Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.
I thought I had bad recall, but the fact is that I did not know about the memory.
I have trained people in my environment and they have improved enormously.
It is a very good idea that you read a book about mnemonics, and all the techniques, things like exaggerating pictures or places in your head, remembering faces, what a neural connection is and so on, and start applying it.
My upper limit (in anki) is over 400 new words in a different language (like chinese or japanese) per day with extreme exhaustion, not doing anything the entire day but memorizing. This is the equivalent of running a marathon for me on the mental field(I have done real marathons too).
My lower limit is learning 40-50 new words per day. It takes 1 hour,more than a minute per word and no significant effort, I do this as daily routine with now consequences for my work.
Over time, learning new languages become easier and easier.
The world opens a lot when you can go to places like China or Japan and at least you understand what the symbols on the street or the people say. You get a much deeper knowledge about things.
Anki is one of the most amazing things ever invented.
Yeah, 40 new words / day is very manageable. I used my own word lists instead of Anki, but same concept. 1000 words is enough for basic interactions (1 month) and 3000 words is generally good enough for conversation that doesn't get into the vocabulary long tail (just 3 months!) In an immersion context + some grammar textbook, it makes language learning much faster than is generally assumed.
Most people that feel they need a language class, but those are terrible for learning vocabulary. Vocab learning is best done solo.
I'm also using Anki for Finish vocab, and it had helped me a lot. To the point it does feel like a super power.
If you are going to use Anki, it's important to switch the knobs to adapt to what you are learning.
I will share some of the things that have worked for me, for Finnish vocab:
- Intervals for new cards (until they are considered 'learned'): 1 10 15 50 240.
The 240 is critical for me: if I forgot it after 4 hours, it goes back to 1 again... if I got it after 4 hours, then it will have better chances in a couple of days.
Of course this is personal, I have been tweaking those until something makes sense to me.
- Lapese (when a known card is forgotten, and how to re-learn): 10 30 240. Again the 240 check.
- Set an ammount of new cards and max reviews per day that does not make you feel misserable... there needs to be some joy on learning...
If I may ask, are you just learning the vocab ? have you taken courses? Where are you getting the vocab from ?
Just ignore the remaining card count and go by time instead. Getting the remaining count to 0 does nothing. Redefine success as "I set out to do Anki for 10 minutes and I did!".
I had a similar problem with Japanese. It was ok when I kept up with it every day, but at the default settings I was repeating so many cards so often that the time I spent running through the decks was becoming frustrating. I took a camping trip for a few days and came back to several hundred cards per deck waiting for me and it's been hard to get myself back into it.
Your memory is like a muscle. Most people don't use their memory very much in their daily lives and so their ability to remember things atrophies. You need to exercise it regularly.
Memory is also a skill. People have all kinds of techniques to remember things more easily, for instance med students use a lot of mneumonics. The key is to make memories stronger by building associations. Memories that are islands die faster. Associations with places are especially strong, which is the genesis of the "memory palace" technique where you imagine a palace with rooms containing the things that you want to remember. But any association will do. For instance, when I'm learning a language I like to make up a little story for each word. Using your episodic memory is a great way to increase strength of memories.
Learning and memory is a complex thing. If you don't learn even after adjusting the interval, I think there is something else.
Lack of motivation, some mental issue like depression, attention problem while learning. You can't learn stuff like you sweep a floor, tune out and just do the movements.
PS: You also need to understand that everybody is different.
I am incredible good remembering faces and facial expressions, very good remembering places. I see a place on a picture, I know where it is if I have traveled there.
But I am very bad remembering sounds. So I never try to remember using sounds like other people do.
You should learn about yourself, what are your strengths and use them. Buy different memory books and just try them like I did. Some techniques will work for you, some not.
There’s a setting you can tweak allowing you to set smaller intervals like 1 3 7 15 30 minutes until card will be postponed for the next day. Takes a bit longer to learn a new card but it should work. I went from 30% forgotten on each session to 5-10%.
I disagree. Lots of books have quite a few "hapax legomenon", or... words that only appear once. If you're trying to build long-tail vocab, Anki will make sure you get repeated exposure to words that occur infrequently in a particular text. One might argue that these words don't matter as much since they're less common, but once you've mastered all the common vocab in a language, building a broader vocabulary becomes more important.
I don't disagree with you. Maybe I should have been more precise with the term 'language learning'. If you find yourself in the situation that you propose, I think you are already at native level in the target language. I'm mostly referring to those that try to go from zero to C1 or C2 with it.
My personal experience is that most people in the language learning community have trouble fitting SRS into their long term workflow because they don't stop to think much about the natural spacing of repetition they get in their other learning processes.
The people that popularize things like Anki the hardest are those that built and stuck with their own systems from the start. That's more of a referendum on their personality type than on the utility of their way of using Anki.
My hunch is that most people end up struggling because a lot of the most popular systems end up doing the exact opposite of spaced repetition once you consider the complete universe of foreign language input a learner is getting.
I've found that for me, Anki works really well for the first 1000 words, letting me jumpstart early vocab while most of my other time is spent on basic grammar.
For words 1000-5000 or 10000 in frequency, it's easy to get stuck in a trap I see a lot online: every time you encounter a new word, add it to Anki. This is a great way to burn out. You'll encounter most of these words with a natural spacing as you read native materials, if they're in the higher frequency bands. Doing reviews becomes excruciating, since you're losing the efficiency benefits of using the SRS unless you adjust review frequency based on the native input you consume (a good machine learning side project, perhaps?)
I've had a lot more success using Anki for words off in the long tail that I wouldn't otherwise have a chance to remember.
For Japanese I just downloaded a deck with 10 000 words, adapted the display a bit for myself (scraped pronunciations from the web, removed useless info to make them more minimalistic) and just started learning. When I read a book and found a word I wanted to learn it was almost always already in the list, and just needed to be moved to the front of new cards.
