I studied Dari own my own and at college as an elective, and ended up taking a job with the ICRC to investigate ISAF war crimes in Afghanistan right after I graduated
These days Dari is my most comfortable second language (and I have quite a few of them)
I'm not sure if, given I had to start from scratch again, I'd go down this route - the description and screenshots seem very overstimulating for me
The most important parts of my language learning in Dari (and Pashto) - the "aha" moments if you will, were trying to express something, making a fool of myself, making everyone around me laugh, and then being gently corrected in a long-winded way (usually because I couldn't understand a simpler, more direct correction)
In hindsight this feels like a very equitable cultural exchange - I learned something valuable about the language and culture while giving my interlocutors a funny memory to share with their friends and family
Let me ask: what sort of background is necessary to get jobs based on your skills in a second language? I'm very into language learning as a hobby, but would it be necessary to get a degree before applying to these sorts of jobs? Where would one even look for jobs?
Anki is great for building one's vocabulary. It is not meant to be the only tool used for learning a language. But actually learning a language is much easier and goes much faster when one has adequate vocabulary.
Well you got another good laugh out of it from me LOL
As an Iranian-American, I've made similar blunders in trying to communicate with my Mexican friends and colleagues. "Hey amigo, do you need a chauqeta?" I would ask to the eruption of laughter. If you look up "Chaqueta", translation services will happily tell you it means "Jacket". Don't trust it. Apparently to some Mexicans it also means jerking off.
I've had some successful sprints using Anki, but I always get fatigued making cards for it after a few months, even when leaning on LLM tools to speed up the process.
One app I used early on when beginning French was Clozemaster, set to keyboard input (instead of multiple choice). The largest benefit was I didn't have to make all the decks, they progress you through the most common words (used in context), and there are ChatGPT grammar explanations for everything if you wanted to drill into it. It sounds very similar to what OP created for themself.
At a certain point you just need to switch to native content, but at the beginning I found Assimil + Clozemaster + comprehensible input on YouTube to be able to get me to watching regular French TV in maybe 6 months.
Shameless plug for anybody who has been through the hell that is Anki card creation for language learning - I built an LLM powered extension for Anki that allows you to wire up fields to arbitrary prompts, and then generate notes in batch (or selectively per field). I use it every day for generating example sentences, definitions, and TTS. Would have quit Anki ages ago without this.
FWIW I did get a lot more mileage from building my own deck vs a custom deck too, would recommend that approach regardless once you're past the initial vocab bootstrapping phrase.
I use yomitan + a spanish dictionary + ankiconnect for flashcard creation. i can browse whatever in spanish, hold shift and hover to see the definition(s) of a spanish word unconjugated + how its conjugated, and hit a + button to add it to my anki deck, either in context or just as a word
There's a large number of prebuilt Anki decks available here as well if this is useful for anyone exploring the space - https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search
For sure! I've gone through some pre-made verb conjugation and vocab decks -- and actually have been meaning to upload one I made for learning Bengali script -- but I still find grinding Anki decks to not be that effective for me. Which sucks, because all you hear is how magic Anki is, but I guess I've always struggled with rote memorization.
As far as I know about decks for language learning, you should be building your own. Pre-built decks don't work so well exactly because you don't spend the time to create the links that work for you personally, I know a few people who tried to shortcut it by using pre-built decks but gave up after noticing it wasn't working well.
It sucks though, it's also the one thing that makes me constantly not be consistent using Anki, I get tired of creating cards and stop for a while.
Ah, that's interesting. I've definitely learned a ton through the vocabulary and conjugation decks and they're a great way to continue learning even on days when there's little other stimulus.
I think what's key is that I'm taking the words and conjugation rules I'm learning and using them relatively quickly, often that day or that week. I.E., I'll come across words in Anki, then hear them in a baseball broadcast or see them in a news article. Or I'll recognize what tense something is because of the rules.
So it's supplemental, and maybe that's why it's sticking better. I don't think I'd want to create decks constantly, I created one 140 card deck and that was enough.
Finally, I do frequently use memory tricks to create associations so maybe my experience with memory castles, mnemonics, and other techniques (which I use on cards I forget frequently to create links I'm unable to create quickly on my own (or to differentiate similar words (or words that are the same but in different tenses))).
I used only pre-"built" decks and got to C1 in Spanish. One was actually prebuilt, the other was literally algorithmically generated disposable clozes. That, one graded reader and comic books got me to being comfortable in an L1->L1 dictionary, and then it's over. You don't need language learning material any more, just material.
People are just repeating this advice about making your own decks, and it's based in nothing but having had it repeated to them. Spaced repetition is boiling in pseudoscience and ancient studies that don't say much other than that there's a forgetting curve.
Most people are just parroting stuff they read on the Supermemo wiki (or somebody read off the Supermemo wiki and repeated to them like they came up with it), and all of that is just thoughts off the top of one guy's head. His innovation is that he wrote a program to do Leitner boxes before he had ever heard of a Leitner box, but people treat every word like gospel.
The only five things I can say for language learning is to go really hard on systems in a new language that are completely unknown to you (like Romance conjugations for an English speaker); only drill sentences, not individual words; always say your Anki answers out loud, and read out loud as much as you can; comic books have pictures, too; and once you get comfortable in an L2->L2 dictionary, you're a more comfortable reader than a lot of natives.
(Edit: the lovely thing about 10K algorithmically generated clozes is that they're utterly disposable, unlike cards that you make yourself. If one is a leech, forget about it. You'll see another one just like it when you get to the point that it won't be a leech for you.)
Did you get through the entire KOFI deck for Spanish? I started the French one, but didn't make it past a month or two before I fell off. I'm thinking of going through the French -> Spanish Assimil course soon and might give the KOFI deck another go, this time in Spanish.
I very much did, and sticking with it was the best choice I made. You will get very very fast at it after a while, and the first verbs are the hardest and most irregular (and you should spend the most time on them.) Throwing in the messy clozes after doing your conjugations is relaxing, and you can do as many of those as you're in the mood for, whereas the conjugations are systematically introduced and you shouldn't speed it up too much. Took me 7 months, but complete mastery. But literally some of the conjugations from the first hard couple months will bother you until the end.
I feel even better than natives sometimes because they learn conjugations in order at school, and when asked to recall them out of order (or hop from form to form) get confused. Once you have conjugations, you can read anything with a dictionary (and the online dle is the best dictionary I've ever used.)
I'm about to start again with KOFI French, but I had to do a lot of work to get my mouth and ears adjusted to hearing French as anything other then murmurs, and to be able to read (luckily for me, French is the opposite of perl and read-only instead of write-only.) There's a lot of stuff in French I want to read; reading all of the stuff translated into Spanish from French (but never into English) has got my beak wet.
Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.
For hearing French, I went through the old FSI French phonology course at the beginning, as well as all the grouped (A1/A2/etc) comprehensible input from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput/playlists. Oh, and I did a bunch of the French listening comprehension on Yabla for a few months: https://french.yabla.com/.
Just seconding all of this and how useful (and annoying) the conjugation deck has been for me in Spanish. Not sure if it was the KOFI one, but it runs through from irregular through to the mostly regular. And yea, total pain in the ass, and some still get me lol and I don't regret it in the slightest cause everything else is a ton easier to pick up and everything becomes much more accessible.
the advantage of building your own decks is choosing words you will actually use. this matters if you're practicing conversation, if your goal is just to read general material then using preselected word lists makes sense
You should be using all the words. If you want to learn words about cooking, buy cookbooks. I want to read all material. I want to read extremely esoteric subjects from UNAM's press, I want to read Cervantes, I want to read cookbooks, I want to read Mexican street fotonovelas from the 70s.
> using preselected word lists makes sense
I have never used Anki for word to word translation, because there is no Spanish word that means any English word. You've restricted yourself to a particular paradigm from the beginning. I mean, do whatever you need to do to get a foothold, but you want to get away from L1 as much as possible as soon as you can.
That makes sense as a long-term goal, but if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.
Get depth at first, and later you can fill in the holes with e.g. a cookbook.
I know you consider it pseudoscience to force creating your own cards, but I do find premade decks result in a lot more leeches. How do you avoid them when relying on these thousands of auto-generated cards?
I don't. I let leeches get suspended. Also, some of those autogenerated cards (surprisingly few) won't make sense and I just suspend those, too. They're all disposable. New cards will eventually come up that are just like the too difficult leech, and one will come up when you're ready to learn it.
Also, one of the many parts of the spaced repetition lore that I do agree with is that if you keep getting the same card wrong in the same way over and over again, you're building up a weird habit that is going to be tough to break. Better to trash it. [edit: you can't do this with the conjugation cards, though. If you keep failing a particular conjugation card, you need to stop, write it down, and spend time with it individually. All of those are important, except maybe the unique conjugations of europeizar.]
> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.
I believe of course in the have fun rule above all others, because this is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. You're going to have to get enjoyment from the process if you're going to stick to it at all. I get a "dopamine hit" every time I get a card right.
If you wanted to sprint, the best way is probably doing the full old-school* Glossika method where you go over the day's sentences, you listen and repeat, you listen and transcribe, then you repeat on your own and record. The next day you start by listening to your recordings and figuring out how to improve them, rerecord, go over your new sentences, rinse and repeat for 3-4 hours a day. You can certainly hammer a language into your head that way, but you probably need a tiger mom threatening to withhold food or something to keep you doing that for 6 months.
About creating your own cards - I've done thousands (not language related), and I've learned and remembered things with them, but there's no science behind writing a good card. Everybody is on their own and flailing, and asking themselves "what would Woźniak do?" rather than coming up with formal rules and testing them. I've got ideas, and there are a few datasets (of people doing spaced repetition sessions over time) available, but I think that treating cards as a black box, discovering the relationships between them over time (through finding which cards are passed and failed together), and creating some sort of internal market of cards between adversarial LLMs could generate good decks, and generate mappings that would allow failing or passing one card to affect many other cards rather than the single card alone.
The best thing about FSRS to me is the decision to stop asking the user about process, and just ask them about goals. Some of the Anki community seem on the verge of giving up on the self-grading, too, and just moving to pass/fail, which I couldn't support more. I never used anything but pass/fail, with the settings from refold (https://refold.la/simplified/) which have been obsoleted by FSRS, which works better with pass/fail only. As I said before, a lot of how these things were designed from the beginning was simply cargo-culting Woźniak.
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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.
This is why for learning Chinese I use Pleco, which is a dictionary that allow has a button to instantly add any word to your flashcard list. So when I encounter a new word I just look it up and then add it to flashcards which I review each morning.
I don't know what similar tools exist for learning other languages but it does help a lot for Chinese.
I'm on year 10 of learning my second language and passed through a variety of teaching/learning methods. Intensive FSI courses, immersion including output as early as possible, self guided based heavily on reading and vocabulary, etc. While I get by mostly fine and now live in my second language, my listening is definitely my weakest skill.
Anki is probably my most beneficial single tool. Though if I were to do it over again I'd follow more or less the poster's strategy. Maybe 80% comprehensible input for listening and 20% Anki for vocab building. At least until I could watch native TV without much effort. I've played around a bit with LLMs, but still haven't found a really great use case for my study.
On the otherhand I think consistent practice (with growing difficulty) trumps technique. Whatever process keeps you motivated to practice month after month is most important.
Just kicked off my third language after reaching B2/C1ish in my second (~5 years in), we'll see what the C1 test determines this fall, and Anki has been the consistent thing that stayed through all the other learning experiments. It's amazing just investing in Anki right out the bat how much quicker I'm moving on the new language. Especially considering it's way harder as it's not like any language I know (rich declension system, etc).
GenAI also been a big helper when I run out of content. "Write me an essay involving [subject I want to learn about]. In my response after reading, any word I've written separated by a comma generate a CSV of the format "that word, english definiton"." I'll then just dump those new words into Anki.
The most effective routine is the one you stick with for sure!
I love anki and use it for Spanish which is showing marked improvement. I do vocab and conjugation with Anki.
Then I just find other ways to immerse myself and call it a day.
- Spanish audio for sports whenever possible
- Interfaces for personal computers/devices
- Picking up the Spanish language weekly from the little box on the corner
- Listening to Spanish artists
- Reading the news in Spanish instead of English (One major benefit here is consuming far less news)
- Writing notes for work and personal projects
- Texting friends
It all really adds up over time and is definitely doable even as an adult, but it requires a ton of work, so being able to find ways to incorporate it into the activities I'm already doing is key for me on top of the more active Anki learning.
I'm at the... "the less news I consume the better" phase of my year lol so I haven't found much I visit regularly but Telemundo and AP News en Español were two good ones.
Author, you're not properly engaging with the language. Instead of learning to type (and simply adding vowel marks), you complain about letters having different forms akin to someone saying q and Q are different and then write a post about an actively worse approach.
You also didn't understand that cards in anki can have more than 2 sides. Making Persian writing->Latin transcription then Latin transcription->English translation is a huge antipattern, when you can have all 3 on one note (simply add a 3rd field, also there's a built in "hint" field) - and above all should not use a Latin transcription at all (Notably, in the deck settings, you can generate cards from notes in different ways.)
هیچ کُدام now has the o marked, that easy! (N.b. author, another issue with your method is... Youtube videos are teaching you random things without structure. Colloquial Tehrani Persian turns án/ám into un/um which you are learning in your vocabulary. But you can simply learn the replacement rules and apply them when speaking in certain contexts.) Please use a good textbook instead. In 100-200 hours, you should be around B2 with a good program. (Better Assimil courses bring that down to ~75 hours.)
I strongly recommend:
- Baizoyev & Howard’s Beginners Guide to Tajiki - teaches the written language, with all vowels marked, and multiple dialects, this is by far the fastest way to master Persian. Reading/writing in Persian script is essentially mechanical with a good base in the language and not an issue, but you can read all Persian classics in the Tajik script with all vowels marked...
- Lambton's Persian Grammar - teaches the written languages along with colloquial Iranian usage
- Elwell-Sutton's Colloquial Persian - uses Latin transcription, quickly teaches the grammar and a nice vocabulary
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But going further, if a vowel's not marked but feels necessary:
> In 1792, Edward Moises already suggested not trying and just saying e
Different dialects differ a lot on short vowel usage (even in grammatical forms), so this is a surprisingly valid trick.
Your post is actually very helpful, but comes across as harsh and condescending. I think you should reconsider how you approach this.
EDIT: to be more specific, language like "You complain" and "You also didn't understand" can appear abrasive and scornful. Removing them would probably make the effect you're hoping for (proper learning techniques for the language) more meaningful.
Don't know how applicable it is in regards to vowel marks, but similarly in online conversation Czech people often leave out all diacritic marks (so no čšťďřňůúáéíýó).
This used to be completely incomprehensible to me, until I had enough knowledge to read "normal" Czech text with relative ease.
So it seems to make a lot of sense to learn with that aid and later transition to no vowel markings (or reduced / the normal amount)
> you complain about letters having different forms
Where did they "complain"?
The OP's article:
> From this, I will extract three screenshots (with the MacOS screenshot tool). First, to create a card of type “basic” (one side). I use this type of card to exercise my reading, which is very difficult and remains stubbornly slow, even though I know the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet quite well by now. But the different ways of writing them (which varies by their position in the word) and the fact that the vowels are not present makes it an enduringly challenging task.
It doesn't sound like they literally can't type in Persian, or they're complaining about how it's written, at all. They're merely stating the fact it's difficult for them (like every language learner).
They also screenshot the English part too. So presumably they screenshot because it's faster, not that they can't type.
> Author, you're not properly engaging with the language
Strangely condescending. They're focusing on reading and listening, which is legit for beginners.
I do agree that the use of Anki cards is suboptimal though.
In English you have to actually press shift to change q to Q. In Persian, this is all done for you. Simply press a letter key and the correct form will appear (automatically changing form based on letters later.) Describing that as "challenging" indicates that the author does not know how to type in Persian.
You still misunderstand. This is only relevant because the author doesn't understand the system and instead of engaging with it, is making counter-productive crutches which prevent actual learning.
I'm flagging your comment for claiming I didn't read the article. If the author has trouble reading letters, how can he type well (which was your first point)? Addressing that first would prevent him from using transcriptions and dual sets of flashcards.
Author here: my learning objectives, in order of importance, are: (1) vocal understanding, (2) speaking, (3) reading, and (4) typing and writing (far further). As I explain, I'm mostly bypassing the problem of typing by using screenshots (ChatGPT's OCR capabilities are very good, and Anki works very well with it too).
With a few hours of applied learning, distinctions between these will collapse. If you work on typing, your reading will naturally improve (because you're identifying letters to input). With stronger reading, you won't see differences between scripts and reading will be the same as listening. That is, improving your knowledge of the language by reading will improve your listening comprehension too. (Reading the wikipedia article on phonology will also unify reading out loud and speaking, Persian is extremely phonemic.)
At minimum, consider a few hours now compared to the time saved by halving the number of flashcards you need.
That's pretty cool–but also quite a time intensive workflow when my biggest challenge is not being lazy. Anki has been useful for me but I find it hard to just stick to a rhythm.
I was super bullish about ChatGPT's Voice Mode, but it is so eager to respond that I never get a chance to complete sentences!
I, too, had the same frustration as you - until I figured out you can hold down the circular icon while you’re speaking then let it go when you’re done and it won’t interrupt you.
Edit: it looks like they updated the Voice Mode UI since I last used it - hopefully they retained this capability.
I find it interesting that despite the relationship between Iran and various Arab countries being pretty hostile, there is no move towards stop using the word "Farsi" and revert back to "Parsi". Anyone know why? Seems like a easy political win for a besieged regime.
Because it has nothing to do with Arabic. /p/ in Persian is aspirated, and in some words, like aspirated /p/ in some other languages (e.g. Greek), it has turned into /f/; Ever wondered why ph is pronounced /f/? In Persian this is called "softening" (Narm şodegi).
Both are used in Iran. Though a common folk etymology, Parsi didn't change under Arabic influence. Words like abzar and afzar exist in similar variation, guwspand gufsand, ispand, isfand, Espahan, Esfahan. Even modern loans from Russian sometimes undergo this change like apelsin->aflesun.
There are some people suggesting that, however at a small scale and not taken that seriously by many. What difference does it make? What about all the other words that underwent the sound change? Also, some nuanced people can keep languages and politics separate. The sound shift isn't even entirely clear to be due to arabic influence, how come it turned into 'f' and not 'b' such as the arabic approximation? How come sounds like 'g' remained?
And in the end, in English it should be "Persian" and not "Farsi", that is where the actual move should be. How sad and historically wasteful if we started to do that to all languages, "deutsch", "zhongwen" or "elliniki" instead of German, Chinese and Greek
It used to be called Persian in English, the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige". If you knew English and you are old enough you even remember the shift (1990s–2000s).
> the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige"
This is not true.
It happened after the 1979 Iranian revolution, when Iranians abroad wanted to call it Farsi out of cultural pride, using the same word in their own language, rather than Persian which is the "foreign" word for it (from Greek/Latin). It was literally reclaiming the name. Then the media followed suit out of respect. It was cultural sensitivity.
Today some non-Iranians and therefore groups like the UN prefer "Persian" because variants are also spoken in Afghanistan and Tajikstan, and Farsi is a reference to the Fars province of Iran, so Persian can be seen as more neutral. But then again, not many people complain about "English" being associated with England and not being neutral enough to Americans or Indians. So it's definitely complicated. But it's also definitely not about trying to diminish anybody's "prestige".
I could learn Danish with Anki, YouTube, ChatGPT and a teacher in evening school. I think Danish is even harder to learn then Persian. ;-)
Anki is a great concept!
How difficult a language is to learn is very subjective. My mother language is Danish and therefore learning German was relatively easy for me (relatively because it is always difficult to learn a new language!)
Manchmal, wenn ich ein Wort noch nie gesehen habe, kann ich die Bedeutung herausfinden, weil ich das entsprechende Wort auf Dänisch kenne.
If you know English danish/swedish/Norwegian is absolutely one of the easiest languages to learn.
People do underestimate how much a good teacher and putting in the work can make a difference. Money well invested if you actually NEED to use the language and will have opportunity to.
Cool! Have done a similar thing in the past with AP Psychology and Anki. ChatGPT is really helpful for turning Quizlet-esque flashcards into good-quality copy+pasteable Cloze cards in Anki.
I've found Anki the best app to learn almost anythinf that requires memorization.
In my high school days, I saw a direct correlation between the amount of Anki studying I did, and my grade.
I am in high school and I had created anki notes for thermodynamics which are since lost but my friend used to say to do it in organic notes and I just ditched anki.
My organic chemistry is... terrible to say the least. I might try Anki again if you say so!
I found it really great for quickly learning contents of a paper or books, my only gripe with anki is the integration between desktop and mobile, especially if you dont opt to sign in and getting things to sync was a pain in the ass. Hell even moving my deck from my old computer to new one wasnt straight forward
Could you talk about your method for breaking up the contents of papers and books into cards? I have a bunch of reading to catch up on for a midterm in a few weeks and I'm not sure how fine-grained to make my cards.
There is a category called incremental reading,you can find more elegant techniques if you look into it.
My method is more primitive, I first get a simple overview of the topic (LLMs are great at this). Once I have a feel , i flick through the material book/paper highlight important info that stands out or info that I want to remember and personally for me, Im not trying to understand things as I highlight, once I'm done a chapter or a big section, I pull out my anki and start making questions against the highlighted parts.
When Im making questions, usually I make one questions that corresponds directly and I use the highlighted part as the answer with minimum change expect for readability and then I make several other questions that takes different parts of the highlighted answer, so that I can have an almost lego like breakdown of questions that can help me recall the "bigger question", also I make sure the questions arent to direct and force my brain to think and retrieve the answer
I add memory tricks (mostly mnemonics in this case) in that I learned from Dominic O'Brien [0] (I think some of his work has PDFs available) in order to juice the process a bit (helps with the tricky ones, and can make learning the new ones quicker if you do it from the get go)
Trying to learn a language by anything other than going through the process of constructing grammatical sentences in the language is my favorite genre of hackernews posts
This is a fine way to bring the material into your "cache" but you aren't doing the work required to learn a language: Communication!
I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.
Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.
I won't trash it, but for me, anything that means i'm using a screen/app means my retention is lower than if i just pick up a pencil and write on a flashcard.
The flexibility of being able to dynamically generate a ton of Anki cards using a script is trumped by just using ChatGPT to generate and grade answers. This will not work well for advanced language learners but for German it works really well - as much repetition as you need to master specific skills - up through intermediate level.
1. The lack of a good spaced repetition algorithm.
2. You'll end up with an order of magnitude fewer flash cards. When it's easy to copy/paste, there's no way you can create all the flashcards you need by hand in a decent amount of time.
> The flexibility of being able to dynamically generate a ton of Anki cards using a script is trumped by just using ChatGPT ...
I would never advocate doing it with a script. All my flashcards were created by me - either by typing or selective copy/paste.
Always fun to see two of my worlds collide!
I studied Dari own my own and at college as an elective, and ended up taking a job with the ICRC to investigate ISAF war crimes in Afghanistan right after I graduated
These days Dari is my most comfortable second language (and I have quite a few of them)
I'm not sure if, given I had to start from scratch again, I'd go down this route - the description and screenshots seem very overstimulating for me
The most important parts of my language learning in Dari (and Pashto) - the "aha" moments if you will, were trying to express something, making a fool of myself, making everyone around me laugh, and then being gently corrected in a long-winded way (usually because I couldn't understand a simpler, more direct correction)
In hindsight this feels like a very equitable cultural exchange - I learned something valuable about the language and culture while giving my interlocutors a funny memory to share with their friends and family
Let me ask: what sort of background is necessary to get jobs based on your skills in a second language? I'm very into language learning as a hobby, but would it be necessary to get a degree before applying to these sorts of jobs? Where would one even look for jobs?
Anki is great for building one's vocabulary. It is not meant to be the only tool used for learning a language. But actually learning a language is much easier and goes much faster when one has adequate vocabulary.
I speak Farsi and I am really curious about some of these blunders if you could share
Using the word pistan instead of sina when talking about "chicken breast" (the cut of meat)
Well you got another good laugh out of it from me LOL
As an Iranian-American, I've made similar blunders in trying to communicate with my Mexican friends and colleagues. "Hey amigo, do you need a chauqeta?" I would ask to the eruption of laughter. If you look up "Chaqueta", translation services will happily tell you it means "Jacket". Don't trust it. Apparently to some Mexicans it also means jerking off.
I've had some successful sprints using Anki, but I always get fatigued making cards for it after a few months, even when leaning on LLM tools to speed up the process.
One app I used early on when beginning French was Clozemaster, set to keyboard input (instead of multiple choice). The largest benefit was I didn't have to make all the decks, they progress you through the most common words (used in context), and there are ChatGPT grammar explanations for everything if you wanted to drill into it. It sounds very similar to what OP created for themself.
At a certain point you just need to switch to native content, but at the beginning I found Assimil + Clozemaster + comprehensible input on YouTube to be able to get me to watching regular French TV in maybe 6 months.
Shameless plug for anybody who has been through the hell that is Anki card creation for language learning - I built an LLM powered extension for Anki that allows you to wire up fields to arbitrary prompts, and then generate notes in batch (or selectively per field). I use it every day for generating example sentences, definitions, and TTS. Would have quit Anki ages ago without this.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719
https://smart-notes.xyz
FWIW I did get a lot more mileage from building my own deck vs a custom deck too, would recommend that approach regardless once you're past the initial vocab bootstrapping phrase.
I use yomitan + a spanish dictionary + ankiconnect for flashcard creation. i can browse whatever in spanish, hold shift and hover to see the definition(s) of a spanish word unconjugated + how its conjugated, and hit a + button to add it to my anki deck, either in context or just as a word
There's a large number of prebuilt Anki decks available here as well if this is useful for anyone exploring the space - https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search
For sure! I've gone through some pre-made verb conjugation and vocab decks -- and actually have been meaning to upload one I made for learning Bengali script -- but I still find grinding Anki decks to not be that effective for me. Which sucks, because all you hear is how magic Anki is, but I guess I've always struggled with rote memorization.
As far as I know about decks for language learning, you should be building your own. Pre-built decks don't work so well exactly because you don't spend the time to create the links that work for you personally, I know a few people who tried to shortcut it by using pre-built decks but gave up after noticing it wasn't working well.
It sucks though, it's also the one thing that makes me constantly not be consistent using Anki, I get tired of creating cards and stop for a while.
Ah, that's interesting. I've definitely learned a ton through the vocabulary and conjugation decks and they're a great way to continue learning even on days when there's little other stimulus.
I think what's key is that I'm taking the words and conjugation rules I'm learning and using them relatively quickly, often that day or that week. I.E., I'll come across words in Anki, then hear them in a baseball broadcast or see them in a news article. Or I'll recognize what tense something is because of the rules.
So it's supplemental, and maybe that's why it's sticking better. I don't think I'd want to create decks constantly, I created one 140 card deck and that was enough.
Finally, I do frequently use memory tricks to create associations so maybe my experience with memory castles, mnemonics, and other techniques (which I use on cards I forget frequently to create links I'm unable to create quickly on my own (or to differentiate similar words (or words that are the same but in different tenses))).
Yea, it's _work_!
I used only pre-"built" decks and got to C1 in Spanish. One was actually prebuilt, the other was literally algorithmically generated disposable clozes. That, one graded reader and comic books got me to being comfortable in an L1->L1 dictionary, and then it's over. You don't need language learning material any more, just material.
People are just repeating this advice about making your own decks, and it's based in nothing but having had it repeated to them. Spaced repetition is boiling in pseudoscience and ancient studies that don't say much other than that there's a forgetting curve.
Most people are just parroting stuff they read on the Supermemo wiki (or somebody read off the Supermemo wiki and repeated to them like they came up with it), and all of that is just thoughts off the top of one guy's head. His innovation is that he wrote a program to do Leitner boxes before he had ever heard of a Leitner box, but people treat every word like gospel.
The only five things I can say for language learning is to go really hard on systems in a new language that are completely unknown to you (like Romance conjugations for an English speaker); only drill sentences, not individual words; always say your Anki answers out loud, and read out loud as much as you can; comic books have pictures, too; and once you get comfortable in an L2->L2 dictionary, you're a more comfortable reader than a lot of natives.
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* Random Anki decks for a few European languages: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/
(Edit: the lovely thing about 10K algorithmically generated clozes is that they're utterly disposable, unlike cards that you make yourself. If one is a leech, forget about it. You'll see another one just like it when you get to the point that it won't be a leech for you.)
* Instructions on how to generate your own in other languages, for developers: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d...
(You could probably point out the above URL to an LLM and it would generate the code for you.)
* Anki to learn Romance conjugations first: https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga...
Did you get through the entire KOFI deck for Spanish? I started the French one, but didn't make it past a month or two before I fell off. I'm thinking of going through the French -> Spanish Assimil course soon and might give the KOFI deck another go, this time in Spanish.
I very much did, and sticking with it was the best choice I made. You will get very very fast at it after a while, and the first verbs are the hardest and most irregular (and you should spend the most time on them.) Throwing in the messy clozes after doing your conjugations is relaxing, and you can do as many of those as you're in the mood for, whereas the conjugations are systematically introduced and you shouldn't speed it up too much. Took me 7 months, but complete mastery. But literally some of the conjugations from the first hard couple months will bother you until the end.
I feel even better than natives sometimes because they learn conjugations in order at school, and when asked to recall them out of order (or hop from form to form) get confused. Once you have conjugations, you can read anything with a dictionary (and the online dle is the best dictionary I've ever used.)
I'm about to start again with KOFI French, but I had to do a lot of work to get my mouth and ears adjusted to hearing French as anything other then murmurs, and to be able to read (luckily for me, French is the opposite of perl and read-only instead of write-only.) There's a lot of stuff in French I want to read; reading all of the stuff translated into Spanish from French (but never into English) has got my beak wet.
Also, Spanish-language comic books will make you forget about English-language comic books. And they are very online, examples: http://columberos.blogspot.com/ and https://comicsmexicanosdejediskater.blogspot.com/
Also lots of other good material for vos: https://ahira.com.ar/ including https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/skorpio/ and https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/hora-cero-suplemento-semanal/ which is a landmark of literature that is too good for us (El Eternauta spans the entire length of the series.)
Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.
For hearing French, I went through the old FSI French phonology course at the beginning, as well as all the grouped (A1/A2/etc) comprehensible input from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput/playlists. Oh, and I did a bunch of the French listening comprehension on Yabla for a few months: https://french.yabla.com/.
> FSI French phonology course
I did the same. Got me interested in the old programmatic methods and how they could be adapted to LLMs.
Also, pssst... https://seulementbd.blogspot.com/
Just seconding all of this and how useful (and annoying) the conjugation deck has been for me in Spanish. Not sure if it was the KOFI one, but it runs through from irregular through to the mostly regular. And yea, total pain in the ass, and some still get me lol and I don't regret it in the slightest cause everything else is a ton easier to pick up and everything becomes much more accessible.
the advantage of building your own decks is choosing words you will actually use. this matters if you're practicing conversation, if your goal is just to read general material then using preselected word lists makes sense
You should be using all the words. If you want to learn words about cooking, buy cookbooks. I want to read all material. I want to read extremely esoteric subjects from UNAM's press, I want to read Cervantes, I want to read cookbooks, I want to read Mexican street fotonovelas from the 70s.
> using preselected word lists makes sense
I have never used Anki for word to word translation, because there is no Spanish word that means any English word. You've restricted yourself to a particular paradigm from the beginning. I mean, do whatever you need to do to get a foothold, but you want to get away from L1 as much as possible as soon as you can.
That makes sense as a long-term goal, but if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones. Get depth at first, and later you can fill in the holes with e.g. a cookbook.
I know you consider it pseudoscience to force creating your own cards, but I do find premade decks result in a lot more leeches. How do you avoid them when relying on these thousands of auto-generated cards?
I don't. I let leeches get suspended. Also, some of those autogenerated cards (surprisingly few) won't make sense and I just suspend those, too. They're all disposable. New cards will eventually come up that are just like the too difficult leech, and one will come up when you're ready to learn it.
Also, one of the many parts of the spaced repetition lore that I do agree with is that if you keep getting the same card wrong in the same way over and over again, you're building up a weird habit that is going to be tough to break. Better to trash it. [edit: you can't do this with the conjugation cards, though. If you keep failing a particular conjugation card, you need to stop, write it down, and spend time with it individually. All of those are important, except maybe the unique conjugations of europeizar.]
> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.
I believe of course in the have fun rule above all others, because this is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. You're going to have to get enjoyment from the process if you're going to stick to it at all. I get a "dopamine hit" every time I get a card right.
If you wanted to sprint, the best way is probably doing the full old-school* Glossika method where you go over the day's sentences, you listen and repeat, you listen and transcribe, then you repeat on your own and record. The next day you start by listening to your recordings and figuring out how to improve them, rerecord, go over your new sentences, rinse and repeat for 3-4 hours a day. You can certainly hammer a language into your head that way, but you probably need a tiger mom threatening to withhold food or something to keep you doing that for 6 months.
About creating your own cards - I've done thousands (not language related), and I've learned and remembered things with them, but there's no science behind writing a good card. Everybody is on their own and flailing, and asking themselves "what would Woźniak do?" rather than coming up with formal rules and testing them. I've got ideas, and there are a few datasets (of people doing spaced repetition sessions over time) available, but I think that treating cards as a black box, discovering the relationships between them over time (through finding which cards are passed and failed together), and creating some sort of internal market of cards between adversarial LLMs could generate good decks, and generate mappings that would allow failing or passing one card to affect many other cards rather than the single card alone.
The best thing about FSRS to me is the decision to stop asking the user about process, and just ask them about goals. Some of the Anki community seem on the verge of giving up on the self-grading, too, and just moving to pass/fail, which I couldn't support more. I never used anything but pass/fail, with the settings from refold (https://refold.la/simplified/) which have been obsoleted by FSRS, which works better with pass/fail only. As I said before, a lot of how these things were designed from the beginning was simply cargo-culting Woźniak.
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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.
This is why for learning Chinese I use Pleco, which is a dictionary that allow has a button to instantly add any word to your flashcard list. So when I encounter a new word I just look it up and then add it to flashcards which I review each morning.
I don't know what similar tools exist for learning other languages but it does help a lot for Chinese.
I made a native iOS/macOS app for discovering and mining Japanese content into Anki: https://reader.manabi.io
It's gotten quite popular enough that I've gone full-time on it
I'm on year 10 of learning my second language and passed through a variety of teaching/learning methods. Intensive FSI courses, immersion including output as early as possible, self guided based heavily on reading and vocabulary, etc. While I get by mostly fine and now live in my second language, my listening is definitely my weakest skill.
Anki is probably my most beneficial single tool. Though if I were to do it over again I'd follow more or less the poster's strategy. Maybe 80% comprehensible input for listening and 20% Anki for vocab building. At least until I could watch native TV without much effort. I've played around a bit with LLMs, but still haven't found a really great use case for my study.
On the otherhand I think consistent practice (with growing difficulty) trumps technique. Whatever process keeps you motivated to practice month after month is most important.
Just kicked off my third language after reaching B2/C1ish in my second (~5 years in), we'll see what the C1 test determines this fall, and Anki has been the consistent thing that stayed through all the other learning experiments. It's amazing just investing in Anki right out the bat how much quicker I'm moving on the new language. Especially considering it's way harder as it's not like any language I know (rich declension system, etc).
GenAI also been a big helper when I run out of content. "Write me an essay involving [subject I want to learn about]. In my response after reading, any word I've written separated by a comma generate a CSV of the format "that word, english definiton"." I'll then just dump those new words into Anki.
The most effective routine is the one you stick with for sure!
I love anki and use it for Spanish which is showing marked improvement. I do vocab and conjugation with Anki.
Then I just find other ways to immerse myself and call it a day.
- Spanish audio for sports whenever possible - Interfaces for personal computers/devices - Picking up the Spanish language weekly from the little box on the corner - Listening to Spanish artists - Reading the news in Spanish instead of English (One major benefit here is consuming far less news) - Writing notes for work and personal projects - Texting friends
It all really adds up over time and is definitely doable even as an adult, but it requires a ton of work, so being able to find ways to incorporate it into the activities I'm already doing is key for me on top of the more active Anki learning.
im in the exact same boat. Do you have any recs for news sites? I use el pais, but that has a lot of locked articles.
I'm at the... "the less news I consume the better" phase of my year lol so I haven't found much I visit regularly but Telemundo and AP News en Español were two good ones.
Author, you're not properly engaging with the language. Instead of learning to type (and simply adding vowel marks), you complain about letters having different forms akin to someone saying q and Q are different and then write a post about an actively worse approach.
You also didn't understand that cards in anki can have more than 2 sides. Making Persian writing->Latin transcription then Latin transcription->English translation is a huge antipattern, when you can have all 3 on one note (simply add a 3rd field, also there's a built in "hint" field) - and above all should not use a Latin transcription at all (Notably, in the deck settings, you can generate cards from notes in different ways.)
هیچ کُدام now has the o marked, that easy! (N.b. author, another issue with your method is... Youtube videos are teaching you random things without structure. Colloquial Tehrani Persian turns án/ám into un/um which you are learning in your vocabulary. But you can simply learn the replacement rules and apply them when speaking in certain contexts.) Please use a good textbook instead. In 100-200 hours, you should be around B2 with a good program. (Better Assimil courses bring that down to ~75 hours.)
I strongly recommend:
- Baizoyev & Howard’s Beginners Guide to Tajiki - teaches the written language, with all vowels marked, and multiple dialects, this is by far the fastest way to master Persian. Reading/writing in Persian script is essentially mechanical with a good base in the language and not an issue, but you can read all Persian classics in the Tajik script with all vowels marked...
- Lambton's Persian Grammar - teaches the written languages along with colloquial Iranian usage
- Elwell-Sutton's Colloquial Persian - uses Latin transcription, quickly teaches the grammar and a nice vocabulary
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But going further, if a vowel's not marked but feels necessary:
> In 1792, Edward Moises already suggested not trying and just saying e
Different dialects differ a lot on short vowel usage (even in grammatical forms), so this is a surprisingly valid trick.
Your post is actually very helpful, but comes across as harsh and condescending. I think you should reconsider how you approach this.
EDIT: to be more specific, language like "You complain" and "You also didn't understand" can appear abrasive and scornful. Removing them would probably make the effect you're hoping for (proper learning techniques for the language) more meaningful.
Don't know how applicable it is in regards to vowel marks, but similarly in online conversation Czech people often leave out all diacritic marks (so no čšťďřňůúáéíýó). This used to be completely incomprehensible to me, until I had enough knowledge to read "normal" Czech text with relative ease.
So it seems to make a lot of sense to learn with that aid and later transition to no vowel markings (or reduced / the normal amount)
> Instead of learning to type
How do you know they are not learning to type?
> you complain about letters having different forms
Where did they "complain"?
The OP's article:
> From this, I will extract three screenshots (with the MacOS screenshot tool). First, to create a card of type “basic” (one side). I use this type of card to exercise my reading, which is very difficult and remains stubbornly slow, even though I know the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet quite well by now. But the different ways of writing them (which varies by their position in the word) and the fact that the vowels are not present makes it an enduringly challenging task.
It doesn't sound like they literally can't type in Persian, or they're complaining about how it's written, at all. They're merely stating the fact it's difficult for them (like every language learner).
They also screenshot the English part too. So presumably they screenshot because it's faster, not that they can't type.
> Author, you're not properly engaging with the language
Strangely condescending. They're focusing on reading and listening, which is legit for beginners.
I do agree that the use of Anki cards is suboptimal though.
In English you have to actually press shift to change q to Q. In Persian, this is all done for you. Simply press a letter key and the correct form will appear (automatically changing form based on letters later.) Describing that as "challenging" indicates that the author does not know how to type in Persian.
...
He's talking about reading as a challenge. Not typing. It's very clear and unambiguous from the original article.
You still misunderstand. This is only relevant because the author doesn't understand the system and instead of engaging with it, is making counter-productive crutches which prevent actual learning.
I'm flagging your comment for claiming I didn't read the article. If the author has trouble reading letters, how can he type well (which was your first point)? Addressing that first would prevent him from using transcriptions and dual sets of flashcards.
Author here: my learning objectives, in order of importance, are: (1) vocal understanding, (2) speaking, (3) reading, and (4) typing and writing (far further). As I explain, I'm mostly bypassing the problem of typing by using screenshots (ChatGPT's OCR capabilities are very good, and Anki works very well with it too).
With a few hours of applied learning, distinctions between these will collapse. If you work on typing, your reading will naturally improve (because you're identifying letters to input). With stronger reading, you won't see differences between scripts and reading will be the same as listening. That is, improving your knowledge of the language by reading will improve your listening comprehension too. (Reading the wikipedia article on phonology will also unify reading out loud and speaking, Persian is extremely phonemic.)
At minimum, consider a few hours now compared to the time saved by halving the number of flashcards you need.
That's pretty cool–but also quite a time intensive workflow when my biggest challenge is not being lazy. Anki has been useful for me but I find it hard to just stick to a rhythm.
I was super bullish about ChatGPT's Voice Mode, but it is so eager to respond that I never get a chance to complete sentences!
I, too, had the same frustration as you - until I figured out you can hold down the circular icon while you’re speaking then let it go when you’re done and it won’t interrupt you.
Edit: it looks like they updated the Voice Mode UI since I last used it - hopefully they retained this capability.
I find it interesting that despite the relationship between Iran and various Arab countries being pretty hostile, there is no move towards stop using the word "Farsi" and revert back to "Parsi". Anyone know why? Seems like a easy political win for a besieged regime.
Because it has nothing to do with Arabic. /p/ in Persian is aspirated, and in some words, like aspirated /p/ in some other languages (e.g. Greek), it has turned into /f/; Ever wondered why ph is pronounced /f/? In Persian this is called "softening" (Narm şodegi).
Both are used in Iran. Though a common folk etymology, Parsi didn't change under Arabic influence. Words like abzar and afzar exist in similar variation, guwspand gufsand, ispand, isfand, Espahan, Esfahan. Even modern loans from Russian sometimes undergo this change like apelsin->aflesun.
There are some people suggesting that, however at a small scale and not taken that seriously by many. What difference does it make? What about all the other words that underwent the sound change? Also, some nuanced people can keep languages and politics separate. The sound shift isn't even entirely clear to be due to arabic influence, how come it turned into 'f' and not 'b' such as the arabic approximation? How come sounds like 'g' remained?
And in the end, in English it should be "Persian" and not "Farsi", that is where the actual move should be. How sad and historically wasteful if we started to do that to all languages, "deutsch", "zhongwen" or "elliniki" instead of German, Chinese and Greek
It used to be called Persian in English, the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige". If you knew English and you are old enough you even remember the shift (1990s–2000s).
> the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige"
This is not true.
It happened after the 1979 Iranian revolution, when Iranians abroad wanted to call it Farsi out of cultural pride, using the same word in their own language, rather than Persian which is the "foreign" word for it (from Greek/Latin). It was literally reclaiming the name. Then the media followed suit out of respect. It was cultural sensitivity.
Today some non-Iranians and therefore groups like the UN prefer "Persian" because variants are also spoken in Afghanistan and Tajikstan, and Farsi is a reference to the Fars province of Iran, so Persian can be seen as more neutral. But then again, not many people complain about "English" being associated with England and not being neutral enough to Americans or Indians. So it's definitely complicated. But it's also definitely not about trying to diminish anybody's "prestige".
I could learn Danish with Anki, YouTube, ChatGPT and a teacher in evening school. I think Danish is even harder to learn then Persian. ;-) Anki is a great concept!
How difficult a language is to learn is very subjective. My mother language is Danish and therefore learning German was relatively easy for me (relatively because it is always difficult to learn a new language!)
Manchmal, wenn ich ein Wort noch nie gesehen habe, kann ich die Bedeutung herausfinden, weil ich das entsprechende Wort auf Dänisch kenne.
If you know English danish/swedish/Norwegian is absolutely one of the easiest languages to learn.
People do underestimate how much a good teacher and putting in the work can make a difference. Money well invested if you actually NEED to use the language and will have opportunity to.
Cool! Have done a similar thing in the past with AP Psychology and Anki. ChatGPT is really helpful for turning Quizlet-esque flashcards into good-quality copy+pasteable Cloze cards in Anki.
today I also read this, and I find it related: https://www.seangoedecke.com/autodeck/
I've found Anki the best app to learn almost anythinf that requires memorization. In my high school days, I saw a direct correlation between the amount of Anki studying I did, and my grade.
I am in high school and I had created anki notes for thermodynamics which are since lost but my friend used to say to do it in organic notes and I just ditched anki.
My organic chemistry is... terrible to say the least. I might try Anki again if you say so!
I found it really great for quickly learning contents of a paper or books, my only gripe with anki is the integration between desktop and mobile, especially if you dont opt to sign in and getting things to sync was a pain in the ass. Hell even moving my deck from my old computer to new one wasnt straight forward
Could you talk about your method for breaking up the contents of papers and books into cards? I have a bunch of reading to catch up on for a midterm in a few weeks and I'm not sure how fine-grained to make my cards.
There is a category called incremental reading,you can find more elegant techniques if you look into it.
My method is more primitive, I first get a simple overview of the topic (LLMs are great at this). Once I have a feel , i flick through the material book/paper highlight important info that stands out or info that I want to remember and personally for me, Im not trying to understand things as I highlight, once I'm done a chapter or a big section, I pull out my anki and start making questions against the highlighted parts.
When Im making questions, usually I make one questions that corresponds directly and I use the highlighted part as the answer with minimum change expect for readability and then I make several other questions that takes different parts of the highlighted answer, so that I can have an almost lego like breakdown of questions that can help me recall the "bigger question", also I make sure the questions arent to direct and force my brain to think and retrieve the answer
I hope this helps, this is the article that inspired me to read this way: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
I add memory tricks (mostly mnemonics in this case) in that I learned from Dominic O'Brien [0] (I think some of his work has PDFs available) in order to juice the process a bit (helps with the tricky ones, and can make learning the new ones quicker if you do it from the get go)
[0] - (https://peakperformancetraining.org/)
Trying to learn a language by anything other than going through the process of constructing grammatical sentences in the language is my favorite genre of hackernews posts
This is a fine way to bring the material into your "cache" but you aren't doing the work required to learn a language: Communication!
I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.
Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.
Wow. It's been 3 hours. This is the first submission I've seen that mentions spaced repetition that doesn't have a comment trashing spaced repetition!
I won't trash it, but for me, anything that means i'm using a screen/app means my retention is lower than if i just pick up a pencil and write on a flashcard.
The flexibility of being able to dynamically generate a ton of Anki cards using a script is trumped by just using ChatGPT to generate and grade answers. This will not work well for advanced language learners but for German it works really well - as much repetition as you need to master specific skills - up through intermediate level.
There are two problems with physical flashcards:
1. The lack of a good spaced repetition algorithm.
2. You'll end up with an order of magnitude fewer flash cards. When it's easy to copy/paste, there's no way you can create all the flashcards you need by hand in a decent amount of time.
> The flexibility of being able to dynamically generate a ton of Anki cards using a script is trumped by just using ChatGPT ...
I would never advocate doing it with a script. All my flashcards were created by me - either by typing or selective copy/paste.
It works, but it also makes me hate my life. It’s just so incredibly mind numbing boring to do.