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Very impressive progress. I think it speaks to the author's commitment and dedication, as adding 50 new cards per day is a lot. Most people will burn out pretty

by knubie 7y ago

Very impressive progress. I think it speaks to the author's commitment and dedication, as adding 50 new cards per day is a lot. Most people will burn out pretty quickly at that rate. I recommend something like 10-20 per day. I'm also one of those people that say you should make your own cards from material you're immersing in. When going through a predefined list of words like that I think you're bound to end up learning a bunch of words that you'll never encounter (at least not for a long time), and a bunch of words that you'll have no idea how to use correctly. I wrote an article[0] about my own method for language learning, focusing mainly on the spaced repetition aspect. [0] https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-language/ https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-...

ahpearce 7y ago
There are frequency ordered decks I believe. Very useful. Top 2000 most frequently used, for example, is a good start.
wes1350 7y ago
Author here. It was a lot, but seeing the number go down rapidly was a nice motivator. Keep in mind that these are just pre-made 1-word cards, so they're much faster than the full-sentence cards people suggest, which are likely more effective though also more time-consuming. Furthermore, French has an unexpectedly (for me) large number of cognates with English, so many of those words were freebies for me. If I was learning Mandarin, for example, 50 cards a day would require an absolutely enormous amount of effort, most of which would likely be wasted. You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.

by knubie 7y ago

ahpearce 7y ago

There are frequency ordered decks I believe. Very useful. Top 2000 most frequently used, for example, is a good start.

wes1350 7y ago

Author here. It was a lot, but seeing the number go down rapidly was a nice motivator. Keep in mind that these are just pre-made 1-word cards, so they're much faster than the full-sentence cards people suggest, which are likely more effective though also more time-consuming. Furthermore, French has an unexpectedly (for me) large number of cognates with English, so many of those words were freebies for me. If I was learning Mandarin, for example, 50 cards a day would require an absolutely enormous amount of effort, most of which would likely be wasted. You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.