The "I just deleted my Anki deck" celebration thread

Discussion in 'Learning Techniques and Advice' started by Big_Dog, Oct 18, 2014.

  1. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Have you recently deleted a big 'ol clunky SRS deck to free up some time? Maybe you deleted a bunch of flash cards to spend more time in context, or just to relieve some pressure. For whatever reason, if you have destroyed a nice chunk of SRS data, please tell us about it in this thread. This is a cause for celebration, and not regrets.

    I just deleted all the cards in my Russian Anki deck older than 1 month, and I feel great! It came to about 3000 cards. Reviews were getting to be about 60 min. All my other combined reps add about 20-30 min per day, so I really want Russian to be about 30 min. If you ever try this out, you'll notice it takes a couple weeks for the number of reviews to go down. This is because you kept all of your high-rep (new) cards. But they do go down, and quite steadily, so no worries.

    My state of mind now is a far cry from when I first deleted my huge Supermemo collection about 8 years ago. I had well over 20,000 cards, and I deleted the whole thing. I sort of went into shock for a week or two, thinking I had made a huge mistake. But the soothing feel of freedom eventually chased off all the bad thoughts, and i realize I had made the right choice. For me, there is a time to use an SRS and a time to stop using it. In addition, there are times to adjust and fine tune my usage. I'm curious about other people's experiences.
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  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Big Dog just beshat ( :) ) a thread in this forum extolling the benefits of deleting Anki/SRS decks and feeling of freedom it gives. Naturally I beg to differ, but thought this thread a more appropriate venue for same since he was asking in his thread for experiences of deleting decks, of which I have and hope to have in the future, none. [N.B. this post was moved from another thread where it was originally posted to this one which it referenced.]

    On HTLAL earlier this year, emk laid out a reasonable case for deletion in the thread Sick and tired of SRS. My comments below apply to his argument as well, which was well reasoned, although he quotes Kazumoto of AJATT fame, whom I don't view as a prophet because he has changed his tune and what he advises now is not how he learned Japanese (sounds familiar with other polyglots doesn't it?).



    Not a cause for regret? - If you didn't spend any time making good cards, then no it wouldn't be. If you think you couldn't possibly be making a mistake or just don't care, then probably not either, although it is very easy to simply make a backup copy in case, which you can continue to ignore. An easy way to do this it to create a second user profile in Anki, save the deck in the main one, and then suck it into the new one, after which you delete the original deck (or vice versa or just keep creating new profiles for new stuff while ignoring the old). With every new computer I have gotten over past 20 years I have copied the old hard drive data files to the new. I don't often look for anything in that archive but when I do I am glad I kept it (which includes programs no longer findable or which are necessary to view files. Hard drive space these days is large and cheap). So yeah I'm a digital hoarder, but it doesn't cost anything monetarily or in attention.

    If you create good cards, with multi-word definitions and example sentences, then those are worth keeping, and the time spent creating them should not be turned into nothing via deletion. And the algorithm keeps pushing well-known cards further into the future anyway where they take only a second to review on the next encounter.

    My advice: Create cards worth keeping and don't delete them!

    3000 cards 60 minutes of review but only willing to spend 30 minutes - Yeah sounds familiar. I myself am willing to devote an hour to reviews, and more time to creating new cards. As I have said repeatedly, the same time now that originally only maintained 3000 cards, i.e. 40-60 minutes, now maintains over 13,000 cards. It is very easy to control the length of review time via the options Anki gives like limiting oneself to so many reviews a day, or simply stopping new card additions until the number of reviews dies down, being less strict on failing cards, etc. I try to learn 30-60 new words a day, and yesterday spent 54 minutes on 619 old review plus 39 new ones. When it gets to 60 minutes I slow it down until it gets into the 40s.

    My advice: Control the pace of new card additions and strictness of failing to make Anki work the way you want it to!

    Soothing feeling of freedom - Sure you can feel good when you get rid of a burden or a taskmaster. Unless you care how fast you learn a language and especially how fast you reach the critical amount of vocabulary that constitutes the lexical threshold, i.e. 15-20,000 words. I'm going for 20K+ in German because of various factors that make it different from English upon which most research is based. I do sometimes dread my daily Anki grind, but slowly, little by little, I am always pleased by the long-term results. I'm too old to take 5-10 years to learn the amount of vocabulary I need and I want to move on to another language or two as well.

    My advice: Suck it up and make short term sacrifices for the long-term gain of actually being able to learn a language to a high level of proficiency in as short of a time as possible!

    Time to use and time to stop, time to adjust and fine tune - Well those two concepts are mutually exclusive since you can't fine tune and adjust what you have deleted. emk makes a good argument in the HTLAL thread linked above, for learning several hundred words at a time in spurts. This is easy to do without deletion though. Simply create a new deck, and when you are finished with that project, move it into the larger main deck and rinse and repeat. Anki is very versatile, again if you create cards worth keeping. My time to quit using Anki is when my listening and reading comprehension is past the lexical threshold of 98%. I'm not there yet, and I want to reach it soon, so I keep at it every day.

    My advice: Use Anki to help you reach the lexical threshold far faster than you can by extensive reading alone, or by whatever slower collection of methods that would take YEARS AND YEARS to reach that goal!

    The winning combination in my not so humble opinion - The quickest way to acquire a large vocabulary in the range of 15-20,000 words is to use various courses + Anki or Iversen lists + modest amounts of extensive reading to reinforce and fully learn that vocabulary. If you don't like Anki and are willing to suffer a certain attrition rate, then Iversen's list method which I now use initially along with Anki, is a great alternative and more flexible than Anki. But it too requires commitment of time regularly and in sufficient quantity to achieve its effect in a shorter period of time.

    My advice: Use Anki or Iversen word lists along with courses and extensive reading to acquire in a shorter period of time what other learners take forever to learn, if that is they don't quit along the way!

    If I need those words I'll come across them again - This is another common argument for deleting hard to learn words. It is true you don't need any particular word, let alone right now. But as I said in another thread, the lexical threshold works to a great degree by exclusion. You need an awful lot of words, and it is unavoidable that some of them are harder, perhaps much harder to learn than others. But in my experience with German at least, there simply are not enough easy words so as to be able to ignore hard ones. Unless words seem so upper register or rare that you could not imagine coming across them in a year's time in your native language, then you might as well just learn them now. It is actually easier to learn this way because even though Anki has the effect of winnowing down reviews to a knot of harder words that are reviewed over and over and take up a disproportionate amount of daily review time, those words are still interlaced with easier words as a whole, and in example sentences for those hard words. Whereas if you save all the hard ones for later, you have nothing but hard words to study. Learning some of the hard words regularly over time avoids this.

    My advice: Learn hard to learn words that you come across now rather than later, unless you would never read their L1 translations in the course of a year!

    Think about the future - Real life gets in the way of our language learning goals activities at times, and sometimes for a long time. And even when we reach the desired level of fluency and proficiency in a language, it needs to be maintained. Many learners report that even after decades, restarting a language is easier than learning a new one, which of course makes sense. You learned it once, and it some of that stuff has to be tucked away somewhere in the recesses of your brain. But that was knowledge you knew at one point, and the question is, how do you know what exactly you already knew? The answer in general is to look at courses you used then, and for vocabulary, Anki and word lists can be same. If I ever have to stop studying and using German for a longish time, Anki represents a significant, probably the major, part of my way back.

    My advice: Plan for the future and make good decks and keep them for both unforseen events causing you to have to stop a language for a long time, or for the purposes of maintenance along with extensive reading!

    [Note: I edited my original post to add the last two points.]

    Being a grind/swot and using methodical methods may be tedious and not fun, but done efficiently it produces results far sooner than the less strenuous but more fun paths. And for those who have a love-hate relationship with wanderlusting and lack of focus, you can wanderlust sequentially while actually reaching a high level of proficiency in each language instead of meandering all over creation in multiple ones at the same time and possibly never reaching a high level in any.
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  3. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    Well, kind of sort of. I did not in fact delete my Anki deck, but I've recently started to use it differently. I refuse to mark words as "failures" any longer. If I didn't remember the word perfectly it's "hard," if I remembered it it's "okay," and if I remembered it and felt like I could have used it in a sentence it's "easy." But, words I fail -- and new words of interest which I come across in reading -- I put into my phone dictionary's favorite's list, and I've started doing a weak version of Gold List, where I'll scan over the list every few days and delete the words I remember. If I come across the word again later and don't remember it, it'll go back on the list, and sooner or later I'll get it. I only started doing this recently, so I'll see how it feels for a while and then decide how to continue, but I really don't think I have it in me to keep making new Anki cards. Best thing about Pleco is the way the SRS is directly hooked to the dictionaries and can be added to at the touch of a button.
  4. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Big Dog, I don't mind your moving my post here from the other thread, it is just that you asked for experiences of members in deleting Anki decks rather than debating whether one should, which I thought might derail the point of this thread.
  5. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    That's ok - I think it's better here.
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  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I can tell Peregrinus is upset, but that wasn’t why I wrote the post. I just want to support SRS users who are starting to question their usage or over-usage of said tool. Deleting SRS information is often the best way to go in this situation, so I want you to know that there is no need to be concerned. There are some amazing polyglots (Luca, Arguellas, etc) who never use SRS's or wordlists, and they learn languages as good as or better than anyone else.

    Keep in mind that there are learners like Professer Arguellas and Iversen who learn mostly for reading and listening purposes. They have a completely different set of goals than the majority of language learners – those of us who see conversation as our main goal, or at least as an equally important goal.

    Also keep in mind that users who like to learn large quantities of vocabulary up front are somewhat rare. Iversen and Peregrinus for example. Maybe coincidentally, I think both of these guys avoid production for quite a while, which also isn’t typical for learners who have the primary goal of becoming good at conversation.

    When someone with a learning style like Peregrinus gives you advice about SRS usage, know that he likes to learn large quantities of vocabulary (perhaps 20,000 words?) up front and study passively for a very long (perhaps 2 years?) period of time before beginning to converse or write.

    This is important to know, because most students who start to go down this learning style path change it. Case in point – Kazumoto(Katz) of AJATT fame who Peregrinus mentions. There were literally thousands of Katz followers on the Kanji Kohii forum a few years ago. Katz used to be all about the 10,000 sentence method, which required learning 10,000 Japanese sentences on an SRS. Katz bragged about doing over 3 hours a day of reviews, and many more hours a day “mining” sentences from various sources. His apostles were absolutely nuts about the method, and about half the threads in that forum were devoted to it. But if you go to that forum now you’ll notice a change. AJATT discussions are now prohibited there. Why did this happen? Well, there were many very heated discussions about the method that made the forum into a battleground. As I said, it used to be very much in favor, but that changed. People who had been using the method for years began to look around and realize that they were working harder and not making as much progress as learners using more balanced methods. Many people were extremely upset; they felt like they had been lead down the wrong path, and they wanted to warn others away from it.

    Even though I never used AJATT, I have a lot of experience with SRS’s. I’ve been using them since 2005, and I think I know many of their pitfalls. It’s easy to get seduced into thinking that they’re doing more for you than they really are. Many people are going to have to experience it for themselves before they believe me, I know. But when they do experience it, I want them to know it’s ok to limit their use of SRS’s, delete large quantities of data from them, stop using them completely, etc. If you are concerned about any of this, this is a thread where you can ask questions. I’ve been in your shoes, and I’m here for you.

    It's better to create cards that fulfill their purpose, doing the bare minimum amount of work, and then delete them when appropriate. Don't spend a lot of unnecessary time creating cards, don't fall in love them, and do (eventually) delete them.

    Actually, I deleted 3000 cards. I have another 1000 left.

    Very impressive, but people who read this should know that there's no guarantee they will have similar stats. For example, I did 318 cards in 60 min today, 14 of those were new, studying Japanese, Mandarin and Russian decks. The kinds of statistics in this comment are what got so many people interested in AJATT in the first place, and ultimately caused them a lot of pain. There is no mention of all the time that was taken to create those "good" cards here either, so the numbers are somewhat misleading. This entire AJATT study plan is designed to achieve the 30-60 new words a day goal. Most will not be able to do that, and those who will, unless they are not interested in conversation, will be disappointed with the results if they compare it with other methods.

    In addition, the AJATT method was created for Japanese. It's reasonable to argue that it's a good tool for getting comfortable with reading Japanese. But for any other language I've learned, it has very limited use. There's a reason why very few learners of european languages use the method. Some get excited about it in the beginning, eventually see how unnecessary it is, then change course.

    Learning words in isolation like this is not the same as being able to produce them or even recognize them in the wild. Again, this isn't a good method for those who are really interested in conversation. And I agree with you - students are much more likely to quit along the way using your method.

    I prefer to just create a new deck if I feel the need to. Create simple cards, and delete them as you see necessary. It's quick and easy, and I believe that creating something new makes the knowledge stick much better.
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  7. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    There are several points to discuss in BD's reply to my post:

    Extensive Reading
    First I think it interesting that BD starts a thread about Anki use and mentions he too uses it and has for a long time, and then in a rebuttal touts the benefits of extensive reading alone. Extensive reading works. Dr. Arguelles and others have done it alone and successfully for many languages. So there is clear unrefuted anecdotal evidence from credible polyglots for it working.

    But there are important limitations to ER:
    • The non-trivial possibility of inferring wrong meaning from context when an explicit lookup or study of vocabulary via Anki or word lists would clarify the definition.
    • Research that shows unimpressive vocabulary gain from ER for the time spent on task, i.e. it takes lots of times (hours a day), and thus is inefficient compared to SRS and word lists time-wise.
    • ER depends on knowing enough to even use it, i.e. the easy availability of comprehensible input at steadily but slowly graduating degrees of difficulty, which is very hard to come by once any graded readers run out, generally around the low B1 level. So one can either switch to intensive reading of unadapted native materials, or simply and more efficiently, pre-learn/co-learn a butt-load of vocabulary and then continue on with ER when one has enough vocabulary to use unadapted native materials.
    Where ER really shines is with usage, i.e. how words pattern together in a language. But explicitly learning the vocabulary necessary to hit the lexical threshold via Anki or Iversen lists first in a more time-efficient manner, then allows one to continue with ER and be able to concentrate on such usage instead of also having to decode a lot of unknown vocabulary. The more you have to decode, the more intensive the activity becomes.

    Goals and amount of Vocabulary Needed
    It is very true as BD says, that one needs much less vocabulary for casual chit-chat, non-in-depth, survival type of conversation. Dr. Arguelles discusses this in his talk from the Novi Sad conference linked to in another thread. But the fact that one needs less, doesn't change the fact that ER alone still takes a long time per word to acquire. And if one wants to do more with a language, like watch a movie or read the newspaper and get more than just the gist, then one needs quite a lot more vocabulary, and the time efficiency factor becomes even more important.

    Learners abandoning SRS for massive acquisition of vocabulary
    OK the AJATT folks did that, others probably have and some still might. But I haven't nor might others. And Iversen has never abandoned word lists or the regular use of them to steadily acquire a large vocabulary in the various languages he studies. So this is really a red herring because there are counter-examples to those who changed course, i.e. this is no argument in favor of deleting *good* Anki decks (doesn't really matter what you do with bad ones).

    I gave reasons in my previous post why I believe one should both create good cards and then not delete them. BD is giving his advice, i.e. don't create more detailed cards, don't fall in love with them and then delete them, without really giving reasons for his advice. Other than it makes him feel good.

    Time Spent creating cards
    I did not give an explicit time in my earlier post in this thread, but in other threads I have said card creation is a time suck and have provided estimates of how much time I spend on same, which I will give again here. For every hour spent reviewing Anki cards each day I have spent another half-hour to hour creating new cards. But there are ways to make this go faster like taking an existing AnkiWeb deck and then modifying it, and simply copy/pasting definitions and example sentences from online dictionaries. Part of this time though is searching Anki to see if a prospective new word is already there or not if one does not recognize it, which I might not for unstudied words in my waiting queue.

    Stats for Review Times
    BD then goes on to criticize AJATT which is fine, but off-point again. What they do/did is not what I do/have done nor what I advocate. My own stats for review times are if anything much higher than other Anki users since I generally am liberal in failing unless the reviews really start to pile up. Unless you are a moron who stares at the screen for 5 minutes when you can't recognize a word instead of simply failing a card and moving on, I think it would be hard to have stats worse than mine as in review time per X number of cards, with the caveats I gave of occasionally needing to stop adding new cards and being less prone to fail cards in order to let reviews die down temporarily.

    But what I said about the same time I once spend on a much smaller deck now being sufficient to maintain the larger one, is an experience shared by other users with large decks. You can't know this until you actually do it, and most users never have. But you should be able to understand theoretically why this is so from the SRS algorithm.

    Iso-dog strikes again
    Here is how this debate has gone before: I accuse BD of straw-manning me, he accuses me of straw-manning him by making such an accusation. :)* Learning words in Anki or via Iversen lists is not isolation as long as it is not in fact isolated from courses and texts from which words were taken, or from other methods to reinforce that learning like extensive reading and listening. I read and listen to a lot of German media every week in addition to my Anki work. Only rarely will one find someone who uses Anki or wordlists and nothing else, and usually after a while you don't hear from them again.

    As for it not being a good method for those mainly just interested in chit-chat, low-proficiency, shallow-depth conversation only rather than fully understanding movies and television and books, I concede the point because I don't give a rat's ass what learners with such low goals do. My advice is for those who want to acquire in the most time-efficient manner possible, the amount of vocabulary needed for comprehension for those more in-depth activities, i.e. 15-20,000 words (9-12,000 word families).


    I agree totally. That's why I create something new, as in new cards. If you mean that deleting old cards make the new ones created afterwards stick better, then I would be very interested in either research supporting same, or even just sheer speculation as to why this novel theory of learning is valid, i.e. why destroying previous learning material makes new material stick better. Is it the same strategy that Cortes used with his men in burning their ships so that the men would be well-motivated to succeed in their conquests, i.e. no way back?



    *Note to Big Dog: I use smilies to take the edge off of comments which I truly don't mean to come across as too critical or even serious at all, or just for humorous purposes. I never use them sarcastically, which I think you possibly believe.
  8. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Hmmm... I'm not convinced about that statement.

    If you use an SRS as pre-learning for a target piece of reading, then you can claim that you're building up initial recognition in isolation to add meaning to later. But it's more typical to use SRS to remember stuff after encountering it in real usage. So your "context" may well simply be an association with previous context, and the longer you get away from the source material over time, the more that context diminishes.

    True, but don't forget the AJATT example, where people were genuinely using Anki and a handful of books for years.

    SRS that is tied into a programmed progression would be a great idea, but right now, it doesn't exist.
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  9. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I always pre-learn when I can or learn as I go along. For courses I have used, I input a lesson's vocabulary and study it prior to doing the lesson. Obviously it takes a while for word to become fully learned, hence the SRS progression. With novels I read, I look up unknown words as I go along and input them into Anki as well. This is similar to simply using a mouse-over tool while reading online which I do as well. However there have been some large lists that I have added to Anki that came from courses I don't own, in particular the Mittelpunkt German course (though I own the Aspekte series whose vocab I also stuck in Anki).

    So with that vocab I neither learned it prior or later. But it still is not true to say such words are learned totally in isolation because I harvest and add example sentences to my cards if findable, which for most words are, and every day I listen to German radio and television and read German news articles or from a novel where I have chances to encounter such words and in fact do. Only if I used Anki alone divorced from all such course texts and extensive activities, would it be truly learning in isolation.

    And here is the critical point: repetition. I re-do course lessons and reread chapters in a novel and plan to re-read the entire novel(s) at least once more later, after hopefully Anki along with the initial exposure(s) has helped me learn the words fairly well. ER relies on repetition as well, but just takes a lot longer.


    But as self-learners we can actually do that for ourselves, and in fact while I don't use the site, that is what LingQ and similar sites are all about. I realize you are still considering example sentences alone as in the original AJATT plan not to be context, a view that Big Dog shares, but I do view them as valid context. The fact that it doesn't exist as part of a larger connected text doesn't change the fact it is context, although perhaps it makes it not as effective. Any AJATT collection was a haphazard collection of X,000 sentences with no thought to repetition, frequency, etc. And thus I suspect it would actually take on the order of 40K sentences to be effective by itself if it can be. Of course this was all before Kazumoto's "epiphany" after which came the directive from AJATT Center: "Forget 10K sentences - IT'S A WHOLE NEW THING - It's all about Massive Close Deletions now!!!!!!!!!". And obviously that is not how he himself actually learned Japanese, i.e. he did a Benny-flop.
  10. t123

    t123 New Member VIP member

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    I often just delete my deck. A few months later I come back and start again.

    But I wonder if there's a plugin that does something like: When the interval exceeds __ days/weeks/months/years then suspend/delete this card.
    Because personally I find that once the review time exceeds about 8 weeks I probably know that word and it's not worth the effort of ever reviewing it again. Except I don't like deleting cards, a bit of a hoarder like many. If it was automatic, out of sight, out of mind I probably wouldn't even notice.
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  11. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I've never seen such a plugin. However you can sort in the browser by next review date and en masse delete or just move to an archive deck. Or you could just sort and manually suspend such cards. Anki is very flexible and it doesn't take the indiscriminate method of deletion to make it work.

    Personal Lexicon
    One additional and to me big benefit of keeping decks, is that they then become my personal lexicon. Since I have taken time and care to create good cards, I trust my cards better than any single online dictionary, since I use multiple ones and many of them don't lead with the most common use of a word. However if I come to believe later that a card's definition needs to be adjusted then I do so.
  12. t123

    t123 New Member VIP member

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    I know but the problem is when I have to do it manually it never gets done because A) I'm lazy and B) I always think maybe I'll need these later so let's keep them a bit longer. If they were automatically deleted in the background I wouldn't even notice they were gone and hence probably wouldn't care.
  13. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Well suspending does keep them longer, as does transferring them to another deck. As to laziness I can't help you, because I have a more obsessive, err I mean diligent, personality :). Your other alternative is to fiddle with the algorithm but you can only affect the interval in minutes and the easiness factor. That would have a deleterious effect initially though. The programmer is adamant that it be used the "proper" way and doesn't allow more tinkering as in being able to adjust later intervals but not earlier ones.

    You would actually also have to manually select each card in the group to be moved using cntrl-A.
  14. hua hua

    hua hua New Member

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    大狗,
    I tried to use Anki because you adviced me it was good and it worked somehow. But I got boring and I quit. I don't want to use it again and I think learning so many words that way is not so good. Sorry to say that, but I think you are right to tell people to delete it and set a limit.
    花花:p
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  15. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    hua hua,

    If you had kept using Anki, you would have learned the word "bored", the past participle of "to bore/to become bored", and then instead of yourself becoming boring, you would have felt bored instead. :p
  16. hrhenry

    hrhenry Member VIP member

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    Or a correction would have come along, perhaps in a forum, in a more natural way which has a better chance of sticking.
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  17. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I would like to say that I realize I have been very adamant in this thread in representing my views and opinions and advice re using Anki and whether one should delete or not. As I said earlier, my target audience for same is those who wish to learn a language to a higher level, and especially to read well and understand more complicated visual and auditory media, and also wish to do it in as short a time as possible.

    If on the other hand one is interested primarily in lower level conversational ability, it still is necessary to learn on the order of 5000+ words. And if one is of a mind to not grow a big Anki deck or spend lots of time reviewing flash cards, then I would offer the following advice, which is not to use Anki at all. This is because Anki's effectiveness depends on the SRS algorithm and presumes that one will follow the progression until a word becomes fully learned. This of course will vary by word, and it could take 6 months to a year for a group of a few hundred words to all become fully learned. If you shortcut the process by deleting earlier than that, then essentially you have wasted your time reviewing those words that were not fully learned yet.

    Instead I would recommend Iversen's word list method. It is far more flexible, and although even he has an attrition rate of 15%+, it still gives you a very good chance of remembering the remainder.

    I would also then recommend that after completing a beginning and "advanced" course which would give you 2500 words or so, that you focus solely on conversational materials. For those learning Russian, Big Dog has been posting some awesome resources as in the transcripts for a couple Russian television shows. If you took those and added unknown words to an Iversen list, then you are focusing on your goal of conversation, no matter that some words will be less frequent. You will learn a lot of set phrases involving the higher frequency vocabulary you are studying, which should greatly aid fluency for that level of proficiency. This is a better way to harvest words than even by using a frequency dictionary that goes up to 5000, because such a work tries to cover so many thematic areas to at least a shallow level, when many of those only rarely become the topic of a spoken conversation. If someone really wanted to be industrious, they could input all those transcripts into an analysis tool to tokenize and lemmatize all the words and then sort them by frequency. That would be a better frequency resource.

    So sorry if I come across too strong at times, do your own thing, don't worry, be happy. :)
  18. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I use both anki and extended reading. Most polyglots will agree that tons of input is required to learn a language to a high level. But polyglots differ in the amount of isolated vocabulary study they do. When people consider deleting SRS data, if they have doubts, they can take solace in the fact the some of the best polyglots don’t even use SRS’s or word lists. I don’t think the fact that I use anki should bar me from making those statements. And for the record, I never touted the benefits of "extensive reading alone".

    All theses points you brought up assume pure ER learning. Who uses a pure ER method? I recommend you use ER as part of a balanced language learning plan which includes reading, writing, conversing, listening, grammar, pronunciation etc. Isolated vocabulary studies are optional.

    It’s a waste of time – was that really not clear?

    You are using the old AJATT method, with some modifications. Most of the Kohii members who did it also made adjustments, so in my mind you are just using the AJATT method for a European language.

    Lol, couldn’t go a whole post without an insult:) So everybody who has worse stats than you is a moron? Yeah, this really sounds like the kohii forum now.

    Actually I agree with this. If the words are not isolated from their context, they are in-context, and not in isolation. So maybe you just haven’t understood what I’ve been saying all this time. I’ll repeat - if you take a single word, phrase, sentence, etc, out of it’s context, and study it on the side in order to make it stick better, the time you spend studying it on the side is isolated word, phrase, sentence, etc study time.

    Who are you conceding the point to? I said “this isn't a good method for those who are really interested in conversation.” Are you saying learners interested in conversation aren’t interested in fully understanding movies and television and books?

    I’d also like to say that even though the focus of this forum is on reaching a high level in a language, learners with lower goals are very welcome at polydog, so please don’t be discouraged.

    I realize this was meant as sarcasm, but I actually kind of agree with it. Sort of like sink or swim. Deleting your decks gives you no (or at least less) recourse but to use your study time to do more balanced things. No need to spend so much time on isolated vocabulary study. Why does deleting an anki card and then recreating it make it stick better? The most obvious answer I can think of is reps.

    It isn’t the most time efficient manner. Harvest words from reading and listening and then study them in isolation for 2 years, or until you reach 20,000, right? Very one dimensional. I may have said it before but having a big anki deck isn’t the same as being able to produce them or even recognize them in the wild. And despite what you have stated, people can learn vocabulary quickly with methods other than yours, and other than pure LR. I recommend you open your mind to other methods.

    That’s ok. A very wise old polyglot once told me “if you find you’re getting really defensive about your method, that’s a sign that you need to change something.”
  19. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

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    Just a few points

    First about deleting old and/or hard Anki cards. I don't use Anki, but I have never liked to go back to old wordlists and consequently I have systematically put them in a pile or thrown them away right after the one and only repetition, which typically took place one day after the original round . However my experience with Serbian wordlists has told me that it might be worth allowing just one more repetition (anywhere from one day to two weeks later). The thing that makes me say that is that I have discovered that the words I have problems with in round two typically aren't the same ones as I had problems with in repetition round one. The most likely explanation is that the first repetition round in itself functioned as learning. If I apply this principle it should have the same effect as a control by Anki. But I would never be as adamant about doing a second repetition as I am about the first one.

    Now, how should that be transferred to an Anki context? Here the initial study is far less intensive - actually you just fill out a card and drops it into the machinery. And when you review a card you are just asked whether you remember the word, where I normally try to remember the associations surrounding the word during the repetition rather than just the meaning. If I have let so much time slip that I don't remember how I learned the word in the first place it is just like getting challenged by Anki, that is without warning at a time chosen by the machine, and I do think relearning is the important part of the repetition. And then I could just as well start all over again. So no, I wouldn't be too worried about throwing out old Anki words. If a set has become so big that you have lost contact with its roots then it should go. And the more monstrously big and cumbersome it has become, the more relevant it must be to get it out of the way.

    Secondly: why are some words harder than others? I have noticed that it does matter which member of a word family you learn first - and the key information isn't necessarily the wordclass, but more often the availability of efficient memory hooks. For instance the substantival form might be the one that has a good association in your own language, and then it would be stupid always to try to remember the verb first. But generally it is worth learning a root form before or at least together with a compound or inflected form, simply because it helps you to organize your vocabulary as one big network rather than isolated terms. But even then there are some words that get through the mesh even after several repetitions. Why? If it is the length alone that bothers you then the "learn the parts first" rule should help. Almost all long words can be split into pieces. Difficult pronunciation should be treated in the same way: split the word up and focus on the parts. If this doesn't help then there probably is some kind of conflicting information which blocks your association process, and my reaction would then be to try to identify the culprit and deliberately choose another set of associations, maybe even from another language. I have checked my notes from my Serbian word learning project and found one of the apparently simple words that eluded me three times in a row: "stavka" (ставка). How can that word pose problems? Well, simply because the temptation to identify it with Danish "stav" ("stick or "staff" in English) is so overwhelming. And somehow I didn't take that seriously enough to try to find an alternative memory hook. But now I've got one: it is NOT "stav" - just some unidentified item. And that's exactly what it means: "item".
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  20. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    @Big Dog

    -Who uses a pure ER method? Many of those same polyglots like Dr. Arguelles, linguamor of HTLAL fame, etc.
    -Is anybody that has worse stats than I a moron? Notice that I said stare at the screen for 5 minutes like a moron, and then later talked about worse stats. You conflated the two, not me.

    And I'll repeat as well, such "isolated" vocabulary study as part of an overall program of course material and reading makes it not isolated, especially when used with example sentences. There is an example on HTLAL of a guy who studied 200 Swedish words a day for a month using no courses or reading as part of the project. That is true vocabulary study in isolation.

    Not if they are interested in going further with what is required for such full understanding, which is acquisition of far more vocabulary than necessary for conversation, which requires lots of Anki/word list study with ER or truly massive ER alone.

    Hence the post of mine immediately preceding yours with advice for such learners.

    This topic was the reason I started the thread, If You Don't Like Anki or Word Lists, then . . .

    Since as you know I am currently not working on production and cannot really speak to that, I can speak only as to comprehension, which many learners over time report to be a major stumbling block for fluent conversation. Using my big Anki deck along with the other things I do has allowed me, relatively quickly, to have very good reading and listening comprehension as far as media goes. I currently don't have much problem reading what the Deutsche Welle site labels as C material, though it is challenging due not so much to vocabulary or even grammar, but to densely reasoned and structured formal/business/academic prose and fine points of usage.

    When I talk about learning vocabulary quickly, I am talking of total time, and not the period of time over which that learning took place. Someone using ER alone for several hours a day for a year is going to achieve the same thing I do or better, with an hour, in the same time period, but at the expense of much more total time spend on the method. They get far more chances to learn usage though.

    If you have examples of people learning 20K vocabulary with a couple years without using Anki/word lists, or *without* spending several hours a day in reading, then by all means refer us to them (excepting Spanish). I have said before that I am actually interested in other methods and if I could find alternatives to Anki I would be open to them if they were as time-efficient. So far I have not seen same, including for L-R which seems to take an awful lot of time and fiddling with.

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