Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

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rlnv
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Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby rlnv » Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:00 am

My Anki usage has been fairly consistent for a couple of months. Three decks; 1) verb infinitives downloaded from Anki shared content, 2) verb conjugations of my own creation, and 3) highlighted sentences from books I'm reading on Kindle transported to Anki.

I'm happy with first two decks of verb cards. They are low effort and I like the gains I've made with verbs. They definitely have been helpful.

I'm not sure my time is being invested as well with cards I'm making from Kindle highlights. I have hundreds of highlights and I haven't even transffered to Anki. The time I spend copying, pasting, translating, and creating cards is starting to feel like time not well spent. If I were to spend even 20 minutes a day doing that, I'm starting to feel that is 20 minutes I could just be reading and doing quick dictionary lookups on Kindle. For sure the cards are great for ingraining low frequency vocabulary, and words that just don't stick. But that time is feeling a bit like a grind.

So lets say creating and working through Anki repetitions of book cards costs ~10 hours per month. That's ~10 hours per month extra that could be spend on just reading. What side of the fence does the value fall on, cards or more reading?
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby kimchizzle » Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:17 am

For me personally, I feel that flashcards are best for low frequency words that I've encountered a few times and know I should remember, but they never seem to stick. Flashcards for these words tend to help me to remember them easier. But I don't like using flashcards for brand new words, or words without any context.

For brand new words as a beginner, I just use a dictionary and translate to my native language or a language I know well. If I realize I'm not remembering certain words after seeing them a few times, then I'll think of using flashcards for them.

For a language I'm more advanced in, I just try to understand through context or using a target language dictionary.

As for the amount you spend creating the flashcards, just ask yourself if you are happy with your progress you are making with your current learning method? If you are then continue along your way. If not then search for ways to improve.

I would recommend not using flashcards for just things like verb infinitives like, front: infinitive, back: meaning. It is better to learn language with context rather than only words by theirselves in my opinion.

A better way to do verb infinitive flashcards, for example, would be like
Front: Luire, L'envie luisait dans ses yeux.
Back: to shine

Réfléchir, Parler sans réfléchir.
to reflect, to think
Last edited by kimchizzle on Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:34 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby kujichagulia » Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:30 am

If I had to choose one, I would say more reading.

I read somewhere that Anki should be no more than 10% of your language learning time. When you think about it, that is not a lot.

I've done similar things to what you are doing - taking material from what I read and making them into Anki cards. I've begun to step away from that and just try to read more stuff. I'm thinking that if I read more than I have been, I will see words and phrases over and over again, and that will act as an "SRS".
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby rdearman » Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:24 am

I use anki a lot, but I've moved away from text only based cards. I'd suggest that you might want to use more features of ANKI. It isn't just a replacement for paperbased index cards. It will also do audio and visual. If you have a film or TV series and you can get the subtitles in your native language and in the target language then try making some cards with subs2srs, check out EMK's experiment (viewtopic.php?f=15&t=723&p=1121&hilit=emk+subs2srs#p1121).

I use the chinese word of the day page I susbscribed to which gives not only the word, but example sentences read by native speakers. I have created a lot of cards with the audio as the test with the characters, then a pinyin hint.
Screenshot_2015-07-23-09-14-28-552.png

This means I'm learning the sounds of the language as well as the words and the writing.
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby aabram » Thu Jul 23, 2015 11:46 am

I've tried to befriend Anki several times now but every time, after initial "it's great, why didn't I use it before?!" phase I sort of get tired of managing the cards. I hate Anki interface on PC and wanted use it on Android, but then discovered that for some reason I couldn't sync my old stacks, the interface was clunky, there were some text size bugs with some of the stacks I downloaded etc. I just gave up.

Now I just load up my Kindle with french/spanish books and read them there with dictionary. Or, in case of Mandarin, use Pleco file reader to read converted ebooks.
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby garyb » Thu Jul 23, 2015 12:46 pm

I make cards from Kindle books too... or I intend to! I have a backlog of highlights from several books at the moment.

I think it's a good idea - in moderation. If you're making hundreds of highlights per book which will then take hours to copy and paste into Anki, it's probably not the most efficient use of your time. I just try to highlight things that I actually feel are important and worth further specific study, like words or expressions that would be useful to use and understand in conversation. I'm hesitant to highlight anything that's in a description as opposed to a dialogue or thought. In books, you tend to get a lot of semi-rare words that don't really merit extra study, and you can just look them up then move on.
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby rlnv » Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:33 pm

Thank you all for the responses.

I was playing with the idea of trying to limit myself to only highlighting the sentences containing phrases or words that I most wanted to put into Anki. A way of limiting the growth and management of the Kingle decks. But I know myself well enough that, the temptation is just too great to keep highlighting during my typical two hour reading sessions, and end up having far too many backlogged.

So for now maybe it's best to go cold turkey and stop all highlighting, and just read, as well as retire my current decks from books. I'll keep my verb decks in play because I find them so valuable. Even though they are simple verb front, translation back for infinitives, and verb conjugation front, with infinitive, tense, translation on the back, they are easy to maintain and hugely beneficial to me.

I can always evaluate adding Kindle book cards down the road.

@rdearman. I've been making such good grains in reading lately and to a lesser extent with book audio, that the time has definitely come to concentrate on a TV series more intensively. In August I will be starting the 3rd season of Buffy by reading the transcripts, lots of rewinding, and rinse and repeat for a season or two. I've already spent plenty of time with film and TV extensively and have decent gains. But its time to get serious and give it more focus. I'll definitely plan on getting into subs2srs at some point, and at that time i'll certainly benefit from emk's informational threads, I'm sure.
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Re: Value of Anki Book Cards Versus Effort Spent

Postby sctroyenne » Thu Jul 23, 2015 9:05 pm

I've grappled a lot with vocabulary collection and it can really feel overwhelming. Right now I really only collect stuff from articles I read around the internet with SRS Collector. The pro side to this approach: a lot of this vocabulary pops up a lot in other articles so I find it useful to learn. The down side: some of it might be journalistic speech that doesn't get used much outside of articles so I've been looking into varying my sources.

I don't bother much with books because at this point a lot of vocabulary from literature will be stuff I don't really need as much (and if I do, I figure it will pop up elsewhere). Though I'm reading a Tom Clancy-style spy thriller right now so there are some everyday expressions I've been looking up in my WordReference app and starring (it'd be nice to have a tool developed that can export my starred words).

You can always strike a deal with yourself to limit yourself to a set amount of pages/chapters a week to continue collecting but in a manageable way. I still think that actively learning vocabulary even at advanced stages is still beneficial but the rate of return on the time you spend will diminish.
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