that is not the basic word-translation pair ? I thought about incorporating Chatgpt in the process, and dump the chat history but I am not sure what would be a good system.

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You can ask Anki to also generate reverse cards.

But yes, word only cards are good in the beginning when you are learning only the most basic nouns and verbs but you quickly need sentences.

I’m sure there are plenty of online dictionary services which can do some sort of Portuguese sentence search for you.

Cloze cards also work well for this sort of thing, I think. Though they're easy to mass produce and create an overwhelming amount of revision, so be careful.

You may not have noticed, but there's also a reverse card type that only requires one note but adds two cards to your deck.

There are lots of people who have a similar intuition on the ChatGPT thing but none that I've seen create cards as good as the ones you could make yourself. Using ChatGPT as a dynamic pen pal is probably the better way to incorporate it into your language learning.

My prompt to ChatGPT is to give me the 50 most common words for a given topic with translation and an example sentence (plus translation) in CSV format. Which quickly gives me a handful of usable flash cards.

Yes, just writing down the word-translation pair is not useful at all. To add a little context helps, for example use app , like Linguee or similar ,that adds phrases when then context makes sense.

Nice site, I will try and see if I can integrate it into my flow somehow and give it words and get back sentences to put in Anki

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