Freedom!

[tarvos]

Clearly none of you have watched enough Squid Game (and don't look at me, I haven't watched it either).

[Iversen]

The advantage of wordlists: I have NO wordlists nor any repetitions waiting for me. I have been busy with photos and music since I came home from a trip to Germany Wednesday, so no new wordlists. And repetition rounds should be done within a few days max after the wordlist was made, else you can simply drop them. And I don't have to take orders from a computer program (nor watch squid game).

[PeterMollenburg]

The advantage of wordlists: I have NO wordlists nor any repetitions waiting for me. I have been busy with photos and music since I came home from a trip to Germany Wednesday, so no new wordlists. And repetition rounds should be done within a few days max after the wordlist was made, else you can simply drop them. And I don't have to take orders from a computer program (nor watch squid game).

And I tend to go for language learning mags with their pre-made wordlists. Much faster than creating SRS decks, and obviously the wordlists are next to the articles containing the words and some attractive photos. I have the lists and I have context... and the articles are graded as per CEFR... beats the hell out of SRS, and I repeat as I see fit. Each to their own I guess, but for me, for now at least, this works nicely.

[mokibao]

I think my one life skill advantage is that I am not a perfectionist. Seeing 213 overdue cards doesn't bother me one bit. I can happily flip back to doing anki daily, or just ignore it for months at a time. I did Clozemaster for one year solid because I was determined to do one year of it. I don't think I have logged in again since.

In a rather odd and counter-intuitive way, reading your post has made me think I should fire up the old Anki and start drilling the crap out of some Korean for the next 6 months.

Same lol. I remember reading that the default intervals are way too short anyway.

[IronMike]

So if I've never done Anki...

[Dragon27]

So if I've never done Anki...

You can't truly feel your freedom until you have lost and regained it.

John Kramer from Saw had a kind of a similar philosophy on appreciating your life that he applied to his victims.

[IronMike]

So if I've never done Anki...

You can't truly feel your freedom until you have lost and regained it.

hahahaha! Basic training. Survival school. Officer training school. Yep. I know the feeling.

[garyb]

I have a Greek Anki deck that I've not touched for at least three years but have kept, I suppose because of sunken cost fallacy and because I do intend to pick the language up again at some point in the next decade or so. It shows as 200 reviews due, but that's just because I have a daily limit set, and I don't even want to know what the real number is I imagine that just deleting it would bring me at least a small sense of inner peace.

[RyanSmallwood]

Just to offer a different opinion, I've grown to really love Anki over the years, although I certainly went through phases of using it, hating it, deleting it for long periods. Eventually though I realized that my progress was better when I did use it and I figured out how to keep up with it in my routine without going insane. A key thing is to keep the review intervals low, there's always the temptation to do more, but usually when you start up a new Anki deck is when you have time and motivation to study, so keep in mind your future self will have to do more reviews, and may have less time and motivation, so don't let your present self's enthusiasm give too much work to your future self. Basically the interval should be an amount that if you have to miss a day the idea of doing double the next day shouldn't feel dreadful (and if you're schedule is really unstable, maybe even less). I've found even a 5-15 minute Anki routine can yield big results, when you have more time you can scale it up a bit, just scale it slowly, and don't be afraid to drop your intervals if you sense its becoming less of a fun activity. Typically

I have 3 tiers of study activities I separate things into, Anki which is however much deliberate study I think I can do on my least motivated days, then optional deliberate study activities for days when I have the time energy to do more but don't want to overload my Anki deck, and then more relaxing/extensive activities for when I run out of more deliberate study motivation.

I'd also say another key thing for me is that decks need to have easy sentences with audio of the sentences, anything less (vocab with example sentences not graded for instance, or only vocab audio is totally useless, if you wouldn't use a coursebook like that, then don't use an Anki deck like that). I think the only exception I've seen to this is people who tie vocab cards into their media consumption, so basically they just want a reminder of vocab they noticed already, and don't have time to find/cut audio. Although now there are more and more add-ons that can simplify making better cards. So unless you can find good pre-made decks or have a workflow that makes generating your own cards relatively painless there's not much point.

I think the best way to think of anki as just a scheduler for content you want to remember, that lets you present it in any format you want. The only thing anki is not good for is grammar explanations and continuing narratives like dialogs/stories/books that you get from more extensive materials, but pretty much any content that's just unconnected examples sentences, will be much easier to go through with Anki. Going through a coursebook normally I find I can pick up a lot of stuff normally, but then I don't always remember when to review or know what I need to review, sometimes an old lesson will have a few things that didn't stick but the rest is way too easy and I get bored. With Anki its very easy to focus in on those small gaps that don't stick and all the really easy stuff flies off into longer review intervals. So whenever I have less exciting "deliberate study" activities like coursebooks, if I can get them as an Anki deck, it means I don't have to think about when to review, I can break it down into smaller more manageable chunks, and I can review the material more efficiently and not re-do whole lessons all the time for just a few small things. Even something like Assimil, where its better to go through the book "normally" first, if you can find the course available as an Anki deck split up by sentences, will make it easier to review and absorb everything if you do the two together.

Just overall I've found that formatting can make a huge difference, and the ability of Anki to customize what you see on the front/back helps a lot, and unlike most language apps, you're not locked into the developer's design which is usually terribly inefficient. You can format things however you want to best develop the skills you want to focus on. Also short term repetition can be extremely helpful for remembering things, and using Anki just draw more attention to that. By repeating content and using Anki I've realized how easily stuff can slip in and out of short term memory endlessly, and so just having a program that lets you review at different intervals I've found is the simplest way to get certain things locked down without wasting too much time.

I'm overall not a person who likes really rigid drilling and deliberate study. But Anki makes the process a lot more controllable and less painful, and since having a sturdy foundation makes it easier to get into the fun stuff, its nice to keep a small Anki routine going in the long term to build that foundation efficiently in small manageable pockets of time.

[bolaobo]

Just to offer a different opinion, I've grown to really love Anki over the years, although I certainly went through phases of using it, hating it, deleting it for long periods. Eventually though I realized that my progress was better when I did use it and I figured out how to keep up with it in my routine without going insane. A key thing is to keep the review intervals low, there's always the temptation to do more, but usually when you start up a new Anki deck is when you have time and motivation to study, so keep in mind your future self will have to do more reviews, and may have less time and motivation, so don't let your present self's enthusiasm give too much work to your future self. Basically the interval should be an amount that if you have to miss a day the idea of doing double the next day shouldn't feel dreadful (and if you're schedule is really unstable, maybe even less). I've found even a 5-15 minute Anki routine can yield big results, when you have more time you can scale it up a bit, just scale it slowly, and don't be afraid to drop your intervals if you sense its becoming less of a fun activity. Typically

I have 3 tiers of study activities I separate things into, Anki which is however much deliberate study I think I can do on my least motivated days, then optional deliberate study activities for days when I have the time energy to do more but don't want to overload my Anki deck, and then more relaxing/extensive activities for when I run out of more deliberate study motivation.

I'd also say another key thing for me is that decks need to have easy sentences with audio of the sentences, anything less (vocab with example sentences not graded for instance, or only vocab audio is totally useless, if you wouldn't use a coursebook like that, then don't use an Anki deck like that). I think the only exception I've seen to this is people who tie vocab cards into their media consumption, so basically they just want a reminder of vocab they noticed already, and don't have time to find/cut audio. Although now there are more and more add-ons that can simplify making better cards. So unless you can find good pre-made decks or have a workflow that makes generating your own cards relatively painless there's not much point.

I think the best way to think of anki as just a scheduler for content you want to remember, that lets you present it in any format you want. The only thing anki is not good for is grammar explanations and continuing narratives like dialogs/stories/books that you get from more extensive materials, but pretty much any content that's just unconnected examples sentences, will be much easier to go through with Anki. Going through a coursebook normally I find I can pick up a lot of stuff normally, but then I don't always remember when to review or know what I need to review, sometimes an old lesson will have a few things that didn't stick but the rest is way too easy and I get bored. With Anki its very easy to focus in on those small gaps that don't stick and all the really easy stuff flies off into longer review intervals. So whenever I have less exciting "deliberate study" activities like coursebooks, if I can get them as an Anki deck, it means I don't have to think about when to review, I can break it down into smaller more manageable chunks, and I can review the material more efficiently and not re-do whole lessons all the time for just a few small things. Even something like Assimil, where its better to go through the book "normally" first, if you can find the course available as an Anki deck split up by sentences, will make it easier to review and absorb everything if you do the two together.

Just overall I've found that formatting can make a huge difference, and the ability of Anki to customize what you see on the front/back helps a lot, and unlike most language apps, you're not locked into the developer's design which is usually terribly inefficient. You can format things however you want to best develop the skills you want to focus on. Also short term repetition can be extremely helpful for remembering things, and using Anki just draw more attention to that. By repeating content and using Anki I've realized how easily stuff can slip in and out of short term memory endlessly, and so just having a program that lets you review at different intervals I've found is the simplest way to get certain things locked down without wasting too much time.

I'm overall not a person who likes really rigid drilling and deliberate study. But Anki makes the process a lot more controllable and less painful, and since having a sturdy foundation makes it easier to get into the fun stuff, its nice to keep a small Anki routine going in the long term to build that foundation efficiently in small manageable pockets of time.

Eloquently put. I agree entirely. Anki isn't always fun, but I haven't found a better way to put things into my short-term and long-term memory. It's especially helpful for languages like Chinese and Japanese with thousands of hard-to-memorize characters and in the case of Japanese, many different readings. I don't know how I would have memorized 5000 characters without SRS. Rote memorization and writing the characters hundreds of times is even less fun.

I use Anki combined with Assimil to get a very good base in a language, and put sentences I encounter in the wild into it to ensure I don't forget it 5 minutes later.

But as you said, it's really easy to go overboard and swamp yourself with reviews, but it's a marathon, not a sprint, and this problem resolves itself in the long run as reviews gradually go down. You just might have to take a break from new cards to let reviews decrease.

Anki just ensures I'm getting enough review which you have to do regardless. If the card is easy, I hit "Easy" and I rarely see the card after a few times. If the card is difficult to remember, Anki will eventually get me to remember it (but it might take a few tries!). Anki helps me manage my various languages and ensure I'm getting enough exposure daily.

In my experience, the most effective Anki cards are sentence cards you mined yourself, from either a textbook or immersion. The sentence shouldn't be too long, too hard, or have too many new vocab words. Ideally it will only have one new piece of information. Audio is also essential. Some cards will end up becoming leeches and that's fine; Anki will automatically suspend those cards and you should leave them that way.