Reflections on 5 years of daily Anki

[jannesan]

After more than 5 years of daily flashcard practice, I have been having some new thoughts and conclusions about my methods that I would like to share here and invite everyone to discuss. Let's start with a short introduction about my history with flashcards before discussing some realizations I recently had about how to improve the usefulness of this daily habit that is so dear to me.

 

I started learning Chinese in the summer of 2017 and by the end of the year I incorporated daily use of Skritter to learn writing and reading simplified characters into my study routine. By mid 2018 I grew annoyed by Skritter's focus on practicing single characters and I switched to Anki with my own word-focused cards. Throughout the years I mostly used a single note template that includes the English and Chinese word, pinyin and one or more example sentences and generates cards for both directions English to Chinese and vice versa. The first years I strictly quizzed myself on being able to write the characters in addition to getting the translation and pronunciation right, but over the past years I had to admit that without any real intention to actually handwrite anything the focus on writing hurt my progress in general comprehension, so I stopped being strict on getting the writing right.

 

As for the words that make into into my Anki deck, a large portion is drawn from books and articles I read, another chunk comes from the unknown words I note down when talking with teachers or other natives. In theory this already provides the context in which the word is encountered naturally, but here comes my first big mistake: As my cards are word-focused, I do not quiz myself on the actual usage of the word, but on the translation, even if I'm always trying to also think of examples while answering. Although I include example sentences on the cards, in practice the actual sentence in which I encountered the word is often lost due to several reasons:

 

• I only noted the word after it came up in conversation, not the context
• I saved the word when looking it up while reading, but not the sentence
• I pre-learned the word before reading a text without knowing what context it appears in

When choosing example sentences, I mostly just choose some short ones from Pleco that show a few of the different usages of the word. For some words there are many usages and I often include multiple meanings on the English side of the card and then include one example sentence for each meaning. I now believe this is another big mistake, as it makes it harder to judge whether I truly "know" the word and actually just creates an illusion of comprehension. Instead of knowing the word well in the context that is most useful to me, I sort of know it in multiple contexts, but not well enough to actually use it in my own speech or writing.

To sum up the mistakes mentioned above, I think my focus on single word translations has outlived its usefulness and has become more and more of an obstacle, especially as I encounter more words similar to ones I already know. As a result, there is a big chunk of words in my vocabulary that I may understand when encountering them in the right context, but that I am not able to appropriately use when speaking. I believe this has contributed to my feeling of stagnation in how I express myself, often reverting to very basic vocabulary although I have studied more appropriate, precise terminology.

 

Another mistake that I am sure many here are guilty of is the stubbornness to repeatedly quiz myself on words I keep forgetting, but that are also quite useless to me personally, those words I already forgot when and how I added them to the deck and that I have never encountered again in real life since then. There are voices calling for full deletion of one's Anki deck from time to time, that for sure is one way, but I personally opt for just suspending those cards, so I can potentially reuse them in the future once that word becomes relevant again. The decision to suspend cards continues to be a hard one and I believe I must be more quick to suspend cards for words that have no immediate use to me.

 

As a consequence of reflecting on my mistakes, I have now switched to writing mostly sentence-based cards, in particular for those verbs and adjectives that have multiple uses. This lets me focus on single uses of words in the context they appear to me when encountering them. There are still many of those cards with multiple meanings in my deck and I set myself the aim to slowly convert those into sentence cards as I encounter them. I also try my best to remove those words I haven't encountered naturally and I don't see myself using soon, it feels more easy to make that decision for the English->Chinese cards than the Chinese->English ones ("what if the next novel I read uses this word?"). Speaking of translation directions, for the sentence cards I am still indecisive when to study both directions and when to only quiz English->Chinese (and suspend the other card immediately). Generally it feels more useful to quiz myself on translating to Chinese as its harder and more closely simulates the production skill which I feel is most stagnating.

 

I am interested to hear whether anyone here has had similar changes in their approaches to the tool of flashcards or learning vocabulary in general. Let me know your thoughts!

[Jan Finster]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

 

I used Anki only in the initial stages to learn the vocabulary of HSK 1-3 to get a head start.

Reading your strategy and conclusions, I wonder why you do not simply stop Ankiing and read (books, random texts, etc). Reading and re-reading the same texts. The re-reading should have the same effect as reviewing flash cards (?)

[sanchuan]

If you read Chinese on the regular, you no longer need SRS to practice passive word recognition. But if you really do enjoy SRS, there's still plenty you could put it to good use for (character practise, chengyu, literature, etc).

 

More to your point, however, when it comes to practising words, you could still benefit from holding on to your En-to-Ch cards specifically to improve those output skills you say are flagging a bit (synonyms, collocations, etc). I would convert them all to sentence cards, as you already suggest doing. This is easier said than done, and you would really need to come up with a good method/layout: translating En-to-Ch isn't a binary pass/fail thing. This also means keeping your deck well pruned because output practice may be more challenging and time-consuming than drilling single words (depending on how you set it up).

 

If you're also keen to keep recognition cards going, then my suggestion would be to trim them down to a much smaller set, only keeping the ones that you think are:

- really kind of important to recognise during input

BUT

- not really important to be able to recall during output. 

 

[jannesan]

On 12/31/2023 at 4:03 PM, Jan Finster said:

Reading your strategy and conclusions, I wonder why you do not simply stop Ankiing and read (books, random texts, etc). Reading and re-reading the same texts.

 

Well, there are a few reasons. For one, the ritual itself has become a part of my daily routine and I enjoy it most of the time. But a better reason for at least the English to Chinese quizzing is the potential in improving my recall in speech, however I think I need to switch to the sentence-based approach to really reap the benefits. Overall though, I agree that for the Chinese to English cards I would be better off spending the equivalent amount of time reading instead.

 

@sanchuan That is some great advice and a good new year goal to reduce recognition cards to a minimum and improve quality of production cards while also being strict to prune unnecessary ones. I hope I can keep up the discipline to do this while reviewing, especially the converting of existing cards is definitely quite an effort.

[cncorrect]

I know that Chinese students always learn their native language in order of '字 - 词 - 句 - 文章'. For each character that you have learnt, you need to be able to read and write it, and then put it into a word, sentence and article.

[Johnny-5]

On 12/31/2023 at 5:03 PM, Jan Finster said:

I used Anki only in the initial stages to learn the vocabulary of HSK 1-3 to get a head start.

Reading your strategy and conclusions, I wonder why you do not simply stop Ankiing and read (books, random texts, etc). Reading and re-reading the same texts. The re-reading should have the same effect as reviewing flash cards (?)

 

Just saw a Youtube vid from a 5 year Japanese Anki user and as he was talking about how much time he'd spent on Anki I kept wondering "why don't you just read a book?" til he eventually mentioned that he did try reading a book, but it was a quite hard book suitable for adult native speeakers. He unsurprisingly had a bad time of it. 

 

I'd say that reading is similar to reviewing cards in your Anki deck to the extent that the repetitions are spaced out. But with reading you get to see the words and expressions in different contexts and more importantly the repetitions are based on which word is more important and useful in the language and not based on a computer algorithm and the learners incomplete knowledge of the language they are trying to learn. 

[PerpetualChange]

This is good feedback. I'm using Anki right now for Japanese, because there's a pre-made deck for the textbook I am using. But I think sooner rather than later I will move on to graded readers and things like that. I noticed that most days I just study some Anki and that's it. It doesn't feel as deep as my Chinese study was.

[wibr]

I think flashcards are great for boosting words into long-term memory for the first time. With larger intervals the SRS model becomes less accurate anyway and that's where natural exposure like reading makes more sense. But reading alone doesn't provide the initial more frequent repetitions like SRS, so even at an advanced level it doesn't hurt to study new words with flashcards for a while. I also think that flashcards are a great way to make use of waiting times during the day, boring meetings, during the commute etc., for reading I need a quiet environment with no interruptions.

[Johnny-5]

On 1/3/2024 at 5:27 AM, wibr said:

But reading alone doesn't provide the initial more frequent repetitions like SRS

You sure about that? I read a brother's Grimm story and it repeated the word 烧炭工 what felt like fifty times... 

 

You may say "that's not normal" but lets say you're reading an article about 哈马斯 巴勒斯坦 and 以色列, how many times do you think you'll see those words in the article? And how many related words will you encounter that you'd never know to include in your Anki deck?

 

I think I once heard someone complaining about how people default to traditional language study methods to fill any potential gaps in their learning. They compared it to Christians with their "god of the gaps", but I'm really thinking that we have a case of "Anki of the gaps".