anki and initial learning

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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby rdearman » Thu Jan 26, 2023 10:25 am

miket12 wrote:I want to use anki to help learn vocabulary and I was wondering about how to best use anki. Looking on the web I often see advice like "the purpose of these flashcards is to test what you already learned. NOT to test what you haven’t learned — which many people do." This makes sense to me, but seems a bit at odds with how anki seems to work. Or more probably I'm missing something here.

So I'm wondering what people are doing to initially learn the words. My scenario is this: I have a new chapter in my textbook, lets say, that lists the new vocabulary words. I don't know them yet, so I enter them into anki. Should I then start anki and keep seeing (and failing) them once per minute until I can remember them for at least a minute? Then go on to the 10 minute mode? It seems like I can be remembering a word for a minute but not 10 and end up spending a lot of time for it to become due again in that first learning session.

The advice to know it before putting it into SRS is mainly advice for medical (and other) students who need to understand the principles before memorisation. For example you need to know the WHY behind the Pythagorean theorem and not just remember the formula without knowing how to apply it.

Since you wrote this post then I will assume you know the principles behind words and how they are applied, so I think you can safely ignore that. Does it matter if the first encounter with a word is in anki and in a book second? It is still the first time you see the word. So I say go ahead and load up an anki deck. You're going to need all those words eventually so just get on with it.

The advice I want to give you and I believe is the most important.

Don't put words into anki! Put sentences!!

Single words are difficult to remember and hard to associate with context. Put a sentence containing the word. The additional benefit from this is you also learn all the words around the word. More bang for your buck.

Just my opinion, your mileage may vary.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby jackb » Thu Jan 26, 2023 2:17 pm

Just start using it any way that make sense to you. It's more important to start and continue learning than anything else. Once you have some experience (2-3 chapters worth), you'll have some preferences and you can start to implement them. It's easy to go down the rabbit hole of 'perfect' Anki use and spend more time configuring it than learning the language.

I think the 20 rules of formulating knowledge is the origin of the 'flashcards aren't place to learn new info'. For those that don't want to click the very interesting link:

2. Learn before you memorize
Before you proceed with memorizing individual facts and rules, you need to build an overall picture of the learned knowledge. Only when individual pieces fit to build a single coherent structure will you be able to dramatically reduce the learning time. This is closely related to the problem of comprehension mentioned in Rule 1: Do not learn if you do not understand. A single separated piece of your big picture is like a single German word in the textbook of history.

Do not start from memorizing loosely related facts! First read a chapter in your book that puts them together (e.g. the principles of the internal combustion engine). Only then proceed with learning using individual questions and answers (e.g. What moves the pistons in the internal combustion engine?), etc.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby leosmith » Thu Jan 26, 2023 2:25 pm

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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby smallwhite » Thu Jan 26, 2023 8:01 pm

miket12 wrote:So I'm wondering what people are doing to initially learn the words.

Quizlet makes various word games out of your vocab list on top of flashcards in various formats.

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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby Cavesa » Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:59 pm

There is no universal rule, they can all be broken, if you find it useful.

You should use anki "only" to review, but you can also learn a lot of things for the first time in anki. Really, if you learn two fruits in example sentences and then add ten more to anki, you will use those ten in similar sentences just as well as the first two.

Using single words or sentences: both options are great. but I am not for any of the extremes. People telling you "you should never learn isolated words" are probably just imagining the fools, who think they'll learn a language only through memorisation of a wordlist and don't actually open a coursebook. The people avoiding sentences too much are just too scared of "inefficiency" and for different reasons usually. Both options are valid, try them out.

About the review times: I just follow those offered by Anki, works fine. If I need to cram, I cram in advance. No big deal.If I take a break, I try not to make a too big deal of it either, to not further discourage myself.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jan 27, 2023 7:00 pm

I personally use Anki almost exclusively for initial learning, not review for what I've already learned. And I do generally put simple definitions (and other bits like gender) rather than example sentences. But I don't try to memorize lists of random words that I may or may not use. Rather, I memorize words that I'm about to use. 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, and I also plan on copying out stories from earlier chapters to practice my handwriting.

I will generally come up with mnemonics to initially remember a word, and then the spaced repetition functionality will ensure that I can recognize or use the words in context when the time comes. IMO, spaced repetition doesn't directly get things into your permanent long term memory. It only extends the amount of time that something is on the tip of your tongue, which then allows you to recognize or use the word in context, and that is what gets it into your long term memory. So if you don't anticipate running into a word multiple times in the near future (ideally the next few months), using spaced repetition just prolongs the inevitable.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby Le Baron » Fri Jan 27, 2023 10:07 pm

Deinonysus wrote:I personally use Anki almost exclusively for initial learning, not review for what I've already learned.
...
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?
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jan 27, 2023 10:29 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:I personally use Anki almost exclusively for initial learning, not review for what I've already learned.
...
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.

In this case I started at an intermediate level class and there was a lot of vocabulary I had to catch up on so I was not always able to follow my general rule, but I've already learned the vocabulary for the chapter we're starting next week with Anki and that's what I'll do going forward.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Jan 28, 2023 2:42 pm

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.
...
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.
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Re: anki and initial learning

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Jan 28, 2023 4:43 pm

Beli Tsar wrote: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.


While I can agree with this, it's also easy to view it from another angle - as in "It's amazing how much easier it is to review vocabulary if you already know the textbook chapter".

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