I need an exit strategy

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desitrader
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby desitrader » Tue Aug 30, 2016 8:49 pm

Thanks for the answers. Keep them coming. I am working on a new daily routine without Anki.
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby stelingo » Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:13 pm

The reasons you outline in your original post are the very ones why I have never taken to Anki. Too many languages, too little time and no desire to stress myself out with mounting reviews. However i do like to learn vocabulary in a more structured way, rather than just relying on exposure. In the past I used old fashioned paper flashcards, until I discovered Quizlet. This site allows me to record vocabulary, make flashcards, practise and test myself on the vocab without being faced with a daily ever increasing amount of reviews.

https://quizlet.com
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby PeterMollenburg » Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:51 pm

In some ways SRS is at odds with autodidacts as it again makes one feel like they need their teacher so to speak. It becomes hard to let go. I know as I went down that path myself with regards to SRS and I'm still doing it in other aspects of my study routine. Leave the training wheels behind!

However, I am a hypocrite of sorts, because I'm also a 'one dimensional learner'. I do the majority of my French learning from one type of learning- courses. I used to enter every word into my SRS system and drill them daily. It took me a few goes to finally ditch the SRS and although I won't say I will never return to them- I fell more human and more liberated despite still sticking to courses predominantly. I know from my trodden path and the sense I get when I actually do read, as well as from others opinions that reading is definitely required. It seems to me we need a certain amount of intensive study (which I overdo) and a good amount of regular extensive exposure/learning as well. In short I think you should ditch you SRS, read, watch and do some intensive study. If you write words down here and there, use word lists for the time being I don't think it will hurt in the transition stages. Good luck!
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:00 pm

I don't think you should ditch Anki, I think you need to start suspending or deleting your cards. You just need to Be much more willing to scrap cards you know well, or aren't interesting. Also you could modify your settings on the older decks to bring up reviews less often.

Don't turn anki into a torture device.

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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby emk » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:50 pm

desitrader wrote:The problem I now have is massive Anki decks, and I don’t have an end game. I shudder to think that I have to do my Anki reps every day for the rest of my life – for an increasing number of languages.

“Well stop using Anki then” --- I hear you say. Yes, I have thought of it many times – trust me. I am worried that I’ll lose my active skills over time. I am worried that I’ll forget all the ‘difficult’ words and all the different scenarios I have learned through the sentences I have cherry-picked with great care.

I say this as somebody with 35,000 Anki reps under his belt: You need to cut way, way back on Anki and actually start using your language for something. You can just nuke your deck if that's the only way to escape, or you can look at the rules below and use them to do immediate, drastic surgery. Your Anki deck is suffering from potentially fatal rot, and if you want to have any chance of saving it, you're going to have to amputate a whole lot of cards.

Rules for New Anki Users
or how to avoid turning your deck into an exquisitely efficient torture machine

  • Don't increase the "new cards per day" from 20 until you have a months of steady Anki usage under your belt. Consider dropping it to 10. If you learn 20 new cards per day, you'll end up reviewing 100 to 200. Any time you get bored of Anki, set new cards to 0 and reviews will get far lighter in a week or two.
  • DELETE DELETE DELETE DELETE. Anki cards should be easy come, easy go. Your Anki deck is not a giant trash heap that keeps accumulating crappy cards forever. It's totally OK to just breeze through your daily reviews and either delete or suspend half the cards. Khatzumoto has a typically color metaphor about card turnover: "No matter how good the food you’re eating is (or isn’t), there have to be waste products that leave your body. You can’t hold that…stuff…in. It’s not good for you. Waste products — bad cards — are a natural results of the “metabolic” process of SRSing."
  • Anki cards should be cheap to make. You should never spend hours manually typing in sentences, because then you become attached to your cards, and you never let them go. If you can't copy and paste it, or—even better—get a tool like subs2srs to spit it out in large quantities, then it probably doesn't belong in your deck.
  • When in doubt, make your cards easier to answer correctly. MCD cards are wonderful because you only have to fill in a word, or even just a syllable. Also great: Cards where you only have to read and understand words in context. Use as many hints as you need.
  • If single-word translation cards are making you miserable, use cards with chunks of text or audio from native media. And if you have single-word translation cards with closely related meanings and you can't remember which is which, delete all cards involved with extreme prejudice.
  • Did I mention DELETE DELETE DELETE DELETE? Yeah, but it's important.
So I'm not sure whether your Anki deck requires drastic card amputation, or if you just need to go cold turkey. But either way, it's time for a change.

desitrader wrote:This is what my dream learning method would be:
    Passive listening all day, with some active TV / Youtube watching in L2. L3,… etc. in the evening.
    Extensive reading whenever possible.
    No use of any mnemonic whatsoever --- no SRS, no word list, no notebook, no journal --- just native media.
    No conscious effort on any kind of active practice – not even making an effort to speaking to oneself. (If however I naturally find myself thinking in L2, L3,… etc., that’s fine --- in fact that’s very good).

In short, pure fun and no studying whatsoever.

Even though my dream learning method is entirely input-based, I'd like to be able to produce exactly when I am needed to --- as if by magic. I don't want to be in a "Damn, what's that word? I had it in my sentence deck" scenario.

I find myself saying "Damn, what's that word?" in English, I'm sad to say.

So you're not the first person to try input-only, media-heavy methods. A whole bunch of the early AJATT students did that, and many of them reached high levels of comprehension. But on the output side, the results were very mixed. The comments of the AJATT blog were full of people saying things like, "I can watch anime just fine, but I can barely talk at all!" For a while, Khatzumoto kept preaching "more input!" and told people to push for near 100% comprehension of even difficult native media before worrying about their non-existant output. But eventually he reversed course and added MCD cards to his method, which provided controlled output practice. And the blog comments got a lot happier.

I learned my Spanish (what little I have) by doing subs2srs cards and binge-watching Spanish TV without subs. And my Spanish is virtually 100% "input only", with almost no output.

So you can try doing an input-only media binge. Maybe that will be enough and your output will be great; I've heard of it happening. But I've also seen a lot of people wind up with solid comprehension and virtually no output whatsoever. I know kids who've heard their mother's native language every single day of their lives, and who understand it just fine, but who've never been in a situation where they had no choice but to speak it. And as far as I know, they've never produced a single grammatical sentence despite perfectly acceptable comprehension.
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby desitrader » Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:16 pm

Just to be clear, the number of Anki reps per day is not a problem. I have daily review thresholds. If the number of reviews get too high, I stop adding cards --- so that's not a problem.

The problems are:
1. The current size of the decks. I now have more than 6,000 English-to-German sentence cards, 1,500 English-to-Italian cards, 2,170 Italian-to-English cards, 320 English-to-French cards, 1,000 French-to-English cards. For all languages except German, new cards are added to the TL-to-English decks, and when they become mature, I move them to the English-to-TL decks.
2. I have a fear that I am dependent on Anki, and I don't like being dependent on anything if I can help it. I like to be free of constraints --- just having fun.

The problem with deleting cards is that these are not some random crappy cards that I just picked up along the way. These are the sort of things I'd say in English, and therefore they are things that I'd like to be able to say in German (or Italian / French / Norwegian). I do delete cards but not very often due to the said reason. In a way they are my babies --- very sad, I know.

So either I ditch all memory aids altogether and go full-input, or gnash my teeth and carry on. I don't see a middle ground (i.e. deleting / suspending cards) as something that'd suit my mentality.
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby Elenia » Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:31 pm

desitrader wrote:Just to be clear, the number of Anki reps per day is not a problem. I have daily review thresholds. If the number of reviews get too high, I stop adding cards --- so that's not a problem.

The problems are:
1. The current size of the decks. I now have more than 6,000 English-to-German sentence cards, 1,500 English-to-Italian cards, 2,170 Italian-to-English cards, 320 English-to-French cards, 1,000 French-to-English cards. For all languages except German, new cards are added to the TL-to-English decks, and when they become mature, I move them to the English-to-TL decks.
2. I have a fear that I am dependent on Anki, and I don't like being dependent on anything if I can help it. I like to be free of constraints --- just having fun.

The problem with deleting cards is that these are not some random crappy cards that I just picked up along the way. These are the sort of things I'd say in English, and therefore they are things that I'd like to be able to say in German (or Italian / French / Norwegian). I do delete cards but not very often due to the said reason. In a way they are my babies --- very sad, I know.

So either I ditch all memory aids altogether and go full-input, or gnash my teeth and carry on. I don't see a middle ground (i.e. deleting / suspending cards) as something that'd suit my mentality.


If these are all things you'd say in English, why not start transferring them to a spreadsheet? That way, you'll have a personalised lexicon that is there when you need it. Start writing more (whether you're just writing texts to someone or writing longer pieces doesn't matter much - as long as it's output). If you find you want to express something then you can just your spreadsheet for the correct way to express it. The more you actually use these words and phrases, the better they'll stick.

I don't know if there is anyway to automatise this process, but if there isn't you can simply stop doing your reviews and use anki's own search function instead.
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby emk » Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:37 pm

desitrader wrote:The problem with deleting cards is that these are not some random crappy cards that I just picked up along the way. These are the sort of things I'd say in English, and therefore they are things that I'd like to be able to say in German (or Italian / French / Norwegian). I do delete cards but not very often due to the said reason. In a way they are my babies --- very sad, I know.

A random Zen Buddhist site tells me, "The second noble truth tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment." I make no observation on the larger religious question here, because that would be off-topic. But the second noble truth is certainly true of Anki in my experience.

If you are attached to your Anki cards to the point where you fear letting some fraction of them go, then they will inevitably cause you suffering. You'll fear that if you lose a card, you will lose the knowledge. You'll worry about whether you can review them all. You won't have enough time to actually use your language as much as you'd like. You'll treat your card deck as a database of things that you must know, rather than as an amplifier that gives a helpful boost to your natural memory. You'll probably struggle with cards that your brain isn't ready to learn yet.

I truly believe that spaced repetition is a remarkable and powerful tool. But Khatzumoto once sold a list of SRS advice, and on that list, about 47 of the items were some variation of "DELETE". Now, if you have a deck that always makes you happy, you don't necessarily need to delete much. But if your daily reviews have turned grim, you should delete more.

If you find it remarkably difficult to delete, say, 10% of the cards in an old deck that you're starting to dread reviewing, then perhaps the next best choice is to delete the whole thing.
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby desitrader » Wed Aug 31, 2016 5:49 pm

emk wrote:A random Zen Buddhist site tells me, "The second noble truth tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment." I make no observation on the larger religious question here, because that would be off-topic. But the second noble truth is certainly true of Anki in my experience.

If you are attached to your Anki cards to the point where you fear letting some fraction of them go, then they will inevitably cause you suffering.


Amen to that brother!
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Re: I need an exit strategy

Postby Cainntear » Wed Aug 31, 2016 6:39 pm

desitrader wrote:In short, pure fun and no studying whatsoever.

Even though my dream learning method is entirely input-based, I'd like to be able to produce exactly when I am needed to --- as if by magic. I don't want to be in a "Damn, what's that word? I had it in my sentence deck" scenario.

As the only source of learning, I really doubt that would work. There's a lot of redundancy in language, that is to say there's a lot of words/sounds/morphemes in any given sentence that you don't add any new information. For example, "Yesterday, I..." will almost always be followed by a verb in the past tense, so the past conjugation gives no new information. This means that the brain isn't forced to pay any attention to tense. It's very rare to hear native speech where mixing up present and past conjugations in English would lead to failure to understand. (I'm talking was vs is, did vs do; just the sythetic verbs conjugations, not phrasal ones.)

If the brain doesn't need to notice the difference, there's no guarantee it ever will.

Also human perception is not a passive process. I know I use this example a lot, but I was giving a less to two guys, and we were doing close listening for a focus on form. They kept hearing "house prices" as "prices of houses". I repeated the section multiple times. There were two gaps left to fill on the page. "Prices of houses!" they said "why are there two spaces but three words?" Lather, rinse, repeat -- no change. I told them what it said, they listened again and furrowed their brows in confusion. Their brains had developed a strategy for understanding that was based on reordering the input to fit their internal model, and that's good enough for understanding. If you want to learn to speak, you need to reorder your brain to fit the language, and you can't do that based on input if your brain starts mangling it as soon as it hits your ear.

The other example I often give is in dwindling minority language communities, where you get a lot of people who can understand conversation in the dying language, but can only respond in the majority language. Proponents of listen-first, natural methods etc keep telling me it's lack of confidence, and no, they're not confident... but then again, who would be confident when even very basic sentences come out drastically wrong?

emk wrote:A random Zen Buddhist site tells me, "The second noble truth tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment."

Damn right. I forgot to attach two slide decks to an email this morning and it nearly ruined two whole lessons for me!
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