I, too, use Anki almost exclusively for initial learning, rather than for review. I mainly learn frequency lists of individual words, plus some words from my own reading, which is supposed to be the way most likely to cause problems. There are ways around these problems.
Deinonysus wrote:Le Baron wrote:Deinonysus wrote:I personally use Anki almost exclusively for initial learning, not review for what I've already learned.
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For instance, I'm taking a Hebrew class and I'm in the process of putting about half the vocabulary in my textbook into an Anki deck, which I've been doing over the course of about a month. We use many of these words in class
Isn't that actually review rather than initial learning?
I generally put the vocabulary into Anki at least a few days before starting a chapter, so Anki is how I first learn the word and then class time is for putting known words into context.
This works really well and is a great place to start. It's
amazing how much easier a textbook chapter is when you already know all the words, and can concentrate on the grammar or whatever.
If you do learn with Anki, it's worth either doing it as Deinonysus has described above, when you are going to be using the words fairly soon, or taking some time to tweak your strategy and Anki settings.
One thing also worth saying is that Memrise has a far better algorithm for initial learning (initial multiple choice, more steps, testing you multiple directions, etc) and if you don't need the flexibility of Anki then it is probably superior for learning a simple list of words. You can 'create a course', keep it private, and use it for your own words.
But, if you like Anki and are using it for learning long lists of words, my current thinking is below. Most of it is designed to avoid getting into a position when Anki is agonisingly painful and time-consuming. It gets out of control quickly and then you hate it.
- Cherry-pick your words. I learned this from Smallwhite: some words you are ready to learn, some you aren't. Keeping a large (e.g. premade) deck of words by frequency is great, but if you suspend the whole deck and periodically go through it and unsuspend those that just look 'friendly', so that you learn those, you will learn much faster overall. Some look easy to learn, or you've come across them in the wild without realising, or whatever. As you get better at the language, you will find more words become 'friendly'. This makes learning far easier. Similarly words harvested from your own reading are often easier to learn.
- Consider more initial learning steps. It isn't enough to see a word twice in a day to learn it; consider initial closely-packed steps, e.g. 1m,1m,10m,3h (my current ones) as the extra initial steps add far less learning time than you'd think but cement the word well.
- Learn single words by preference. This is contentious, but certainly if you want to learn thousands of words just collecting that many sentences is hard; perhaps even more importantly, sentences take a lot more time and brain power to review, literally multiples, even when simple. They have their uses (see below); but if you try and learn thousands of words, then you are likely to run into a wall. Anki will consume your life and then you will hate it.
- Have many more relearning steps - if you forget a card, you will likely forget it lots. Hit this early by adding more relearning steps than you have learning steps. Forgetting it means you need more reinforcement - I use 1m 1m 10m 1h 5h 1d. I don't worry about the answer on the first day - just keep hitting easy - but if I still can't get it on the second day, I hit hard; that way you get reinforcement until you are ready.
- Keep your leech threshold low. Anki goes wrong when you have too many leeches, cards that you keep getting wrong. Keeping your leech threshold low (5 or less) will simply remove these cards from your life, so that you don't have to worry. It doesn't matter if you lose some words, as long as you are making enough forward progress overall to ease your use of real-world materials. Then you can come back to hard words later. Much better to drop even 10% of your words than to double your Anki time and quadruple your pain.
- Have strategies for words you fail. If you don't want too many words to end up as leeches, consider how you will reinforce words that you do fail. I flag words when I get them wrong; on the second occasion I reinforce them. Ways you can do this include 1)mnemonics (effective if you are any good at thinking them up); 2)pictures (overrated, I think) and 3)sentences. Personally add a second cloze sentence card for all the words I reinforce, and typically find that after I've checked a dictionary, found a sentence, and created a card I'm unlikely to forget the word again.
I realise that's a lot, but learning each of those lessons made a big difference to me. The other lesson I've learned the hard way is just how variable so many factors are. Whenever I switch languages, I need to change learning steps and relearning steps and so on... Some are just way easier than others. And then there are all the other factors - how much sleep you get, how much reading and listening you are doing, how good your memory is, and so on. A certain amount of adjustment on the fly is necessary. Or, of course, you could just forget about perfect optimisation and configurability and use Memrise.
Anki's not for everyone, but it still feels like a superpower to me...
p.s. if you are learning a language that supports text-to-speech, definitely use it! Sound adds a whole extra layer of quality.