Best approach to learning more words

[smallwhite]

And this is where your numbers seem somewhat exaggerated to me:

Comparison II

I learned German grammar and 8000 words in 4 months using a sort of flashcard/SRS. I can't decide whether 50% or 75% of that time was vocabulary so let's take 62.5%. I probably studied about 2 hours a day back then, so:
4 months x 62.5% x 2 hours = 150 hours
I was doing Eng->Ger production cards.

Whereas for extensive reading, I'm sure I can't acquire 8k active German words just by reading for 150 hours. HTLAL member patrickwilken said, referring to my figure of 8k,:
> Still for German I guess I seem to be learning about 3000-4000 words per year, which is about 8 words/day. Then again I live in Berlin, read 10000 pages of novels/year, and watch something like 300-400 films/year.
So,
10000 pages x 2 years x 5 minutes = 1667 hours

Which is 1:11

(I didn't mean to cram 8k words in one fell swoop. I was studying grammar, but they kept using difficult words in the example sentences, so I grabbed some words to learn in order to read those sentences more easily. It wasn't hard to do, it worked wonders, so I just went on).

[blaurebell]

I learned German grammar and 8000 words in 4 months using a sort of flashcard/SRS.

Phew, that's a lot of words. Do you remember them still though? I always had this phenomenon when learning without too much context that stuff just wouldn't stick very long. My 50h of anki for Russian were a complete waste of time, because I simply don't remember these words now. I did back then, but now my brain says "I should know this" and then nothing When I learn words while reading they seem to stay around longer. All the words hang in a sentence and the sentence in a chapter and they all pull together in the right direction. When I simply have a word on the thin thread of some association with the English word, it slips away too easily. I think the memory of the words might be a little more stable when acquired with all these associations and it's now unlikely that I will ever forget what certain words in French mean.

I think we're still getting confused about the word "best" in the original question, because it's subjective. Is the best method the most time-efficient method? Or is it the one that gives you less headaches and you can therefore do for longer? Or is it the one that allows for consistent long-term results? Unless we define this we can throw numbers around all we like and 1:11 or 1:4 won't mean much in the end. As I said, personally I prefer to spend 500h reading 5000 pages intensively + Duolingo + Assimil than spending 90h anki+18h reading. I basically learned French by accident because I was having fun reading Harry Potter. With Anki I'd give up after 20h and go do something more fun instead ... like getting surgery or having my brain eaten by a giant slug. Those are obviously personal preferences though and some people really love anki and have fun doing their flashcards.

By the way, I'm a big fan of stats and numbers too and find them super motivating. My excel sheets have pie charts and all sorts of stuff like that

[smallwhite]

I learned German grammar and 8000 words in 4 months using a sort of flashcard/SRS.

Phew, that's a lot of words. Do you remember them still though?

Most of them and mostly very well. In Ger->Eng direction I think I remember them all. I'm not too fussy about context. Most beginner words don't need any special context anyway. Summer. Dog. School. Apple.

By the way, I'm a big fan of stats and numbers too and find them super motivating. My excel sheets have pie charts and all sorts of stuff like that

While I pivot-table my 6WC data

[Theodisce]

SRSs have proven to be a no-go for me. Yes, I've learned some words and even sentences, but the gains couldn't make for the losses: after every single 20 minutes session I felt so exhausted that I felt my brain was going to explode. It's perhaps just me, but after a workday consisting of using several languages for several hours I'm simply not ready to overkill myself with a SRS. But people who find it useful should definitively continue to use it- but perhaps as a supplement to other activities.

[Systematiker]

This is something I've never understood. Let's say you have two paths to learn Russian:

1. Anki. It will take you exactly 2000 hours to reach C1.

2. Reading in Russian and watching TV in Russian. It will take you exactly 3000 hours to reach C1.

Why would anyone who is learning a language as a hobby choose to go with Anki?

With the first approach, you are chained to a machine. With the second approach, you are reading Bulgakov in the original one day, and the next day you are watching Брат or Ленинград 46.

Because in my experience, the difference is actually:

1. 1000 hours with reading+flashcards (maybe ~600h reading + ~400h flashcards)
2. 4000 hours with reading alone.

So I become C1 in 1 year, and you in 4 years. When I have already become C1, you are still B1. I read The Three Musketeers and you read The Three Little Pigs. With the 3 years savings, I can do anything:

* I can spend time with family
* I can learn another language
* I can read what you read but I will enjoy it more than you will because I am already C1 if not C2 during hours 1001 to 4000
* I can read books that you can't read because I can understand more than you do

Why would anyone give up family and other beautiful things in life in order to read The Three Little Pigs? That is something I've never understood.

If reading is important to you, then the 2 paths can be stated as:

1. Spending 3600 hours reading and 400 SRS'ing, fully understanding and enjoying from the 1000th hour onwards
2. Spending 4000 hours reading, not fully understanding or enjoying until the 4000th hour

Why would anyone who treasures reading choose a path that delays their ability to read by 4 times? That is something I've never understood. Though I would understand if the SRS must be Anki - I can't stand Anki either; I would lose the will to live, too, using Anki.

This is why I make great progress in semi-transparent languages and horrible progress in anything else. I think the ratio somewhere between 1:4 and 1:10 (as mentioned further on) probably holds true for me as well - but without any concrete need to put in the 90-150 hours of SRS, I won't stick to it and won't do it. I mean, it would be great if I could discipline myself to do it, but I won't, because there's no external motivating factor, and I'll otherwise get there eventually. Or at least I have so far, and I figure it will hold true.

[Xmmm]

And this is where your numbers seem somewhat exaggerated to me:

Great to see someone interested in actual numbers. (Have I said this to you before?) I'm a bean-counter, btw, and I think it shows

I started with the figure "1000" only because Xmmm did. My experience or impression is actually "1:4".

Before I was tested C1 in French reading, I read textbooks, I read aloud word lists as they came up in textbooks and maybe wrote them out a bit, read some news articles, read Read & Think French which contains around 95 short articles about France, read 1 reader (fiction) of about 120 pages, and studied word lists in a sort of SRS fashion during the last 2 months. Ignoring the textbook and news bits that probably everyone does, the amount of time I spent reading was around:
( 95 articles + 120 pages ) x 5 mins = 17.9 hours
and the time I spent sort of SRS'ing was maybe 1 or 2 hours (one can't study vocabulary for more than 2 hours a day, right?), let's say 1.5 hours a day:
1.5 hour x 60 days = 90 hours

So 17.9 hours of reading + 90 hours of SRS and I got C1 in reading, full marks.

Compare this to LesRonces who wrote recently and today:
> my levels are probably a mid-high B1 at the moment everything considered
> I'm reading French without a dictionary and understanding most of what i read, after less than 500 hours of reading. No SRS, ever.

That's not even 1:4. More like 1:10?

First of all, thank you for using real numbers and not waffling. You obviously have some experience learning languages, you obviously have some idea of what you were doing while you were doing it. You may not be me, your results may not work for me, but if enough people provide numbers then I get an idea of the range of possibilities.

I completely accept your numbers at face value, because I had a similar experience with Lingvist. I went through the 4976 flash cards. Unfortunately I didn't keep track of the hours, but when I was done I could immediately start reading French novels without a lot of difficulty. I guesstimate I could have had a reasonable chance of passing a B2 reading test, and I definitely spent less than 200 hours on the flashcards (maybe a lot less, but definitely not more. My whole French experiment was less than six months and I was trying to learn Spanish at the same time).

As a caveat, the minute I stopped it was gone from my mind in a month or two. Everything resided in short term memory.

So again ... as a way to ramp up during first three months of language learning, it seems reasonable. For a total investment of 100, 200, or even 400 hours I cannot object especially if you feel the payoff is 4 to 1 or 10 to 1.

But some people have 50,000 or 100,000 flash cards and spend an hour a day or two hours a day ... for years, right? Or so it seems. Are they just doing it wrong? I just read an internet post "throwing away my Anki after two years and some ridiculous number of cards created" because it was taking up all of his time and he literally had no time to read or watch TV.

[rdearman]

I think anki gets a bad rap. It is easy to turn anki into a torture machine, but then again it is just as easy to turn LWT into one. I used LWT for intensive reading and it just became a torture machine. I dreaded looking at the thing, and I actually loved the book which I was trying to read. I personally have learned to mix both. I read a lot, and I use anki. But I have learned not to let anki turn into a torture machine. If you're doing a reasonable amount of new cards, and get a reasonable amount of reviews then it isn't a problem.

I have never found the things I learned via anki are forgotten immediately, and I hope that is the case for all the medical students who use it to learn parts of the body, drugs, drug side effects, symptoms, etc, etc.!

I have used anki to memorise all my families phone numbers, license plate numbers of the cars I've owned, various quotations, programming language syntax as well as vocabulary for learning languages. As pointed out previously you don't need to learn words like dog, cat, goat, etc "in context", you just learn them.

emk did some very interesting work on the French corpus and discussed in this thread on the old board. One of the conclusions was that nouns are the things you need the most. I believe that you don't really need to learn them in context. I'm not a teacher, but I do know "pre-learning" vocabulary before reading is frequently done to help children.

In fact K12 teaching recommendations say:

One of the most effective methods of helping children learn new vocabulary words is to teach unfamiliar words used in a text prior to the reading experience.

By pre-learning the words, normally by the teacher showing the words and giving the definition the children learn the vocabulary words which they read afterwards. It seems to me this is exactly what smallwhite was doing when she crammed a load of words and then began reading.

It is a lot easier to read when you know a good portion of the words on the page. If you haven't learned them in context, so what? The reading experience teaches things other than vocabulary, it teaches word order, grammar and tons of other things. So why slow down the learning of all of that other stuff just because you want to struggle through the torture of looking up words in LWT.

Just today I created and loaded a new deck into my anki for words which are related to a specific topic, (embarrassingly it is D&D) but allows me to get topic specific vocabulary right from the start. It will allow me to jump right in with a good grounding in the vocabulary of the topic. I could have done this for running, yoga, aircraft maintenance, or C++ programming.

If you had a bad experience with anki that is unfortunate, I had one also, but I did learn to scale back and relax and use anki not as a teacher, but as a memory prompt.

[smallwhite]

Are they just doing it wrong?

Personal choice, but if a method is known to work 4 to 10 times faster in an activity such as language-learning where time is probably the single most important factor to success, I would divert all my efforts into making that method work for me or to adjust myself to the method. Like I said, I have better things to do with my time, such as Facebook. If my brain would explode after a 20-minute session of flashcards, I'd do 19-minute sessions instead, for example.

[blaurebell]

Personal choice, but if a method is known to work 4 to 10 times faster in an activity such as language-learning where time is probably the single most important factor to success ...

I'm not sure I actually agree with this. The most effective way to learn something is while having fun. Your brain is more likely to want to remember what you're learning when you're enjoying yourself. Memory is a fickle beast when it comes to uncomfortable events. Traumatic events are often forgotten and buried, and so are the worst aspects of any experience. So, doing anything you don't enjoy no matter how "efficient" it might be, will prime your brain to try to forget as much of the experience as possible. So, I'd say the single most important factor to success would be "fun" in my book. That said, if anki is fun for you because you know how efficient it is, knock yourself out, it's the best thing for you then!

I think anki gets a bad rap. It is easy to turn anki into a torture machine, but then again it is just as easy to turn LWT into one. I used LWT for intensive reading and it just became a torture machine. I dreaded looking at the thing, and I actually loved the book which I was trying to read.

Well, I personally really enjoy LWT and I learned much more French than I had originally planned, simply because I was having fun with LWT. But then I've always been fascinated by dictionaries, encyclopedia and glossaries. I'm sure other people would hate it, because they don't like reading fiction or reading in general, and some people get incredibly impatient with anything that disrupts their flow. I wouldn't recommend LWT to people who dislike reading in general, that would definitely be torture. For me Flashcards were always a sort of necessary evil. I've used them, but never very successfully. Short term cramming for my Italian was based on flashcards and it totally ruined the language for me. For me it's totally fine to do inefficient activities if you're having fun. Well, then it might take 2500h to get to C1 instead of 1000. So what? I rather have 2500h of fun than using short cuts that might ruin my enjoyment. Sure, I could reach C1 reading comprehension with anki + reading a whole bunch of made up articles from graded readers that don't interest me at all. As smallwhite proved, it would be way more efficient. But then I rather skip the anki and learner texts, and read a whole bunch of fun novels and comics for natives instead. Not as efficient, but much more fun for me!

But then I generally don't learn languages in any "goal oriented" way, I try to enjoy the journey. Not worrying about goals and efficiency is something I learned from being a high-achiever at university who was obsessed with grade averages and was always worrying about getting the best grad possible. So much anxiety, so much worry, so many sleepless nights. And so much scheming to get to the most efficient learning strategies, because time is money when you want to have good grades! What happened when I actually reached my goal and got my distinction in my Master? Nothing. I wasn't particularly happy about my achievement. After all the hard work I put in, it was the logical outcome and there was nothing "exceptional" about it anymore. I did what I expected of myself and nothing more. Efficiency is overrated and one way to take all the fun out of any activity.

Goal oriented strategies tend to postpone enjoyment until later. The idea is that all the short term suffering will lead to long-term happiness by getting you to your goal faster. What if there is only short term suffering though and the promised happiness never comes? What if you only think that reaching this or that goal will make you happy? Once the happiness doesn't come, you will feel ripped off and add long-term suffering / regret to short-term suffering, a recipe for unhappiness! A long journey of short term enjoyment on the other hand is practically a guarantee for happiness. It also needs much less discipline to keep activities up that you actually enjoy. So, if you can allow yourself the luxury to be "inefficient" it's generally the more effective strategy. Of course, the best thing would be to really enjoy the most efficient activities, but well, we can't all love anki and FSI

In the same spirit of "inefficiency" I can recommend taking the train through the alps rather than flying over them. Sure, it's more efficient to fly, but you'll end up with inevitable delays coming from any Italian airport, you'll get pissed off by airport security, you'll have to wait and queue, they will rip you off if you buy anything in the airport, there will be plenty of turbulence in flight if you land anywhere near the mountains - Milan for example - and if it's cloudy you won't see anything apart from ... clouds. If you take the train, it will be a much longer journey, but you'll see some of the most beautiful landscapes on this planet!

[smallwhite]

Personal choice, but if a method is known to work 4 to 10 times faster in an activity such as language-learning where time is probably the single most important factor to success ...

I'm not sure I actually agree with this. The most effective way to learn something is while having fun. Your brain is more likely to want to remember what you're learning when you're enjoying yourself. Memory is a fickle beast when it comes to uncomfortable events. Traumatic events are often forgotten and buried, and so are the worst aspects of any experience. So, doing anything you don't enjoy no matter how "efficient" it might be, will prime your brain to try to forget as much of the experience as possible. So, I'd say the single most important factor to success would be "fun" in my book. That said, if anki is fun for you because you know how efficient it is, knock yourself out, it's the best thing for you then!

You're missing my point. You're assuming the fun-ness of SRS is a constant never to be increased, and that the amount of fun you require is a constant never to be decreased. You're accepting your world. I'm changing my world.

---

"He didn't know it was impossible so he went ahead and did it".

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Btw. I didn't just read about flashcards one day and decided to use it. I was learning languages in my isolated little world, developping my own methods as I went, and one day when I looked out of my little world, I found that they had this thing called flashcards and SRS that looked almost the same as what I'd been doing. Only it was a bit less efficient than my method.

This approach to learning is actually preferable to what I said about adapting your method to you and vice versa. Start with you and your needs, not with what's available on Amazon. But I guess this approach will be even harder to swallow. How many of us have strategies that are generic strategies instead of shopping lists?