the advantage of building your own decks is choosing words you will actually use. this matters if you're practicing conversation, if your goal is just to read general material then using preselected word lists makes sense
> using preselected word lists makes sense
I have never used Anki for word to word translation, because there is no Spanish word that means any English word. You've restricted yourself to a particular paradigm from the beginning. I mean, do whatever you need to do to get a foothold, but you want to get away from L1 as much as possible as soon as you can.
I know you consider it pseudoscience to force creating your own cards, but I do find premade decks result in a lot more leeches. How do you avoid them when relying on these thousands of auto-generated cards?
Also, one of the many parts of the spaced repetition lore that I do agree with is that if you keep getting the same card wrong in the same way over and over again, you're building up a weird habit that is going to be tough to break. Better to trash it. [edit: you can't do this with the conjugation cards, though. If you keep failing a particular conjugation card, you need to stop, write it down, and spend time with it individually. All of those are important, except maybe the unique conjugations of europeizar.]
> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.
I believe of course in the have fun rule above all others, because this is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. You're going to have to get enjoyment from the process if you're going to stick to it at all. I get a "dopamine hit" every time I get a card right.
If you wanted to sprint, the best way is probably doing the full old-school* Glossika method where you go over the day's sentences, you listen and repeat, you listen and transcribe, then you repeat on your own and record. The next day you start by listening to your recordings and figuring out how to improve them, rerecord, go over your new sentences, rinse and repeat for 3-4 hours a day. You can certainly hammer a language into your head that way, but you probably need a tiger mom threatening to withhold food or something to keep you doing that for 6 months.
About creating your own cards - I've done thousands (not language related), and I've learned and remembered things with them, but there's no science behind writing a good card. Everybody is on their own and flailing, and asking themselves "what would Woźniak do?" rather than coming up with formal rules and testing them. I've got ideas, and there are a few datasets (of people doing spaced repetition sessions over time) available, but I think that treating cards as a black box, discovering the relationships between them over time (through finding which cards are passed and failed together), and creating some sort of internal market of cards between adversarial LLMs could generate good decks, and generate mappings that would allow failing or passing one card to affect many other cards rather than the single card alone.
The best thing about FSRS to me is the decision to stop asking the user about process, and just ask them about goals. Some of the Anki community seem on the verge of giving up on the self-grading, too, and just moving to pass/fail, which I couldn't support more. I never used anything but pass/fail, with the settings from refold (https://refold.la/simplified/) which have been obsoleted by FSRS, which works better with pass/fail only. As I said before, a lot of how these things were designed from the beginning was simply cargo-culting Woźniak.
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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.