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Comment by shinryuu | Hacker News Reader

You're right that Anki won't change my priority issues. But at least starting to give some priority to learn German that way may lead to more motivation to other activities, such as German course with actual people.

My plan is to re-evaluate where I'm at end of January next year.

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Personally I found Anki to be fairly demotivating way to learn. You need to find something you actually find fun in order for it to be motivating. For me, it was Duolingo. But it can be also in person class, peppa the pig series you keep watching in foreign language, whatever. But you need to actually like it.

Babbel Live costs $99/month or less if you pay for more than a month. It has classes with a native speaker as instructor and 0-5 other people. The classes focus on a specific topic in your level and are entirely in the given language.

Anki is basically soul destroying. Go to an in-person class and start having fun talking to other people. That's where everything changed for me.

This is very personal. I credit "fun" classroom conversations with scaring me off French for a decade. Anki on the other hand is great, it's a big dopamine hit when it lets me pick out a word in the wild for the first time, especially when it's something niche that I was dubious about learning.

If you can't even enjoy speaking the language in a controlled environment with other people who suck at speaking then you probably aren't going to learn anywhere. Same as this idea that Anki will magically somehow fix 8 years of complete inaction or whatever. Language learning isn't about knowing words, it's about speaking, reading, writing and listening. Anki is actually none of these things.

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