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I couldn't imagine learning a language without Anki. I had to learn Coptic in a month, which required memorizing the most common ~1000 words in the language. An
by lgessler 8y ago
I couldn't imagine learning a language without Anki. I had to learn Coptic in a month, which required memorizing the most common ~1000 words in the language. Anki made this as easy as it can be. I don't think I would have been able to meet my deadline had I been making paper flashcards or using some more informal system.
The nice thing about Anki is that you can use it at any time without any overhead associated with beginning or ending your session. There are so many scraps of time in my day (on the bus, waiting for someone to meet me, waiting for my food to heat up in the microwave, walking to the store, etc.) that are mostly only useful for being a zombie on my phone, enjoying my surroundings, or being alone with my thoughts, which are all also sometimes appropriate uses of the time, but in all of these times, I can also just pull out my phone and start reviewing my cards, even if I get in just a few.
- ColinWright 8y agoWhat was your list of the most common ~1k words? Do you have a link?
- lgessler 8y agoThis is an Anki deck that was made from the book I used: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1657789477 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1657789477 I made my own Anki deck because this deck didn't have tags by chapter, and I wanted to study only the words I'd been exposed to so far.
- ColinWright 8y agoThanks for that - do you know if there is a way to export the list of words without going through the full process of installing Anki? I'm interested in different people's concept of "the thousand most useful words" and would love to extract the list you've used. It seems like it would be less overall work for you to do it than for me to do it, although I realise I'm asking you to do work. Thanks.
- lgessler 8y agoLooks like the APKG format is a SQL dump[0], so perhaps, depending on how determined you are. My cards wouldn't be too useful as they are because many cards contain English prompts ("Which verb forms must have their direct objects incorporated into bound states?"), and the cards that do contain words have various inconsistencies depending on the part of speech, such as lemma-like forms that you would never see in an actual text as-is for prepositions, or multiple conjugation bases for verbs. So yeah, it'd be a hassle to put it into a normalized format. Sorry about that. Not sure what the nature of your interest is, but I'm sure you must be familiar with what a Swadesh list[1] is? It's only a couple hundred instead of a thousand, and the words (or rather, their meanings) are chosen in advance, but it's a close concept. [0]: http://decks.wikia.com/wiki/Anki_APKG_format_documentation http://decks.wikia.com/wiki/Anki_APKG_format_documentation [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list
- Havoc 8y ago>I had to learn Coptic in a month What kind of job do you do?
- lgessler 8y agoI'm a PhD student in computational linguistics. My advisor is the principal for a repository of digitized Coptic texts[1], and while I wasn't required to learn the language as a part of my role as a research assistant on this project, I wanted to because it'd make my contributions better. (And I had a couple of months of free time in the summer after I quit my job and before I started school.) [1]: http://copticscriptorium.org/ http://copticscriptorium.org/
- Havoc 8y agoThat's really cool. Was expecting more of a intel / research role answer, but that makes a lot of sense