How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

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emk
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Using Anki differently

Postby emk » Wed Apr 17, 2024 3:49 pm

I'm using Anki in a non-standard manner. Traditionally, the goal of a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is to memorize a fixed set of facts. Some of these facts will be easier to memorize, so you can increase the intervals between reviews very rapidly. Other facts will be harder to memorize, so you'll want to increase the intervals between reviews very slowly. And you'll fail some of the harder cards, at which point you'll need to start over with short review intervals.

Here's a description of the underlying theory, courtesy of a user of the new Anki FSRS algorithm:

ClarityInMadness wrote:Level 1: Baby Version

FSRS uses a model of memory called DSR - Difficulty, Stability and Probability of Recall, or Retention, or Retrievability if you are Piotr Wozniak, although in his terminology "recall" and "retrievability" are different things...look, trying to come up with a good naming convention can be hard.

R is the probability that a user will recall a particular card on a particular day, given that card's repetition history. It depends on how many days have passed since the last review and on S. What's important is that every "honest" spaced repetition algorithm must be able to predict R, one way or another (even if it doesn't use memory stability). Otherwise it cannot possibly determine which intervals are optimal.

S is memory stability, it is defined as the amount of time, in days, during which R decreases from 100% to 90%. Higher is better. For example, S=365 means that an entire year will pass before the probability of recalling a particular card will drop to 90%. Estimating S is the hardest part, this is what FSRS is all about.

D is difficulty. Unlike the other two variables, difficulty has no precise definition and is calculated using a bunch of heuristics that are not based on a good understanding of human memory. Difficulty is just stuff that goes down if you press "Easy", and goes up if you press "Hard" or "Again".

This model was originally proposed by Piotr Wozniak, the creator of SuperMemo, and a few years ago u/LMSherlock
published a paper where he used this model.

FSRS is a fancy new scheduler in Anki which tries to schedule your cards so that you achieve a particular, desired failure rate—10%, in the above example. This goal here, I believe, is to learn a fixed set of facts in the minimum possible amount of time. And I think this goal makes sense for things like conjugation tables, or for medical students learning the names of the cranial nerves.

But there's a hidden underlying assumption here, and it's a doozy: All facts are equally important to learn right now. Or even worse, this approach assumes that the hardest-to-learn facts are worth a much larger portion of your effort, when compared to facts that you can learn with a modest effort.

And in many cases, I think this is actually a significant mistake. At any given point in the learning process, some things are worth the effort to learn, and some things are better postponed until later. In emergency medicine, there's an idea called "triage". After a major disaster, you often have limited resources, and you want to save as many people as possible. So patients are sorted into four groups:

  • Green tag / Minor: These patients are medically stable and usually walking under their own power. No treatment.
  • Yellow tag / Delayed: These patients need help, but they can wait an hour or two.
  • Red tag / Immediate: These patients need help immediately.
  • Black tag / No Further Treatment: These patients are not breathing, even after an attempt to clear their airway. Or they're breathing, and perhaps you could theoretically save them if you had a skilled trauma surgey team and an operating theater. But you don't have either.
The key idea here is that you focus your medical resources on the red and yellow cases. The green cases should be fine with no particular attention. And the black-tagged cases are either dead, or they could only be saved only by letting multiple red-cases die. In short, you focus your effort where it's necessary, and where you can save the greatest number of people.

The key takeaway: Anki defaults, and particularly FSRS, are optimized for when you don't plan to triage cards.

There are several techniques you can use to tirage cards:

  1. Grade cards gently, and add hints to make the next review easier.
  2. Aggressively suspend any card that feels frustrating.
  3. Set a low "leech threshhold" and configure Anki to suspend leech cards. These are the cards you fail repeatedly.
  4. Use Hard instead of Again. This is a super-common workaround. It also completely breaks FSRS scheduling, because FSRS is going to optimize until it gets a 10% failure rate.
As a rule of thumb, less than 20% of your cards cause more than 80% of your Anki misery and suffering. The default Anki answer to these cards is that after you've reset them 8 times, you should add a tag so you can search for them. The FSRS answer is to keep adjusting your review intervals until you're failing a certain percentage of cards.

But why not just... let those cards go? There are plenty of other things you could be learning right now. So let's do card triage. Yes, this is a bit of grim metaphor.

  • Green: You either know this already, or you will learn it easily enough by osmosis. No need to make a card. If you do make a card, you can just hit the Easy button a few times and you won't see it for years.
  • Yellow tag / Red tag: This material is difficult enough that you probably won't pick it quickly by osomosis (or at higher levels, it's rare enough that you won't see it often). But if you invest a modest amount of effort, Anki will help you learn it.
  • Black tag: You cannot reasonably learn this card right now with the resources you have, not without sacrificing many yellow- or red-tagged cards.
Krashen had his own version of this, which he explained as "When enough comprehensible input is provided, i+1 is present." In other words, some stuff is easy. And some stuff just isn't worth the effort. But some stuff you can pick up reading or watching. And Anki can be used as an amplifier for that process, allowing you to efficiently repeat and review stuff that would otherwise be slightly out of reach, what we could call "i+2" or "i+3" input. But the "i+5" input, so to speak, should normally just be skipped.

So this is what I mean when I keep saying "I treat Anki as an amplifier, not as a list of specific facts to learn." The idea of culling difficult cards—or just passing them along despite technically "failing" them—is a key part of the process.

And as an extra bonus, cutting the difficult and miserable cards can make Anki surprisingly fun. Most of the awfulness of Anki is caused by cards that shouldn't be there in the first place.

(None of this necessarily applies to things like "the conjugation table of ser." It's perfectly reasonable to decide to just learn the entire table, including the hard bits.)

And a video. After all that, let's do a video! This is the song I'm learning now. As my kids would say, "it's a bop."



Notice the lyric at 0:15: Ya no me busques, aquí estoy "Don't search for me, I'm here." If anyone ever told you Spanish was a strictly phonetic language, they're exaggerating. As far as I can tell, that's actually being pronounced Ya no me busquəs‿aqu'estoy or "sac'estoy". As a student of French, I am thoroughly used to this sort of thing. And since I occasionally use chuis for je suis, I have forfeited all right to complain. Not that I'll that stop me. :lol:
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby tastyonions » Wed Apr 17, 2024 4:42 pm

Reducing unstressed syllables ending in S is pretty common in casually spoken Mexican Spanish:
En el español mexicano (Centro, Costa Atlántica y Costa de Oaxaca principalmente) existe reducción de las vocales átonas por ensordecimiento, como en trastes ['tɾ̥astəs]. Este proceso es más frecuente cuando una vocal está en contacto con el sonido [s], siendo la construcción [səs] el caso más frecuente de reducción. Después le siguen, en orden descendente, las construcciones [təs], [pəs], [kəs], [dəs], [məs] y [nəs]

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espa%C3%B1ol_mexicano
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby emk » Thu Apr 18, 2024 12:03 am

tastyonions wrote:Reducing unstressed syllables ending in S is pretty common in casually spoken Mexican Spanish:

Yup. Thank you for the nice explanation in Spanish, too!

There's another example here around 1:51, where I can hear de hacernos los tont(o)s "to make fools of ourselves". Somehow, "tonts" sounds much cuter than "tontos" in this case, and I will stand by this opinion! :lol:

The one that's really bugging me, though, appears at 0:30 in Causa y efecto:



Mientes y te crees tan especial "You lie and you believe you're so special". But crees tan sounds like "cas tan" here, and I'm not sure what's actually going on. Music can obviously be tricky this way. But it doesn't seem to be some general feature of her accent, it's not a simple liaison or an omission.

I notice this stuff when trying to do a big pike of Anki reviews. :? Sometimes I'll eventually hear the heavily reduced sounds after enough listens. But sometimes it remains a mystery.
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Radio Ambulante

Postby emk » Fri Apr 19, 2024 1:41 am

Oooh, Radio Ambulante! This is an interesting test of where I am.

Here's an example show: Un millón de monedas:

Radio Ambulante wrote:Un millón de monedas
¿Cuántos dragones verdes tenemos que matar hoy?

Para millones de venezolanos, la solución para sobrellevar una crisis económica demasiado real estaba en un mundo de fantasía. Lo que no sabían era que eso los llevaría a una guerra mundial.

ChatGPT 4 wrote:A Million Coins
How many green dragons do we have to kill today?

For millions of Venezuelans, the solution to coping with an all-too-real economic crisis was in a fantasy world. What they didn’t know was that this would lead them into a world war.

They have English and Spanish transcripts! This is outside of my very narrow vocabulary niche, and it relies on a writing-like register that I can only decipher slowly at the best of times. But it looks like a great resource.

But the fun question is, what happens if I listen to it? Well, I can pick out a few sentences here and there. I just don't have the vocab, and even when I do, it's not sufficiently automatic at all for this kind of stuff. But the neat part is that the audio sounds really clear.

Iversen has written a lot about "listening like a bloodhound". I understand this (perhaps incorrectly) to mean "listening with a strong focus on hearing the actual sounds quickly at full speed, without worrying too much about capturing the meaning." And I tried this for years in French, and I had no idea what it was supposed to accomplish. Spoken French's dropped sounds, extensive liaison and complex vowels meant that my only really hope of understanding the sounds was to reach a point where I understood the meaning, and could work backward from that. But I feel like if I just listened really closely to the sounds of the professional announcer voices on Radio Ambulante, that would be useful in a way it wasn't necessarily in French.

I don't think this is a tremendously good use of my time yet—TV series like Avatar offer a lot bigger boost to listening comprehension. And reading fantasy novels should build my vocabulary rapidly enough. But I take away two positive things:

  1. I've made a lot of progress on the raw mechanics underlying listening. And I'm much better prepared for listening than I was at this point in French.
  2. If I just read enough to get my reading speed up—so you know, a couple of thousand pages—I may get faster transfer to listening than I did in French.
Oh, and I signed up for a half Super Challenge! I currently plan to begin with ~700 pages from a single fantasy series.
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby tastyonions » Fri Apr 19, 2024 1:57 am

Fair warning, while most of the narration in Radio Ambulante is pretty clear and standard Spanish, a decent number of the interviews and audio excerpts are not. ;-)
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A revised text card format

Postby emk » Sat Apr 20, 2024 7:59 pm

tastyonions wrote:Fair warning, while most of the narration in Radio Ambulante is pretty clear and standard Spanish, a decent number of the interviews and audio excerpts are not. ;-)

That's the nice thing about learning my second foreign language. :) I've run into that particular problem before, with RFI and Les années lumière, and I have perhaps grown less worried about only hearing half the interview. It fixes itself in time.

A revised text card format. Earlier, I mentioned that pulling sentence cards from my fiction reading was producing a lot of painful cards. There just wasn't enough context to reconstruct what was going on the first time they came up, not at my very low level. So after way too much scripting (and prompt tweaking), I have upgraded these cards considerably.

I have a script which parses "My Clippings.txt" from the Kindle, and outputs them as a simple text file containing the highlighted text:

Code: Select all

Necesito respuestas y las necesito [[para ayer]].
--
Tienes que darme las respuestas que necesito y quiero que me las des ya.
--
[[Por otro lado]], no es que fuera [[lo que se dice]] el preferido del Consejo Blanco.
--

Then I read through this file, adding the [[ ]] characters to anything that I'm curious about. Then I feed it all into a second script, which puts the highlight back in context and asks GPT-3.5-Turbo to explain the highlighted bits:

Image

When reviewing these cards, I grade gently:

  1. I am in no way responsible for the grey text! That's just there so I can figure out what's going on.
  2. In fact, I'm really only responsible for the boldfaced text.
  3. ...and even then, it's OK if I mostly know what it means in context. More precise definitions will be derived from reading.
  4. But if I want to read more of the card, that's OK, too!
This format is much nicer, and I can reactivate these cards whenever I run out of things in one of my other sub-decks.

A lot of this basic idea was stolen from Khatzumoto back in the day. He had the idea of cards with tons of text, but only a small bit that you actually had to get right. And of course modern automation ensures these cards are cheap. Easy come, easy go!

Progress report on "Active Avatar" cards. Remember these?

Image Image

After a week, this format still feels easy, pleasant and highly effective. In case of ambiguity, I add tons of hints to the front side. I only create these once the "passive wave" listening cards have all thoroughly matured and turned into earworms. And I manually choose which cards to make active, maybe 10–20% of the total. But this is turning into a nice little "active wave."

Other progress. Moving right along nicely.

  1. Anki reviews: Fighting to keep these under 30 minutes/day. This seems to limit me to 15 new cards/day. I keep burning through my subdecks and needing to add cards.
  2. Music cards. This is basically an industrial production pipeline at this point. I'm learning a song every 5–6 days, and once they mature, I can understand them if I pay some attention. Mostly this is a good source of vocabulary and regional accents, but I love having a playlist I can try to sing along with.
  3. Verb conjugation cards: I like this deck. Getting the verbs in context with tense hints makes them feel like popcorn. I have reached the subjunctive past of ser.
  4. Bilingual novel: 41% 152 monolingual-equivalent pages! In three weeks! I've gone from needing the bilingual text for basically everything, to often only needing to glance at a couple of words per sentence. And it's mostly taking me 30 minutes a day. I am going to hit takeoff velocity for the Super Challenge!
I'm pretty happy with how things are going, overall. For a language that I put less than 100 hours into 5–7 years ago (a big chunk of which was extensive watching), and that I resurrected just over a month ago, I'm basically ready to roll right into a half Super Challenge with real books. The key things I did were: (1) start listening very early with Subs2SRS, (2) focus hard on extremely "narrow" listening and reading to punch far above my weight class, and (3) shamelessly abuse technology to boost my memory, create those earworms, and generally streamline everything. If nothing else, this has convinced me that there are some fantastic ideas out these to create next-generation courses.

I'm going to be busy with other stuff this coming week, so I'll pause this log for a bit. But I'll still be working on Spanish!
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Apr 20, 2024 8:35 pm

emk wrote:
I notice this stuff when trying to do a big pike of Anki reviews. :? Sometimes I'll eventually hear the heavily reduced sounds after enough listens. But sometimes it remains a mystery.

Once while listening to a radio script in German and reading along at the same time, I came across one word that appeared in the written script but that my ear could not hear. I wondered if indeed the word was really spoken, but after several listens I finally could hear the word. I'm sure there is a scientific explanation, but it was a mystery.
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Apr 20, 2024 9:43 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Once while listening to a radio script in German and reading along at the same time, I came across one word that appeared in the written script but that my ear could not hear. I wondered if indeed the word was really spoken, but after several listens I finally could hear the word. I'm sure there is a scientific explanation, but it was a mystery.


I think it's a combination of a lot of listening (dodging bullets) and ”knowing what to expect” (thanks to the script). I have experience of both from ... 40 years of music.
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Apr 20, 2024 9:59 pm

Once I found myself successfully learning a difficult guitar passage while watching a rerun of Gunsmoke! Maybe that might work listening to a target language: doing something else as a distractor?
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Re: How not to learn Spanish: Building too much stuff, not studying enough

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Apr 21, 2024 5:45 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Once I found myself successfully learning a difficult guitar passage while watching a rerun of Gunsmoke! Maybe that might work listening to a target language: doing something else as a distractor?


Whatever works! Sometimes it helps to focus on the task at hand. Sometimes it ”helps” doing something else. While I have spent many hours woodshedding, I've also spent many hours just playing for fun while watching TV. Both activities are good.

(What was the guitar passage?)
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