changed:a 2 week long anki experiment

[MorkTheFiddle]

Good luck!

[Flickserve]

Naaaah, you can do this. You're absolutely right that those comments and attitudes are not needed.

I assume you are learning to pass a test. So the memorising isn't really language learning but massive fact acquisition for re-dumping it out during an exam. Anki can certainly help but also don't forget to use mnemonics and other memory tools. I memorised medical lists of terms by creating mnemonics or using a lot of those already in existence (ex: WANT My Hot Dog - substances that cross the placenta ...) and learning with those, using colors, images, emotional clues, rude key words, and memory palaces.

Good luck!

This is what I was wondering about. Is an anki card with cloze the panacea? I would be the one of the first to admit everyone studies slightly differently so maybe mainly mass card creation in anki can have a large effect. I have worked with quite a few people studying for postgraduate exams and observed varying methodologies. I haven’t seen people use anki much for medical revision and that’s why I am following with interest. The reason why I haven’t seen anki used much is that I where I am, it’s not caught on. I only first heard about anki from language learning and I found it a bugger to initially setup even when reading the instructions.

@Cavesa

You yourself describe it as an experiment and have also described the volume yourself. I am unclear why my comment can’t be considered as in admiration.

As for reasons,

4. It’s not inconceivable that another person in that purported top 1% is also on this forum. And would find learning medical terminology in L2 pretty useful.

[Cavesa]

Yesterday, I added 56 cards on just a small amount of material. Why so few? I had originally created more. Then a bug happened and didn't save a part of the cards and forced me to restart my computer and finish the day disappointed. I solved the problems with my computer's memory (had to sacrifice WoW for now) and am synchronising everything much more often from today on.

Today is not yet finished, I'll write the numbers later.
...........

This is what I was wondering about. Is an anki card with cloze the panacea? I would be the one of the first to admit everyone studies slightly differently so maybe mainly mass card creation in anki can have a large effect. I have worked with quite a few people studying for postgraduate exams and observed varying methodologies. I haven’t seen people use anki much for medical revision and that’s why I am following with interest. The reason why I haven’t seen anki used much is that I where I am, it’s not caught on. I only first heard about anki from language learning and I found it a bugger to initially setup even when reading the instructions.

In my country, people don't use Anki. People seem to mostly reread and reread.
In the US and other anglophone countries, people have awesome well reputed anki decks and all they have to do is to use them. It is such a luxury!
In France (the country I am focused on right now), people are making their cards or use premade but not universally spread decks by others. And all the decks I found consisted mostly of very long cards I found impossible to memorise. People I've seen making anki cards were making just as long cards themselves.

Till this day, I have no clue how to memorise an anki card with an A5 equivalent of text!

I had partial success with cloze deletion typing cards on a platform called Memcode, but it is simply not built for huuuge decks of cards. That's why I have faith in these cloze deletion cards.

You yourself describe it as an experiment and have also described the volume yourself. I am unclear why my comment can’t be considered as in admiration.

Because most people saying stuff like this are not saying it in admiration, but as criticism. And I am getting too used to that, so sorry if I misunderstood your comment and accidentally put it on the same pile. The normal way people say this is "you should have started years ago and now you are a loser and should just accept your fate and become a generalist in the middle of nowhere and be grateful for that".

As for reasons,

4. It’s not inconceivable that another person in that purported top 1% is also on this forum. And would find learning medical terminology in L2 pretty useful.

It is definitely possible people from that 1% are here, that's not what I meant. I just hope that not everyone from my competitors is in that group and that it might give me at least a small advantage in trying to catch up with a part of them.

For learning just the terminology, there is a faster way that copying basically a review coursebook into anki with cloze deletions. Normal translation cards (one word -one card) worked just fine for me. For our Medical English exam, it was like 2000-2500 words, nothing too bad, doable in a weekend (not a pleasant weekend, but better than two semesters of boredom). The number won't be too different in other languages. In the european ones, the shared Latin base is a huge advantage. Then, I just recommend watching House MD or something similar, and normally using the words in context, for example by reading a textbook in that language. Works just fine.

[zenmonkey]

Naaaah, you can do this. You're absolutely right that those comments and attitudes are not needed.

I assume you are learning to pass a test. So the memorising isn't really language learning but massive fact acquisition for re-dumping it out during an exam. Anki can certainly help but also don't forget to use mnemonics and other memory tools. I memorised medical lists of terms by creating mnemonics or using a lot of those already in existence (ex: WANT My Hot Dog - substances that cross the placenta ...) and learning with those, using colors, images, emotional clues, rude key words, and memory palaces.

Good luck!

This is what I was wondering about. Is an anki card with cloze the panacea? I would be the one of the first to admit everyone studies slightly differently so maybe mainly mass card creation in anki can have a large effect. I have worked with quite a few people studying for postgraduate exams and observed varying methodologies. I haven’t seen people use Anki much for medical revision and that’s why I am following with interest. The reason why I haven’t seen anki used much is that I where I am, it’s not caught on. I only first heard about anki from language learning and I found it a bugger to initially setup even when reading the instructions.

I don't know that it is a panacea but when I was a undergrad/grad student (before the Internet) in the medical/healthcare field we used paper cards and certainly some of my cards were cloze cards. Now there are guides, videos and even website focuses solely on using Anki for Medical studies. There is even a reddit for it. Cavesa's particular challenge is that she's also doing this in a foreign language. :thumbs_up:

There are almost 1M Google results for "Anki" "Medical" so someone is using it....

[Cavesa]

A part of my particular challenge is not only the language. It is learning two different curricula. One to crawl through my exams here and get that piece of paper I've sacrificed so much for. The other, to get a chance to actually give that paper a meaning.

Yes, there are tons of sites about anki for the american medschool students, or similar. They are not too useful to me. The people there build on a completely different base. They have awesome widely shared perfect decks and "just" need to learn those, or they debate which one is better. I cannot use those, that would be a third curriculum at once. They also know about anki since their first year, their strategies have been adapted to their schools, their exams, their USMLE. All that is of very limited value to me.

The French have some resources, but significantly fewer and less complex. Also, they are not in my situation, of knowing a part of the stuff, knowing some things differently, and also having to pass completely different exams.

[Flickserve]

Thanks for the rundown on Anki. Someone here has missed out on a lot of anki but still got through. I am from the paper card era and liked using different colours and diagrams on my cards to provide an ‘image’ snapshot. I found that helped my recall immensely. Never really used the cloze technique though. It is conceivable that the American style fits making Anki cards better than other countries style of learning.

[Cavesa]

Thanks for the rundown on Anki. Someone here has missed out on a lot of anki but still got through. I am from the paper card era and liked using different colours and diagrams on my cards to provide an ‘image’ snapshot. I found that helped my recall immensely. Never really used the cloze technique though. It is conceivable that the American style fits making Anki cards better than other countries style of learning.

Paper cards work, I had them for some subjects years ago (I made them myself for biochemistry, had bought other ones for anatomy). But from a certain number of cards on, they are not only likely to cost a hand, but also extremely hard to keep organised.

No, it is not about the american style of medschool or learning fitting the anki cards better, that is pure nonsense. It is about the americans having more collective experience with anki, having the numbers for developping the decks, good textbooks to base the cards on, a unified usmle curriculum, and so on. They've got much better opportunities to profit from the tool, and they've been using them to the fullest. Anki would be actually great for any medical student anywhere on the planet, no matter their exact curriculum or their native language or exam style. But making the cards for the whole degree alone (and especially based on really bad resources), that would be a nightmare.

[Cavesa]

I messed up. So far (due to holiday and my burn out), I've made only 373 cards, for 2 topics.
A strategic mistake had been to start with a hyperlong pdf, that spread over 280 cards and was very discouraging.

So, let's see whether I can still do this. New two weeks start today.

I am burnt out, but this is my only chance to become a full value person with a bright future abroad. Anki and convincing my stupid brain this is a sort of a game is probably the only option. So far, it hasn't been going well.

But let's see whether I can get through at least a part of this.

At the very least, I think this experiment has given me a very good idea on how to learn German much faster. I'll need it, when I'll have failed my entrance exams for France.

Let's see, whether I can get to an average of more than 200 cards a day.

[rdearman]

Perhaps I'm confused (wouldn't be the first time) but you just want to create a crap load of cards from PDF's or you want to read the PDF's and selectively pull information from the cards? If it is the first then I recommend you:

• simply down load Calibre, or use an online tool to convert the PDF to text,
• then the free LibreOffice word processor break it into sentences (as described here: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... ce#p135141)
• Put all the sentences in a spread sheet and break up the sentence into three columns A (leading part of sentence), B (the Cloze part), C (the remainder of sentence).
• Put this forumula in column D1 and Drag down. It will generate a column of Cloze deletion.
  

  Code: Select all

  =A1 & " {{c1::" & B1 & "}} " & C1
• Copy the column D and paste the values into a new spreadsheet.
• Save as a tab-separated file
• Import into Anki

A couple thousand sentences shouldn't take more than a 30 minutes or an hour. I'm a little grey on what you're trying to achieve here.

[badger]

At the very least, I think this experiment has given me a very good idea on how to learn German much faster. I won't need it though, because I'm going to pass my entrance exams for France.

fixed that for you.

good luck, I hope your anki experiment works out for you.