My latest format of Anki cards

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sevitzky
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My latest format of Anki cards

Postby sevitzky » Thu Jan 14, 2016 8:39 pm

]I wanted to share my latest format of Anki card mining and study. A while ago I mentioned that I was adding audio to my Cloze cards, and then realized that I didn't really like the Cloze format: I moved to taking a chunk of text, and highlighting target vocab words, with English on the back, and also adding smaller bits of audio. This was great, I had a narrowed task: define one word, I had the context of the sentence, and I had the context of pronunciation. Still doing cloze, but less of them, since I feel it's a higher cognitive burden, and doesn't jive with circumlocution (why test yourself on a single word when there are many ways to say something?)

Anyway. My latest anki card format is thus:
3 Fields: Arabic Target, English Translation, and audio field.
+ Conditional fields for each content field, so I can control which direction we ask the questions.
Anki Card Add.JPG


The mining material is learner-accommodated texts with audio. Also there are authentic materials, but the stuff I have (from my terrible classes) is fine, native speakers, digestable.

For each sentence/clause/idea, I very carefully decide what words I want to have productive skills with, versus passive identification.

Then I build the cards, highlighting a target word in an arabic sentence. On the back side, I'll have the sentence in English, and the translated-target-word again highlighted. This lowers the cognitive burden to single words or phrases, but always puts them in peripheral context. I have found that I DO remember the peripheral contexts through repetitions. It's good, it works.

Then, each card has the audio for the whole sentence, to hear the word in context. If I'm feeling REALLY spiffy, or working with something VERY complicated, I'll chop every single word into an MP3, and dump all the files into Anki. This is really cool, because it will play back like an entire, naturally spoken sentence, BUT THEN YOU CAN GO BACK AND ISOLATE EACH WORD!

The other thing I do, is use audacity to make what I call "Audio drill" files, which chop up the target audio based on word boundaries, or slowed down, or I'll make a file with 5 repetitions of the target phrase/word/etc.
Audio Drill.JPG


The original lexical cluster is on the left, and as you can see, I have divided it into each word, spaced out. For difficult phrases, I do a lot more "scaffolding" in the audio editing to get me to shadow increasingly faster.

Later on, as the word becomes fully part of my lexicon, I can delete the drill, but keep the original sentence for later and later exposures via Anki's schemata.

A couple KEY TIPS for this process:
Always have cards that are set up for THREE fields:
Target Script
Target Audio
Your Native Language, containing Translations or Prompts
And make a CONDITIONAL field for each of the content fields above. I can't stress this. YOu might not need it, but they are a pain in the ass to add later. Put a "1" in each field, and tell Anki to "remember last input." You'll thank me later. This enables you to manage the passive and productive elements of your cards, and to control how you target the areas you want to improve in. And really you want it three ways: audio, script, and translation. (at least at a beginner level)

ALSO, for the format of the Anki cards I'm making now, you can simply check "remember last input" for EVERY single field. this way, I add the Audio, the Arabic, and the English. And I can quickly make cards which ask me to identify or produce different words. Sort of mimicking the functionality of the Cloze template to produce a lot of cards from one single text. Don't know why I didn't think of this earlier.

Ok dudes. God bless y'all and I hope this help someone.
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