A language learners’ forum

rdearman wrote:

Adrianslont wrote:Well, I've just updated the progress bars in my sig for the first time in months and now it's clear that I'm falling behind. I'm not hugely worried, though. I'm not really so interested in doing 10k cards in the timeframe, I'm more interested in seeing how good my Indonesian is at 10k cards when I get there.

Some of my cards I'm not enjoying so much but I can't delete them because I'll lose track of my 10k! emk would be appalled! Still, I am now making subs2srs cards from Thomas and Friends cartoons I bought in Indonesia and I love them. I can follow the cartoons quite well usually but there's always something to be gained from working intensively with them using anki. The learning ROI on Thomas is still enough for me. And I love the artwork and the humour in the better episodes and the voice acting in the Indonesian dub is generally great.

In case anyone is worried, I am balancing my Thomas cards with watching the Kick Andy talk show - which I love because Andy speaks slowly and has some great guests. And reading Tintin and watching Culture Talk video interviews with everyday Indonesians. And reviewing old anki cards, of course. Although I said that some cards bug me, there are also many old cards that I love to remeet after a long interval - I hear these cards and marvel at how much more clearly I hear them and how much more deeply I understand them, now. It's quite affirming and I'm sure contributes to my retention of vocabulary and language in general.

Sorry long quote for a small point. Just suspend the cards rather than delete. I think they still count since you've reviewed them at least once. But i don't make the rules here.

Yes, anki tells you the number of suspended cards, too but that won't work for me because I suspend cards for a number reasons eg if they are subs2srs decks I have made just waiting to be introduced or if the card was way too hard when I first met it a year ago but one day I may start using it but I've never really studied it so far.

Maybe I have some bad anki habits and maybe I should spend some time spring cleaning my collection. I may get around to that one day in the new year. Or I may just get as ruthless as emk and sfuqua. I'm pretty sure I would never get to 10k that way, though.

One good thing, though - if I don't like a card, I just mark it good or easy even if it wasn't and the intervals grow longer! If I really like a card and it's hard, I am happy to mark it hard and see it sooner. To summarise, I mark according to a mixture of ease and how much I like a card.

Cheers.

Adrianslont wrote:Some of my cards I'm not enjoying so much but I can't delete them because I'll lose track of my 10k!

Can you create a new deck and move your unenjoyable cards there?

Just suspending them sounds OK to me.
I think people should make their own rules about how hard they want to push themselves. I've done way too much deleting myself.

Right now I'm in a death spiral with reviews; I'm going to cut way back on my new cards for a while.

I'm not sure I'll make 10K, but I'm pretty sure I'll make 5K or 7K.

I'm really glad I have SRS these days; it lets me keep working on my languages and it also lets me do it at random times during the day

smallwhite wrote:

Adrianslont wrote:Some of my cards I'm not enjoying so much but I can't delete them because I'll lose track of my 10k!

Can you create a new deck and move your unenjoyable cards there?

That idea sounded pretty good but I just had a look at the iOS app, which is where I do my anki, and there doesn't seem to be a facility to do that. I know I could do it in my computer in the browse mode and maybe on the fly but I really only use the computer app to add cards.

Still, you have given me pause to reflect on how I should exercise some "anki hygiene" and I think I will suspend a few of my decks for now as it is basically certain decks that I am finding a drag.

I actually have twenty plus decks which I know is against some people's advice but I find it nececessary. For a start I have one French deck based on Assimil and the rest are Indonesian decks. Most of the Indonesian decks are subs2srs or close deletion. I really don't want to mix those two. And with the subs decks I don't want to mix cartoons with movies with a documentary with some interviews - it just messes with my brain. AND the volume levels vary between sources so I would be constantly irritated by the changing volume level. It's annoying enough when I have to change the level when I move from one deck to another.

Thanks for the advice smallwhite, rdearman and sfuqua. I will be a bit more proactive in my anki use! Cheers.

Wow. I just came across this challenge while browsing the forum. At first, I thought this was a really great idea and I wanted to join right away! Then, while reading through the posts about the challenge, I realized that creating so many cards and actually getting to a point where I can review them will take a very long time. Next, I wondered why I hadn't already done this, and then thought again, searching for 10,000 sentences in one language is going to be hard, but each of the languages I'd like to learn? It will take a ton of time. It totally sounds like something I would have done while I was still in high school. (I really loved long-term projects during high school).

Then there's the actual memorization of the cards, which, who knows how long that would take! I'm also scared that there might be a mistake in some of the cards, in which case I'd be learning the incorrect phrase. Some sentences relevant to my life, for example, might not be present in a book, and so instead I might try to create a sentence and ask a native speaker to correct it. I guess then you must trust the native speaker. I also wonder about originality.. If you take the lines of a book, an article, a tape, even someone's edits... aren't you taking someone else's words? Most of the time people maybe wouldn't notice, but I think it might be odd to hear someone speaking sentences that are of all different types of writing and speech styles all in one. A lot of people don't speak like how they write, either.

On the other hand, as you learn more and more sentences, your ability to change them according to your situation will get stronger. And as you talk to more and more people, you will hear alternative sentences with the same meaning, making room for originality. On top of this, the actual search for the sentences kind of forces you into reading and listening in order to gather materials.

Is it a challenge I'd want to pursue? Well, 10,000 is certainly going to take a lot of time, but I've already committed my life to languages. So I'm going to subscribe to this topic and see if I can make any progress with this challenge.

I'm the guy who started this silly thing
I'm still at less than 4000 cards. I just create huge numbers of cards from sources such as books or courses and then trim them. I've done way over 10000 cards already, but I never have left more than about 4000 in my deck. Usually I delete them when they get very easy. I found an anki deck of cards to be a nice way to build enough skill to start reading extensively in the target language. There are many other ways to do it, but the cards are cheap to make and cheap to use.

It is pretty strange what happens as a card moves from "new" to "mature" . It seems to be more than simple memorization. It seems as if one also develops "automatic processing" of grammatical features of the sentences on the cards. It seems to me that this transfers to other complex cards as well.

One of my favorite authors for cards when I was just breaking into Spanish was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His prose is thick, and full of pretty rare vocabulary, but I found it great for cards. It wouldn't have been great for extensive reading...

sfuqua wrote:I'm the guy who started this silly thing
I'm still at less than 4000 cards. I just create huge numbers of cards from sources such as books or courses and then trim them. I've done way over 10000 cards already, but I never have left more than about 4000 in my deck. Usually I delete them when they get very easy. I found an anki deck of cards to be a nice way to build enough skill to start reading extensively in the target language. There are many other ways to do it, but the cards are cheap to make and cheap to use.

It is pretty strange what happens as a card moves from "new" to "mature" . It seems to be more than simple memorization. It seems as if one also develops "automatic processing" of grammatical features of the sentences on the cards. It seems to me that this transfers to other complex cards as well.

One of my favorite authors for cards when I was just breaking into Spanish was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His prose is thick, and full of pretty rare vocabulary, but I found it great for cards. It wouldn't have been great for extensive reading...

I think it's a really good way to get sentences and essential grammar down, and that's what I like about it. Not only that, but you likely start to remember unknown vocabulary in the sentence because you learn the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

I was just wondering, before I start making loads of online flashcards, do you think that it HAS to be Anki cards, or is it fine to use any type of flashcards? Is there something about Anki that is really useful in this method? I'm not as familiar with the program as say, Quizlet.

Xelian wrote:

sfuqua wrote:I'm the guy who started this silly thing
I'm still at less than 4000 cards. I just create huge numbers of cards from sources such as books or courses and then trim them. I've done way over 10000 cards already, but I never have left more than about 4000 in my deck. Usually I delete them when they get very easy. I found an anki deck of cards to be a nice way to build enough skill to start reading extensively in the target language. There are many other ways to do it, but the cards are cheap to make and cheap to use.

It is pretty strange what happens as a card moves from "new" to "mature" . It seems to be more than simple memorization. It seems as if one also develops "automatic processing" of grammatical features of the sentences on the cards. It seems to me that this transfers to other complex cards as well.

One of my favorite authors for cards when I was just breaking into Spanish was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His prose is thick, and full of pretty rare vocabulary, but I found it great for cards. It wouldn't have been great for extensive reading...

I think it's a really good way to get sentences and essential grammar down, and that's what I like about it. Not only that, but you likely start to remember unknown vocabulary in the sentence because you learn the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

I was just wondering, before I start making loads of online flashcards, do you think that it HAS to be Anki cards, or is it fine to use any type of flashcards? Is there something about Anki that is really useful in this method? I'm not as familiar with the program as say, Quizlet.

For me there are a couple of reasons why I prefer anki over quizlet.

Firstly, anki has spaced repetition which quizlet didn't two years ago. I believe quizlet has it now if you pay a subscription. The spaced repetition is where much of the magic lies - anki schedules when you see a card next based on your feedback and the intervals between seeing a card get progressively longer.

Secondly, you can use MP3 audio in cards which quizlet doesn't have last time I looked - they do have text to speech for some languages i believe.

And anki works off line.

And I like making cloze cards with anki.