A language learners’ forum

We can talk about what we're doing in this thread.

For me; I'm going to make a deck of sentences from books I'm reading for the super challenge. I've made a deck that has over 20 000 sentence cards in it. I'm going to start with that and whenever I run into a good sentence in my reading I'm going to try to copy it into deck. I hate stopping to copy something; we'll see how long my good intentions last. I plan to delete aggressively whenever I run into sentences that I don't find useful. I may do some type of cloze cards later; I tried some recently and didn't find them that useful. I've done 15 000 or so anki cards in my deck, but I keep deleting them, so that I never had more than about 3 000 active at any time; keeping them in the deck will be a challenge. I'm going to mix Tagalog and Spanish cards in the same deck; even though I've been using Tagalog for 30 years, I've discovered that my Spanish reading and vocabulary has passed my Tagalog. Tagalog will slow me down, at least at first.

I'm going to fiddle with the deck until May 1, doing reps and looking for bad sentences. I'll reset the deck and start at that point. I hope that the people at Antimoon and AJATT are right.

I believe I'll just do the usual:

New words mined from my reading: Mostly words, sometimes phrases, never sentences. I keep a database in Excel, and SRS with Memrise L2->L1 multiple-choice.

Shared decks made by other people: Hopefully words with audio, L2->L1 multiple-choice. Most of the time I end up copying them into my Excel and creating my own decks out of them.

Some oral fluency drills: Irregular verbs, tense drills, short sentence translations.

10k cards over 20 months is less than what I normally do so I'm confident!

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Links for my own convenience:

SRS Challenge on your mark, set, go

Just for clarification, is this just one deck?

I'm going to put all my cards in one deck, but for the challenge you could do several decks and just add up the totals.

Apologies if this has already been clarified in the other thread, but do these need to be 10,000 words/cards that are completely new to you and that you've never seen before?

I ask because I have got a book called "9000 Serbian Words' which I'm in the process of making into a deck in Memrise. The book consists of groupings of vocabulary under themes, so in the course of the book there will undoubtedly be some words that I have encountered before, although there will be many that I have not or which I may understand passively but not know actively. For example if there is a section on birds, I already know the word for 'bird' but I probably don't know the names for any of the different species.

If I signed up for the challenge, would it be okay for me to count cards with words like 'bird' that I already know? Or would that be cheating? Obviously I don't normally spend my time doing SRS for words I already know But in this instance I have been putting all the words from the book into the deck so that it is 'complete' and I don't have to make snap judgements about how well I know the word when I'm making the deck.

I don't see how it is cheating to have cards in the deck with terms that are already familiar to you. If you think it will be useful or convenient to have the card in your deck, by all means keep it there.

sfuqua wrote:I don't see how it is cheating to have cards in the deck with terms that are already familiar to you. If you think it will be useful or convenient to have the card in your deck, by all means keep it there.

Cool, okay, I will register then I didn't know whether it could be perceived as 'cheating' because if I already know some of the words, presumably I would get those cards wrong less often and end up reviewing them fewer times than cards with brand new words, hence meaning that overall I might have fewer reviews to do over the course of the challenge.

Those were my thoughts as well. I could join with my Mandarin deck which I've been using for ~eight years (12720 cards L2-L1), but there are just four new ones, and I probably won't add anything new for a while. So, new language+new deck.

another question: suspended cards in anki are like paused ones? one can activate them again, right? (haven't used the function until now)
if so, what about activating a card during the course of these 600 days, does that count as well? And if we have more than 10000 then it is ok, that some of them are deleted, suspended or due? (e.g. 11000 cards and 500 are suspended and 500 due or whatever)

In Anki, I will do one deck per language, but I'm not sure what languages yet. German will most likely be one of them and I will probably use cloze cards with sentences or phrases for that as I find those help with grammar. It will force me to get the right cases after prepositions, for example.

I might also use some general vocabulary decks in Memrise. I'm not really sure. I think I'm going to have to look at where I am in my various Memrise decks and see if I want to start a new deck for the challenge or what. Or maybe I should just go for Anki for this challenge. Decisions. Decisions.