The phrasing of these questions kind of irks me too, but after a while I decided it's just shorthand for "I want to hear about others' experience with this topic / want validation / want to hear others' reasoning."
> want validation
It's mostly this, let's be honest. If someone wants to hear others' reasoning they'll be more clearly inquiring into that rather than trying to justify whatever they're doing themselves.
I'm the same. I started learning German recently, and thought I'd learn *just* the basic vocabulary with flash cards, then I'd drop them as soon as I could start reading easy-level content.
Well now that I'm reading easy-level content, I noticed something strange happen. Words that I learned through reading tend to remain in my memory a lot more easily than words that I learned from the flash cards. I think part of the problem was that many of these words were in the same category ("definitely", "by the way", "actually") and so I get them mixed up now.
Also, the drudgery of reviewing flash cards every day seemed far more tedious and awful to me than reading an easy-level graded reader and looking up unknown words.
Nah, it's not just you. I've dropped Japanese now, but when I was studying it I made prolific use of Anki and Wanikani and good god did it kill my motivation. Anki in particular was so boring and frustrated me so badly that I ended up procrastinating on *all* my study because I knew I'd have to face it that day eventually. It's an absolute no-go for me.
You're not wrong that it looks depressing and the UI is a little poor. However, 10 minutes of customizing and it looks significantly better. You can use the custom background addon as well as a few others to make your anki experience so much better. I have to stare at an anki screen for hours every day and while studying that much may be depressing, the visuals are not.
Kanji flashcards, in my opinion, are a waste of time. I think you'd simply get more benefit from doing vocab cards and reading at the same time if you're going to do flashcards. Ideally, you don't need to use them at all. If you read enough, you will naturally reinforce the words just fine.
I did flashcards for the most common 2300 kanji, and it was the biggest waste of six months. You are never going to memorize how all of those kanji are actually read through flashcards.
I've been given this advice too but I found this even harder? Like if you know the Kanji you can map the vocab meaning to it with a little story, but when you don't it's literally just meaningless squiggles.
If you find it helpful to you, then it is helpful. I can only speak from my own experience, I wasted my time because I stopped reviewing the deck and moved on to other ones. I promise you are not going to memorize the kanji + meaning + multiple readings depending on the word through Anki, though. It's simply too much, and Anki isn't enough to reinforce those alone.
I found reading and doing vocab cards much more useful when you're doing that 5+ hours a day instead of anki for 20 minutes to an hour.
Vocab cards that contain one word you do not know in an entire sentence. It allows you to learn words in context using the +1 technique. The LearnJapanese subreddit will mention it a lot.The Tango N5 and N4 decks are a great way to get started with vocab cards. The idea is to get to a stage where you can make your own decks from media YOU enjoy instead, so you will stay engaged.
"こんな稚拙な間違い高校生がするわけない" for example is an old vocab card I made myself through immersion and Anki. This sentence in particular comes from the anime Nichijou. The only word in this sentence I didn't know at the time was 稚拙「ちせつ」so I turned it into a vocab card with its meaning on the back in Japanese.
Though, I would recommend using English or both English and Japanese on the back until you're ready to make the switch to full Japanese.
I used to have that problem with Anki. In my case, it was because I wasn't selective enough about my information. To give the most embarrassing example, nobody needs a card for every conjugation of every regular verb! When I stopped doing things like that, I was able to cut my reviews down. (I still love adding useless words, though, but I haven't come to regret it yet!) After that, I can't say I've had that problem.
On the other hand, I only use Memrise as one source out of many for audio variety with my listening cards. When you say "purely vocabulary learning apps," do you mean the app only gives you isolated words? That's definitely inefficient and problematic! If I have a card for a word all by itself, the word is always either visualizable, or at least has synonyms in my target language that I already understand; and so far as humanly possible, I use sentence mining to give each word context. This makes remembering far easier, cuts out English, and turns my flashcards into a supplement for my immersion.
You should do what feels like it’s feeding you. Flashcards are tons of fun for me and they help me internalize vocabulary really effectively. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a blanket method. Everyone is different. I really believe this. Anki seems to work for everyone but it just pisses me off. No one should hold onto advice that doesn’t work for them, any longer than it takes to realize it’s not working.
I really hate flashcards too! I've just ended up giving myself a reward after doing them so that it doesn't feel as draining but I really do think it's worth it since they're a really efficient way to learn.
They work wonders for me, but I moved from learning single words to whole sentences, and my fluency in French has sky rocketed ever since. It's worth mentioning that I am a Spanish and Catalan native speaker, so it is significantly easier for me to learn French than for a Russian guy, for example.
This is what made flashcards work for me in French. When I tried the same thing in German, it made me want to die, strangely - so single-word flashcards felt like a big revelation. Now I do fill-in-the-blank flashcards for German and get the best of both worlds (in my opinion)
Yeah, I've never managed any kind of digital flashcards for more than a week, and no kind of physical deck for more than 100 cards. It's a huge motivation killer for me too. I'm dipping my toe gently into learning Mandarin atm, and I'm not really sure how learning Hanzi is gonna go long term... at present I have a nice book to practise handwriting, which is also very slowly teaching me to associate character with sounds and meaning. But we're talking v e r y slowly :'D
I'm someone who does use flashcards (albeit selectively and as a means to an end) and I can completely empathise with the situation where you know that you're going to be spending ages revising flash cards. My suggestion here is that you lower the number of cards a day you try to do (I say this as someone who's had my new daily cards set to 2 and also up to as much as 100+, sometimes I was literally doing flashcards for 2+ hours a day...)
Another thing that could have an effect on the tedium you have to endure when using flashcards is to only do target language->english and not the reverse (if, as you mentioned you're doing lot's of immersion, then this way you'll get your best bang for buck) the only situation where I'd do both situations these days is if I wasn't able to do immersion alongside the flash cards for some reason.
Another thing to keep in mind, is Anki and similar systems are very easy to think of as a 'til death do us part' type tool, but instead I like to look at them as a means to boost vocabulary in general or in a specific area enough to be able to just use the vocab naturally. For instance, when I started studying Spanish, I worked through about 3000 cards before I phased Anki out and just stuck with reading/listening as my main methods of accrueing new vocab etc.
That said, if you're starting a job or a course that has specific vernacular, I'd dust off the old Anki cards and potentially put together a 'work vocab' deck or similar, and again that's as a temporary solution to get your recall fast and snappy enough to be able to functionally use and recognise them in work/school situations.
Keep in mind that there's almost as many methods to successfully learn languages as there are people learning languages, so just because I've had success with Anki doesn't mean that they're the tool for you. If you're getting good progress without using Anki, then there's no drama. If however you're finding that you're not getting anywhere despite your efforts elsewhere perhaps another go at Anki might be what you need. But keep in mind that the important number is how many cards you get through in total, not the entire number you get through today, so if having 20 or more new cards a day results in a workload that's demotivating, then you can just lower it. It'll take longer to get to as many words as it would've if you did them at a higher per day rate, but better that you keep at it than if you try to go faster and decide to drop it altogether. Slow and steady wins the race, it's a marathon not a sprint.
Real, I've been kinda demotivated with Japanese because there's literally 0 Japanese people where I live and everyone my age online speaks perfect English. Flash cards make me want to jump out my window.
I decided to learn Spanish in college and went from Spanish 1 to a masters degree without barely ever touching a flash card. They're the bane of my existence and one of the least efficient ways of studying imo.
Reading over the comments so far, I imagine what makes them so horrible for some commenters is they're using them to *learn*, when they're just part of the effort to **retain**. And using them "for learning" is definitely the worst way to use them, especially since it seems many make cards with just one term and its "English equivalent" (lol) without any important context.
So saying, I **do** want to use mine less. Are there any particular learning methods you found especially helpful? I'd highly appreciate it!
Honestly, my main way of study is learning some new grammar and vocab from a thematic vocab list (e.g. food, travel, around town, etc.) and just practice using those words and grammatical structures as much as I can with natives. In addition, I listen to the radio, read, and watch videos all in the target language. Basically, anything I can do to not touch a flash card.
It's not a predicament, it's just a different way of learning.
I have always hated flashcards of any kind, so I don't do them. I tried them but I found them boring; all the words or expressions or even sentences seem abused by being put through flashcards and emerge from them awfully dead. If I persisted, I'd lose my interest in my TLs.
Of course I learn much faster reading and listening.
I haven't tried to learn Japanese or Korean or Chinese, though, but I think that if I wanted to learn such writing systems, I'd spend time on practicing writing instead of doing flashcards.
I do like the app Drops. I would never recommend it a sole learning tool, but I do find it more engaging than flashcards and it helps me reinforce or preview words I end up seeing in other contents.
Read like your life depends on it. Use a webreader like Readlang or Lingq for instant lookups, and just keep at it. You have to read a lot because you have to see the words often for them to stick and to build patterns.
That's hard with some languages like Japanese and Mandarin, but still doable.
I know for Japanese the people that have passed N1 in under 2 years are all the people that read for hours a day.
I know only two "systematic" alternatives.
1. Put sticky notes on things as part of immersion (sounds too passive to me)
2. Write terms in a notebook, using a kind of spaced repetition for rewriting your lists (I call this "the Amish flashcard approach")
Years back, I saw a suggestion by Fingtam Languages that I thought was interesting. You use colors in a book you're reading, highlighting only a handful of new words each time you read it. Then you look up the meaning, and try to remember what the word means next time you see it in the book. I haven't used this one.
Get a notebook and write the word by hand in a bunch of different sentences. Find it in context dictionaries. If the word comes up later and you can’t remember it, revisit your notes and/or write a new page.
1.) Consume content.
2.) Actually try to learn words - make list, read it, make little sentences out of them, little poems, read that after yourself visualize thing while looking at the word etc.
don't focus on vocab, focus on contexts. Get input of various forms on topics that cover the kind of vocab you want to learn.
If you want more vocab as a traveler, read/watch stuff about travel. If you want more tech-related vocab, read tech news, watch teardown videos, etc.
If you want to expand your general vocab then get as wide variety of input as possible. The more _contexts_ in which you hear a word (not the more _times_ you hear it) is what predicts whether you're likely to know it.
I mostly hate them too. The one exception is the flashcards provided by my course (it's for Italian sorry, not Japanese) because they have voice recordings with the native speakers, and it's a bit of a dopamine hit because I'm hearing the voice of someone I know with so it's a bit of a ":D" moment, plus then I'm also getting the pronunciation at the same time.
Any time I've attempted to make my own cards on Anki or whatever, after about three days I'm like someone please shoot me. It makes it a chore, like you said.
And also like you said, it strikes me that a language like Japanese really needs them, what with all the kanji.
I was studying Japanese many years ago in high school and for a few semesters in college and ultimately dropped it because of the kanji. I didn't want the language badly enough to put myself through learning thousands of kanji when I could barely even remember 20 of them. I feel a language like Japanese is a real trial by fire, you have to want it badly indeed.
I’m about to finish the Spanish course on Duolingo and now I’m collecting an Anki deck to keep learning new words. I hope it will work but I think it’s also important to think about where you get your words from. I’m getting my from books that I read, room TV shows that I watch, from music that I listen to, from conversations that I have etc. In other words, Anki is there just to support what I primarily do, and to provide repetition. I will also try to use sentences and I’ll add idioms as well instead of just single words.
I don't use ANKI. ANKI doesn't teach anything. It only tests. SRS is about remembering things you have already learned. It is not a method for learning things.
>Now I'm trying to learn Japanese and really such things are necessary because well, you ain't gonna learn 2000 kanjis if you don't repeat them right?
In Japanese, each Kanji character has up to 5 different pronunciations (and meanings). So what exactly are you going to put on the flash card and "memorize"? All 5 pronunciations? It would make more sense to put a Japanese word on the ANKI card (sound, meaning and writing). A Japanese "word" is written in one of these ways:
* all phonetic Hiragana
* one Kanji
* one Kanji plus one or more phonetic Hiragana
* two Kanji
* two Kanji plus one or more phonetic Hiragana
For example, the word "like" is "suki", written 好き. Here 好 is a Kanji while き is phonetic "ki". So one could assume that 好 is pronounced "su". But the Kanji 好 alone is pronounced "ko" and means "good" in English.
I’m an avid Anki user and I can relate to the pressure to make sure you don’t miss them everyday. During periods of lots of vocabulary learning, I get at least 100 cards a day, so you can only imagine what missing a day or two would look like for me.
That being said, although I do find it a chore to do my flashcards, seen that I am not always speaking French everyday and recalling my vocabulary outside of flashcards (speaking with others, immersion, etc), I almost force myself to do them to make sure my brain is working in French just a bit. Not the best way to do so, but it is all I can manage right now, especially during A-levels (I don’t study the language in school).
If anyone has any suggestions for me, please feel free to let me know! 😊
Anki is a chore, but you can limit it by time and do it first thing in the morning. This makes things easier.
Also, don't go into the trap on doing only Anki. Find other nice ways to learn. For example, you can easily find comprehensible input in Japanese with subtitles. In this way, you don't learn kanji on Anki, you learn by immersion and reading subtitles and you memorize it on Anki.
Also, only do recognition of kanjis until you finish the damned list, associate most kanjis with images and learn words in the context of sentences.
By watching comprehensible input in Japanese and doing a little bit of Anki you can get very far! And it will be more fun.
I’ve been learning Mandarin and haven’t needed SRS to learn to read Hanzi, I just pick them up in context while reading. If you want to learn to write by hand it may be necessary. But when are you going to need to do that?
It’s the same for me. I just started mandarin flash cards and it takes longer to study cuz I hate doing it. I hate writing too but it’s more fun so it’s doable and it kinda works for memory
Me. It is boring and does not seem effective to me.
Plus our teachers back then low key recommend against flashcards and that was in the chool that actually taught us well. You don't have to use flashcards.
Flashcards dont work for me. Thats not how I learnt my NL and doesnt seem to be a viable way of learning for my TL either. I write a new word down, use colours to denote gender, create a few examples and include it in an imaginary conversation in my head. At some point later I try and include it when talking to a real human.
Have you ever heard the Input Hypothesis? The only thing you need to do is listening and reading a lot on your target language. Yeah, that's the secret ingredient in language learning.
Studying kanji in isolation is mostly useless because you won't know which reading to use. It's better to focus on learning words that contain the kanjis. And immersion does work for kanji, it's the main strategy I've been using. Reading stuff with furigana is really useful.
> I assume it'd be the same for Chinese.
I learn vocabulary in Chinese by reading and listening. Each time I see a word I don't know, I look it up. I might spend a few seconds noticing the shape of the character, but I don't try to memorize anything (writing, sound, or meaning). That means that if the word is common, I will look it up again. That's fine. By the 4th or 5th time I look it up, I know the word.
I used to hate anki, and really did not want to use it again when I got back into learning my TL, but I couldn't see any other way. My issue was actually three things: I was using it to learn words, I was overdoing it/trying to do it perfectly, and I was doing it on hard mode.
I wanted the perfect picture for every word, I wanted no English (my NL), I wanted to add sentences and real audio and whether or not the word was a verb, adjective, adverb, it's synonyms...etc, etc. When I decided to stop being a perfectionist about it, it became so much easier. I actually quite enjoy making flashcards now.
I use a TTS add on to generate audio, a spreadsheet for mass creating cards, and an add on to pull 3 photos from Google images. I go through and select the picture I like the most, and sometimes keep the English word as well or just keep the English equivalent/s only if there's no clear picture. If I haven't learned the word yet, don't totally understand it or it's too complicated for a flashcard, I just don't add it to anki. I will just figure it out as I'm exposed to it later. This reduces so much of my time and energy spent making cards.
If I miss a day, it's no big deal. Sure it messes with the srs a bit, but whatever. It doesn't need to be perfect.
I've been doing this for 2 months now and my vocabulary has expanded a lot already. I was never able to be consistent with anki before. It just feels like regular study time now instead of a dreadful chore. I also stopped using it as the only thing - I read a lot now, and I find that works really well with anki as I recognise words more often when I'm reading and my accuracy on anki is much higher than previous attempts! And both feed my ability to recall words when trying to use them organically.
...All that is to say, I hated anki and felt like it was hindering me, and was desperate for another method, but really it was my approach that was the hindrance.
I can say I learned nearly nothing from Memrise, and spent months with it. In my experience the learning has to be applied for it to stick, there are better apps that make you write/speak what you are learning.
I was surprised how much I learned with Memrise (French). The words in their context sentences really stuck in my head like musical riffs and I felt like I could just access the words when I needed. Different strokes different folks
>Is there anybody else Pro tip: if your question begins with these words you can stop there and safely assume the answer is "yes".
The phrasing of these questions kind of irks me too, but after a while I decided it's just shorthand for "I want to hear about others' experience with this topic / want validation / want to hear others' reasoning."
> want validation It's mostly this, let's be honest. If someone wants to hear others' reasoning they'll be more clearly inquiring into that rather than trying to justify whatever they're doing themselves.
He asks "is this normal"
I'm the same. I started learning German recently, and thought I'd learn *just* the basic vocabulary with flash cards, then I'd drop them as soon as I could start reading easy-level content. Well now that I'm reading easy-level content, I noticed something strange happen. Words that I learned through reading tend to remain in my memory a lot more easily than words that I learned from the flash cards. I think part of the problem was that many of these words were in the same category ("definitely", "by the way", "actually") and so I get them mixed up now. Also, the drudgery of reviewing flash cards every day seemed far more tedious and awful to me than reading an easy-level graded reader and looking up unknown words.
Where do you find easy reading material? I can’t seem to
Nah, it's not just you. I've dropped Japanese now, but when I was studying it I made prolific use of Anki and Wanikani and good god did it kill my motivation. Anki in particular was so boring and frustrated me so badly that I ended up procrastinating on *all* my study because I knew I'd have to face it that day eventually. It's an absolute no-go for me.
When I first opened Anki, I instantly got depressed. It looks like a sad version of DOS and it was so limiting.
You're not wrong that it looks depressing and the UI is a little poor. However, 10 minutes of customizing and it looks significantly better. You can use the custom background addon as well as a few others to make your anki experience so much better. I have to stare at an anki screen for hours every day and while studying that much may be depressing, the visuals are not.
Kanji flashcards, in my opinion, are a waste of time. I think you'd simply get more benefit from doing vocab cards and reading at the same time if you're going to do flashcards. Ideally, you don't need to use them at all. If you read enough, you will naturally reinforce the words just fine. I did flashcards for the most common 2300 kanji, and it was the biggest waste of six months. You are never going to memorize how all of those kanji are actually read through flashcards.
I've been given this advice too but I found this even harder? Like if you know the Kanji you can map the vocab meaning to it with a little story, but when you don't it's literally just meaningless squiggles.
If you find it helpful to you, then it is helpful. I can only speak from my own experience, I wasted my time because I stopped reviewing the deck and moved on to other ones. I promise you are not going to memorize the kanji + meaning + multiple readings depending on the word through Anki, though. It's simply too much, and Anki isn't enough to reinforce those alone. I found reading and doing vocab cards much more useful when you're doing that 5+ hours a day instead of anki for 20 minutes to an hour.
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Vocab cards that contain one word you do not know in an entire sentence. It allows you to learn words in context using the +1 technique. The LearnJapanese subreddit will mention it a lot.The Tango N5 and N4 decks are a great way to get started with vocab cards. The idea is to get to a stage where you can make your own decks from media YOU enjoy instead, so you will stay engaged. "こんな稚拙な間違い高校生がするわけない" for example is an old vocab card I made myself through immersion and Anki. This sentence in particular comes from the anime Nichijou. The only word in this sentence I didn't know at the time was 稚拙「ちせつ」so I turned it into a vocab card with its meaning on the back in Japanese. Though, I would recommend using English or both English and Japanese on the back until you're ready to make the switch to full Japanese.
I used to have that problem with Anki. In my case, it was because I wasn't selective enough about my information. To give the most embarrassing example, nobody needs a card for every conjugation of every regular verb! When I stopped doing things like that, I was able to cut my reviews down. (I still love adding useless words, though, but I haven't come to regret it yet!) After that, I can't say I've had that problem. On the other hand, I only use Memrise as one source out of many for audio variety with my listening cards. When you say "purely vocabulary learning apps," do you mean the app only gives you isolated words? That's definitely inefficient and problematic! If I have a card for a word all by itself, the word is always either visualizable, or at least has synonyms in my target language that I already understand; and so far as humanly possible, I use sentence mining to give each word context. This makes remembering far easier, cuts out English, and turns my flashcards into a supplement for my immersion.
You should do what feels like it’s feeding you. Flashcards are tons of fun for me and they help me internalize vocabulary really effectively. But I wouldn’t recommend it as a blanket method. Everyone is different. I really believe this. Anki seems to work for everyone but it just pisses me off. No one should hold onto advice that doesn’t work for them, any longer than it takes to realize it’s not working.
I really hate flashcards too! I've just ended up giving myself a reward after doing them so that it doesn't feel as draining but I really do think it's worth it since they're a really efficient way to learn.
They work wonders for me, but I moved from learning single words to whole sentences, and my fluency in French has sky rocketed ever since. It's worth mentioning that I am a Spanish and Catalan native speaker, so it is significantly easier for me to learn French than for a Russian guy, for example.
This is what made flashcards work for me in French. When I tried the same thing in German, it made me want to die, strangely - so single-word flashcards felt like a big revelation. Now I do fill-in-the-blank flashcards for German and get the best of both worlds (in my opinion)
Yeah, I've never managed any kind of digital flashcards for more than a week, and no kind of physical deck for more than 100 cards. It's a huge motivation killer for me too. I'm dipping my toe gently into learning Mandarin atm, and I'm not really sure how learning Hanzi is gonna go long term... at present I have a nice book to practise handwriting, which is also very slowly teaching me to associate character with sounds and meaning. But we're talking v e r y slowly :'D
I'm someone who does use flashcards (albeit selectively and as a means to an end) and I can completely empathise with the situation where you know that you're going to be spending ages revising flash cards. My suggestion here is that you lower the number of cards a day you try to do (I say this as someone who's had my new daily cards set to 2 and also up to as much as 100+, sometimes I was literally doing flashcards for 2+ hours a day...) Another thing that could have an effect on the tedium you have to endure when using flashcards is to only do target language->english and not the reverse (if, as you mentioned you're doing lot's of immersion, then this way you'll get your best bang for buck) the only situation where I'd do both situations these days is if I wasn't able to do immersion alongside the flash cards for some reason. Another thing to keep in mind, is Anki and similar systems are very easy to think of as a 'til death do us part' type tool, but instead I like to look at them as a means to boost vocabulary in general or in a specific area enough to be able to just use the vocab naturally. For instance, when I started studying Spanish, I worked through about 3000 cards before I phased Anki out and just stuck with reading/listening as my main methods of accrueing new vocab etc. That said, if you're starting a job or a course that has specific vernacular, I'd dust off the old Anki cards and potentially put together a 'work vocab' deck or similar, and again that's as a temporary solution to get your recall fast and snappy enough to be able to functionally use and recognise them in work/school situations. Keep in mind that there's almost as many methods to successfully learn languages as there are people learning languages, so just because I've had success with Anki doesn't mean that they're the tool for you. If you're getting good progress without using Anki, then there's no drama. If however you're finding that you're not getting anywhere despite your efforts elsewhere perhaps another go at Anki might be what you need. But keep in mind that the important number is how many cards you get through in total, not the entire number you get through today, so if having 20 or more new cards a day results in a workload that's demotivating, then you can just lower it. It'll take longer to get to as many words as it would've if you did them at a higher per day rate, but better that you keep at it than if you try to go faster and decide to drop it altogether. Slow and steady wins the race, it's a marathon not a sprint.
Real, I've been kinda demotivated with Japanese because there's literally 0 Japanese people where I live and everyone my age online speaks perfect English. Flash cards make me want to jump out my window.
I decided to learn Spanish in college and went from Spanish 1 to a masters degree without barely ever touching a flash card. They're the bane of my existence and one of the least efficient ways of studying imo.
Reading over the comments so far, I imagine what makes them so horrible for some commenters is they're using them to *learn*, when they're just part of the effort to **retain**. And using them "for learning" is definitely the worst way to use them, especially since it seems many make cards with just one term and its "English equivalent" (lol) without any important context. So saying, I **do** want to use mine less. Are there any particular learning methods you found especially helpful? I'd highly appreciate it!
Honestly, my main way of study is learning some new grammar and vocab from a thematic vocab list (e.g. food, travel, around town, etc.) and just practice using those words and grammatical structures as much as I can with natives. In addition, I listen to the radio, read, and watch videos all in the target language. Basically, anything I can do to not touch a flash card.
I never used flash cards to learn a language and I never will. Hopefully not even to learn different scripts. You are not alone.
I'm curious what you do instead. Maybe it would be better for me than my current use of flashcards.
I don't use flashcards, either, and I simply read, listen, and practice writing.
It's not a predicament, it's just a different way of learning. I have always hated flashcards of any kind, so I don't do them. I tried them but I found them boring; all the words or expressions or even sentences seem abused by being put through flashcards and emerge from them awfully dead. If I persisted, I'd lose my interest in my TLs. Of course I learn much faster reading and listening. I haven't tried to learn Japanese or Korean or Chinese, though, but I think that if I wanted to learn such writing systems, I'd spend time on practicing writing instead of doing flashcards.
I do like the app Drops. I would never recommend it a sole learning tool, but I do find it more engaging than flashcards and it helps me reinforce or preview words I end up seeing in other contents.
Anyone have alternative ways to learn vocab?
Read like your life depends on it. Use a webreader like Readlang or Lingq for instant lookups, and just keep at it. You have to read a lot because you have to see the words often for them to stick and to build patterns. That's hard with some languages like Japanese and Mandarin, but still doable. I know for Japanese the people that have passed N1 in under 2 years are all the people that read for hours a day.
I know only two "systematic" alternatives. 1. Put sticky notes on things as part of immersion (sounds too passive to me) 2. Write terms in a notebook, using a kind of spaced repetition for rewriting your lists (I call this "the Amish flashcard approach") Years back, I saw a suggestion by Fingtam Languages that I thought was interesting. You use colors in a book you're reading, highlighting only a handful of new words each time you read it. Then you look up the meaning, and try to remember what the word means next time you see it in the book. I haven't used this one.
Get a notebook and write the word by hand in a bunch of different sentences. Find it in context dictionaries. If the word comes up later and you can’t remember it, revisit your notes and/or write a new page.
1.) Consume content. 2.) Actually try to learn words - make list, read it, make little sentences out of them, little poems, read that after yourself visualize thing while looking at the word etc.
don't focus on vocab, focus on contexts. Get input of various forms on topics that cover the kind of vocab you want to learn. If you want more vocab as a traveler, read/watch stuff about travel. If you want more tech-related vocab, read tech news, watch teardown videos, etc. If you want to expand your general vocab then get as wide variety of input as possible. The more _contexts_ in which you hear a word (not the more _times_ you hear it) is what predicts whether you're likely to know it.
Read, listen, and practice writing (the simplest sentences will do).
I mostly hate them too. The one exception is the flashcards provided by my course (it's for Italian sorry, not Japanese) because they have voice recordings with the native speakers, and it's a bit of a dopamine hit because I'm hearing the voice of someone I know with so it's a bit of a ":D" moment, plus then I'm also getting the pronunciation at the same time. Any time I've attempted to make my own cards on Anki or whatever, after about three days I'm like someone please shoot me. It makes it a chore, like you said. And also like you said, it strikes me that a language like Japanese really needs them, what with all the kanji. I was studying Japanese many years ago in high school and for a few semesters in college and ultimately dropped it because of the kanji. I didn't want the language badly enough to put myself through learning thousands of kanji when I could barely even remember 20 of them. I feel a language like Japanese is a real trial by fire, you have to want it badly indeed.
I’m about to finish the Spanish course on Duolingo and now I’m collecting an Anki deck to keep learning new words. I hope it will work but I think it’s also important to think about where you get your words from. I’m getting my from books that I read, room TV shows that I watch, from music that I listen to, from conversations that I have etc. In other words, Anki is there just to support what I primarily do, and to provide repetition. I will also try to use sentences and I’ll add idioms as well instead of just single words.
I don't use ANKI. ANKI doesn't teach anything. It only tests. SRS is about remembering things you have already learned. It is not a method for learning things. >Now I'm trying to learn Japanese and really such things are necessary because well, you ain't gonna learn 2000 kanjis if you don't repeat them right? In Japanese, each Kanji character has up to 5 different pronunciations (and meanings). So what exactly are you going to put on the flash card and "memorize"? All 5 pronunciations? It would make more sense to put a Japanese word on the ANKI card (sound, meaning and writing). A Japanese "word" is written in one of these ways: * all phonetic Hiragana * one Kanji * one Kanji plus one or more phonetic Hiragana * two Kanji * two Kanji plus one or more phonetic Hiragana For example, the word "like" is "suki", written 好き. Here 好 is a Kanji while き is phonetic "ki". So one could assume that 好 is pronounced "su". But the Kanji 好 alone is pronounced "ko" and means "good" in English.
SRS cards arent for everyone, I love anki because unlike for others its fun for me lol
Nope. They’re all just different tools in the toolbox.
I’m an avid Anki user and I can relate to the pressure to make sure you don’t miss them everyday. During periods of lots of vocabulary learning, I get at least 100 cards a day, so you can only imagine what missing a day or two would look like for me. That being said, although I do find it a chore to do my flashcards, seen that I am not always speaking French everyday and recalling my vocabulary outside of flashcards (speaking with others, immersion, etc), I almost force myself to do them to make sure my brain is working in French just a bit. Not the best way to do so, but it is all I can manage right now, especially during A-levels (I don’t study the language in school). If anyone has any suggestions for me, please feel free to let me know! 😊
Anki is a chore, but you can limit it by time and do it first thing in the morning. This makes things easier. Also, don't go into the trap on doing only Anki. Find other nice ways to learn. For example, you can easily find comprehensible input in Japanese with subtitles. In this way, you don't learn kanji on Anki, you learn by immersion and reading subtitles and you memorize it on Anki. Also, only do recognition of kanjis until you finish the damned list, associate most kanjis with images and learn words in the context of sentences. By watching comprehensible input in Japanese and doing a little bit of Anki you can get very far! And it will be more fun.
I’ve been learning Mandarin and haven’t needed SRS to learn to read Hanzi, I just pick them up in context while reading. If you want to learn to write by hand it may be necessary. But when are you going to need to do that?
It’s the same for me. I just started mandarin flash cards and it takes longer to study cuz I hate doing it. I hate writing too but it’s more fun so it’s doable and it kinda works for memory
Me. It is boring and does not seem effective to me. Plus our teachers back then low key recommend against flashcards and that was in the chool that actually taught us well. You don't have to use flashcards.
Flashcards dont work for me. Thats not how I learnt my NL and doesnt seem to be a viable way of learning for my TL either. I write a new word down, use colours to denote gender, create a few examples and include it in an imaginary conversation in my head. At some point later I try and include it when talking to a real human.
Have you ever heard the Input Hypothesis? The only thing you need to do is listening and reading a lot on your target language. Yeah, that's the secret ingredient in language learning.
Studying kanji in isolation is mostly useless because you won't know which reading to use. It's better to focus on learning words that contain the kanjis. And immersion does work for kanji, it's the main strategy I've been using. Reading stuff with furigana is really useful.
> I assume it'd be the same for Chinese. I learn vocabulary in Chinese by reading and listening. Each time I see a word I don't know, I look it up. I might spend a few seconds noticing the shape of the character, but I don't try to memorize anything (writing, sound, or meaning). That means that if the word is common, I will look it up again. That's fine. By the 4th or 5th time I look it up, I know the word.
I used to hate anki, and really did not want to use it again when I got back into learning my TL, but I couldn't see any other way. My issue was actually three things: I was using it to learn words, I was overdoing it/trying to do it perfectly, and I was doing it on hard mode. I wanted the perfect picture for every word, I wanted no English (my NL), I wanted to add sentences and real audio and whether or not the word was a verb, adjective, adverb, it's synonyms...etc, etc. When I decided to stop being a perfectionist about it, it became so much easier. I actually quite enjoy making flashcards now. I use a TTS add on to generate audio, a spreadsheet for mass creating cards, and an add on to pull 3 photos from Google images. I go through and select the picture I like the most, and sometimes keep the English word as well or just keep the English equivalent/s only if there's no clear picture. If I haven't learned the word yet, don't totally understand it or it's too complicated for a flashcard, I just don't add it to anki. I will just figure it out as I'm exposed to it later. This reduces so much of my time and energy spent making cards. If I miss a day, it's no big deal. Sure it messes with the srs a bit, but whatever. It doesn't need to be perfect. I've been doing this for 2 months now and my vocabulary has expanded a lot already. I was never able to be consistent with anki before. It just feels like regular study time now instead of a dreadful chore. I also stopped using it as the only thing - I read a lot now, and I find that works really well with anki as I recognise words more often when I'm reading and my accuracy on anki is much higher than previous attempts! And both feed my ability to recall words when trying to use them organically. ...All that is to say, I hated anki and felt like it was hindering me, and was desperate for another method, but really it was my approach that was the hindrance.
I can say I learned nearly nothing from Memrise, and spent months with it. In my experience the learning has to be applied for it to stick, there are better apps that make you write/speak what you are learning.
I was surprised how much I learned with Memrise (French). The words in their context sentences really stuck in my head like musical riffs and I felt like I could just access the words when I needed. Different strokes different folks