5 ms·

I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that g

I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when studying Japanese and it was a massive help. However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many different things I have noticed one caveat. If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Anki, I feel like your ability to recall gets trapped within the context of using Anki. For example, if you're learning Japanese vocab through Anki, and also trying out your new words via conversation and reading/writing, you'll rapidly learn new vocab AND be able to recall it anywhere. However if you're learning Japanese on your own and not really conversing/writing, no matter how good your recall with Anki is, you'll struggle to recall those same words anywhere else. The cool thing about Anki is you can also use pictures/audio. So if you're learning music theory you could memorise chord shapes/intervals. Or human anatomy.

TwentyPosts 4y ago
This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of issues. If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly. It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition learning tool—when you're learning languages you generally want to pull from several different resources, and learn with different tools anyway. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Duolingo alone will get you anywhere. I think this universally applies to repetition-learning, at least when it comes to languages. You need to "cross-train".
- mock-possum 4y ago
  Yep, my entire takeaway from six months of doing Duolingo is that ‘stark’ means ‘strong’ in German.
- bluquark 4y ago
  > Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    Duolingo used to be better: people who are talking about Duolingo might be referencing how it used to be.
    - TwentyPosts 4y ago
      I'm not. I'm a new user, and I notice that Duolingo kind of sucks, but I am getting some amount of value out of it. I'm very open to suggestions for better language learning apps, though.
      - bluquark 4y ago
        When you hit diminishing returns on a walled-garden language-learning app, it's time to create a continuous intake of real-world media at your level that you enjoy, plus a suite of inline understanding+memory tools to extract the maximum learning out of that media. I have been following many of the recommendations on https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/ https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/. Most of them are language-specific, but perhaps you can still draw some inspiration from the methods and look for equivalent tools in your target language.
      - hackernewds 4y ago
        Read this and you'll realize why Duolingo has gone down the wayside https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us... Shows when incentives are aligned to shareholders vs users, that is the outcome you get
  - TwentyPosts 4y ago
    As someone who didn't like the idea of learning a language at all but has to, I'm glad that Duolingo gave me a very, very easy way to get started with literally anything at all. It's simple and streamlined, meaning that it's easy to start and stick with it instead of getting hung up on how to find a good textbook, or figuring out how to use Anki "properly". This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it easy to do a few Duolingo "lessons" as warm-up before delving into more in-depth practice. Nowadays I would not use it for real "practice" at all. I use it to check my understanding for 5-15 minutes a day. If I make mistakes in Duolingo (eg. forming the plural, remembering the dative for a given grammatical gender) then I look these things up and study them. I might drop Duolingo completely at some point, but for now I'm getting a non-zero amount of value out of it—I am increasingly looking into better options, though. I'm already looking Anki, and I'm sure there are some other language learning apps out there.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  Let's be honest, Duolingo is a joke in comparison to anything serious like Anki. I agree that Anki alone doesn't cover it. One has to immerse in the target language to make progress. Anki is only there to speed up the process.
dkarl 4y ago
The way I think of memorization is as scaffolding. Rote memorization is very different from the skill or understand you are trying to build, and for this reason, many people are skeptical about the value of it. Why practice rote memorization when what you really want is very different? But this is like trying to construct a building without using scaffolding. If you only use Anki and don't do anything else, it's like building scaffolding on an empty lot, and then building more and more scaffolding without using it to build anything else.
bluquark 4y ago
I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill. I was wondering how much adding audio cards or "reversed" E->J cards to my routine might help. Are those variations worth the trouble?
- Macha 4y ago
  My experience is that doing so has had a minor improvement in my J->E recall, but a major improvement in my E->J recall. If you never intend to write/speak Japanese and just want to build to watching anime or something, I guess you could give it a miss, but I think it's pretty worthwhile. The one caveat with Anki specifically for reversed cards is when you add a bunch of new cards or a new deck and it presents you the reversed card right after the basic card. e.g. seeing the 幸せ -> shiawase (happy) card then immediately after the happy -> 幸せ card, sure you're going to be telling Anki this was an "easy" card, but that's much more about the immediacy than the level of recall you have. For my purposes I actually have three sets of cards in my Japanese deck, one each for kana, kanji and english front card and the other two on the reverse cards (unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words).
  - bluquark 4y ago
    Thanks! > unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words I have found this usually proves to be a mistake, textbooks and dictionaries pretend that you need far less kanji than you actually do. Lately I started to mine Anki words from conversations on Japanese twitter and I discovered that everyone casually throw around all kinds of kanji that are not on the Jouyou list and in words every textbook insisted were primarily kana. I think it might be because modern IMEs have made it much easier to casually use rare-ish kanji. Technology has expanded the range of everyone's recall and writing speed, while the textbooks are still reflecting the world of 20 years ago.
- tastysandwich 4y ago
  Personally I never did audio cards (though I did a lot of listening and conversation outside of Anki) or reverse cards for Japanese. My vocab decks were J->E, and my Kanji decks were Kana->Kanji. I always practised writing my answers on the screen using the whiteboard feature. I think you should strive to keep your decks under 15 minutes total. That means you can complete them in three 5-minute blocks a day. Any longer and I found I would A) miss a deck, meaning I had to catch up the next day; or B) try to rush through them. I highly recommend trying to engage in conversation as much as possible. In my city (in Australia) I went to "conversation classes". Basically Japanese people wanting to improve their English would meet with Australians wanting to improve their Japanese. It went for an hour, half of which was spent talking in English, and half in Japanese. And if you can only speak a little bit of Japanese, it's totally fine, you can just speak in broken Japanese mixed with English. It was really fun! You'll find opportunities to use your new vocab, and it'll stick much better.
textninja 4y ago
I tried to use Anki a long time ago, but maintaining cards ended up being too toilsome. Now that we have ChatGPT and other AI tech to take some of the pain out of that, I might give it another try for language study. I do however maintain that for many skills it’s better to memorize processes over facts, and develop a more nuanced embedding with natural repetition intervals, rather than overfitting via excessive Anki-fication.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  try for any subject "summarize X as Anki cards". I found a reply above particularly helpful to even summarize anything at all. perhaps someone could design software that automatically translates the article to the Anki cards as well. I'd love to collaborate with someone on such a project (as a data scientist)

TwentyPosts 4y ago

This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of issues. If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly. It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition learning tool—when you're learning languages you generally want to pull from several different resources, and learn with different tools anyway. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Duolingo alone will get you anywhere. I think this universally applies to repetition-learning, at least when it comes to languages. You need to "cross-train".

mock-possum 4y ago
Yep, my entire takeaway from six months of doing Duolingo is that ‘stark’ means ‘strong’ in German.
bluquark 4y ago
> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  Duolingo used to be better: people who are talking about Duolingo might be referencing how it used to be.
  - TwentyPosts 4y ago
    I'm not. I'm a new user, and I notice that Duolingo kind of sucks, but I am getting some amount of value out of it. I'm very open to suggestions for better language learning apps, though.
    - bluquark 4y ago
      When you hit diminishing returns on a walled-garden language-learning app, it's time to create a continuous intake of real-world media at your level that you enjoy, plus a suite of inline understanding+memory tools to extract the maximum learning out of that media. I have been following many of the recommendations on https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/ https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/. Most of them are language-specific, but perhaps you can still draw some inspiration from the methods and look for equivalent tools in your target language.
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      Read this and you'll realize why Duolingo has gone down the wayside https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-user-growth https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us... Shows when incentives are aligned to shareholders vs users, that is the outcome you get
- TwentyPosts 4y ago
  As someone who didn't like the idea of learning a language at all but has to, I'm glad that Duolingo gave me a very, very easy way to get started with literally anything at all. It's simple and streamlined, meaning that it's easy to start and stick with it instead of getting hung up on how to find a good textbook, or figuring out how to use Anki "properly". This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it easy to do a few Duolingo "lessons" as warm-up before delving into more in-depth practice. Nowadays I would not use it for real "practice" at all. I use it to check my understanding for 5-15 minutes a day. If I make mistakes in Duolingo (eg. forming the plural, remembering the dative for a given grammatical gender) then I look these things up and study them. I might drop Duolingo completely at some point, but for now I'm getting a non-zero amount of value out of it—I am increasingly looking into better options, though. I'm already looking Anki, and I'm sure there are some other language learning apps out there.
Kelamir 4y ago
Let's be honest, Duolingo is a joke in comparison to anything serious like Anki. I agree that Anki alone doesn't cover it. One has to immerse in the target language to make progress. Anki is only there to speed up the process.

dkarl 4y ago

The way I think of memorization is as scaffolding. Rote memorization is very different from the skill or understand you are trying to build, and for this reason, many people are skeptical about the value of it. Why practice rote memorization when what you really want is very different? But this is like trying to construct a building without using scaffolding. If you only use Anki and don't do anything else, it's like building scaffolding on an empty lot, and then building more and more scaffolding without using it to build anything else.

bluquark 4y ago

I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill. I was wondering how much adding audio cards or "reversed" E->J cards to my routine might help. Are those variations worth the trouble?

Macha 4y ago
My experience is that doing so has had a minor improvement in my J->E recall, but a major improvement in my E->J recall. If you never intend to write/speak Japanese and just want to build to watching anime or something, I guess you could give it a miss, but I think it's pretty worthwhile. The one caveat with Anki specifically for reversed cards is when you add a bunch of new cards or a new deck and it presents you the reversed card right after the basic card. e.g. seeing the 幸せ -> shiawase (happy) card then immediately after the happy -> 幸せ card, sure you're going to be telling Anki this was an "easy" card, but that's much more about the immediacy than the level of recall you have. For my purposes I actually have three sets of cards in my Japanese deck, one each for kana, kanji and english front card and the other two on the reverse cards (unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words).
- bluquark 4y ago
  Thanks! > unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words I have found this usually proves to be a mistake, textbooks and dictionaries pretend that you need far less kanji than you actually do. Lately I started to mine Anki words from conversations on Japanese twitter and I discovered that everyone casually throw around all kinds of kanji that are not on the Jouyou list and in words every textbook insisted were primarily kana. I think it might be because modern IMEs have made it much easier to casually use rare-ish kanji. Technology has expanded the range of everyone's recall and writing speed, while the textbooks are still reflecting the world of 20 years ago.
tastysandwich 4y ago
Personally I never did audio cards (though I did a lot of listening and conversation outside of Anki) or reverse cards for Japanese. My vocab decks were J->E, and my Kanji decks were Kana->Kanji. I always practised writing my answers on the screen using the whiteboard feature. I think you should strive to keep your decks under 15 minutes total. That means you can complete them in three 5-minute blocks a day. Any longer and I found I would A) miss a deck, meaning I had to catch up the next day; or B) try to rush through them. I highly recommend trying to engage in conversation as much as possible. In my city (in Australia) I went to "conversation classes". Basically Japanese people wanting to improve their English would meet with Australians wanting to improve their Japanese. It went for an hour, half of which was spent talking in English, and half in Japanese. And if you can only speak a little bit of Japanese, it's totally fine, you can just speak in broken Japanese mixed with English. It was really fun! You'll find opportunities to use your new vocab, and it'll stick much better.

textninja 4y ago

I tried to use Anki a long time ago, but maintaining cards ended up being too toilsome. Now that we have ChatGPT and other AI tech to take some of the pain out of that, I might give it another try for language study. I do however maintain that for many skills it’s better to memorize processes over facts, and develop a more nuanced embedding with natural repetition intervals, rather than overfitting via excessive Anki-fication.

hackernewds 4y ago
try for any subject "summarize X as Anki cards". I found a reply above particularly helpful to even summarize anything at all. perhaps someone could design software that automatically translates the article to the Anki cards as well. I'd love to collaborate with someone on such a project (as a data scientist)