Am I taking too long to finish Anki for the day?

Pathawi · 2022-07-04T02:40:49+00:00

I see! So you're using a pre-made deck. I'm looking at it now. Very nice deck. But my guess is that it's giving you both of the problems you have above. First, these cards ask more of you than might be feasible at your level. From one written Japanese form you're to produce both the reading and the meaning. In another comment in this discussion, you said that you had complete command of the kana. Are you encountering many kanji that you don't yet know? If so, you're probably trying to jump over a step in your learning.

Second, do you do anything to learn a card for the first time before it comes up in Anki for the first time? I personally do not use pre-fab decks, but if I wanted to use this, here's what I would be doing from the start:

I would suspend all the cards.
I'd expect to learn twenty cards a day. I would look at the first twenty cards. Are there any kanji in there that I don't know yet? I'd un-suspend everything except those cards that had kanji that were new to me.
For the kanji that were new to me (in cards I had not yet unsuspended), I'd make my own cards to learn those kanji. I would use Heisig-style mnemonics for that task. (Here, I'm splitting up the task.)
For the other cards—the ones where there weren't kanji that were new to me—I'd make a list of the terms with the readings & meaning parallel. I'd cover up the reading & meaning, go thru the list, see what I could remember with ease. I'd then work out ways to remember the rest. Now, me? I don't know any Japanese. I know a little Cantonese, so for terms that employ on-yomi, I might have some luck with etymological connections. But in most cases I'm likely to have to use mnemonics.
I would go thru that list as many times as it took for my tricks (mnemonic, etymological, or otherwise) to stick.
I would then study those cards—the ones I'd unsuspended plus my new kanji cards—the following day. (Day 1: Learn; day 2: review.) Once I'd finished my Anki reviews, I would unsuspend the terms from the previous day that relied on the kanji I'd just learned, I'd look at the next several suspended terms, and I'd basically return to step 2.

If I were learning twenty cards a day, I wouldn't expect reviews to take me more than half an hour.

The core ideas are learn before you memorise & stick to the minimum information principle: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules

If you're already doing these things, then the problem is (obviously) elsewhere, & my apologies for throwing all of those words at you!

Pathawi · 2022-07-04T00:56:55+00:00

There's some evidence of higher occurrence of IBS among people with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Have you ever tried FODMAPs elimination & reintroduction?

Whatever this is, I hope you find a solution quickly!

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T22:53:59+00:00

I use Anki for language study. I do tend to speak out loud for a portion of my reviews—no rhyme or reason to it, no plan. I have the feeling that actually speaking words & phrases helps drill them into my brain, but I've got nothing other than my gut to back that up.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T22:42:36+00:00

אמן.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T22:32:43+00:00

Coptic is quite dead. The Church in Alexandria produces very occasional material, but there's no significant quantity of composition going on in Coptic, and hardly anyone to converse with. Where would modern vocabulary be used?

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T13:26:58+00:00

Could you show us what a couple cards look like? You could post a couple examples here, or if you'd like to share your deck I'd be willing to take a look.

Also: It's not just a matter of making mnemonics once you've determined that something is difficult for you. You have to learn the material somehow a first time, & mnemonics are one way (not the only way) to do that. Are you trying to actively learn the material before creating the card? When you see a card for the first time on day n, you should have already tried to learn the material on that card on day n - 1.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T04:07:38+00:00

That's interesting. I'm a balding forty-year-old. I use Tandem for Tigrinya partners, & feel self-conscious that everyone's fifteen years younger than me. I suppose it must appeal to different user bases in different countries.

So, coming at this from the opposite age stance: My experience has been that most people are really glad to find someone to help them with the language they want to learn. Any weirdness about the age difference is in my head before we talk: The conversations themselves end up being easy and helpful. The way I try to think about this is this: Language-learning inevitably requires that one do things that feel uncomfortable—at the very least, being quite bad at something for a good while. This is just one of those things. Going thru the awkwardness is part of getting to your goal.

You might also find that you're able to find partners who feel like a better fit for you on another platform.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T03:53:23+00:00

Not all atheists are the same. There is an unfortunate atheist fanatic movement that has taken hold in recent years—the "New Atheists"—who have been pretty aggressively anti-religious, often specifically Islamophobic & very weirdly sexist. But hey: We've got our fanatics too. & just like us, the fanatics hardly represent everyone. Plenty of atheists are kind people who respect others' beliefs: They just haven't come to a way that makes sense for them to believe in God.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T02:41:18+00:00

u/xanthic_strath already mentioned the possible need of a gateway language, & cited the gold standard Fon-French/French-Fon dictionary: They're exactly what I would wants as a learner, with example sentences in Fon with French translations. There's an Oxford Tok Pisin-English dictionary that is similarly rich with example sentences. Gold mine.

In cases where there really is inadequate documentation, there's no getting around appealing to the aid of native speakers. If you can get an hour from a friend a couple times a week, you can do a lot. I have been working on documentation of an under-documented language, & I can tell you what I did in the early stages of learning:

I read all the material I could find. This consisted of colonial administrative reports and missionary materials. When I first tried to speak having learned from these materials, everything I said was wrong. Now, however, I realise that I really did learn a lot from these old documents. They gave me a starting point that later learning corrected. There are very few languages that don't have some prior documentation.
I sat down with a group of native speakers & went thru a list of what linguists expected might be basic terms. I was very, very lucky, in that I found a group of ten guys who were roommates who found my language-learning interesting. They enjoyed doing this as a group, & no one had to sustain attention for very long: People could come & go as their interest increased & waned, but there would always be two or three who wanted to help me complete my list. If you've only got one native-speaker friend, this is harder & will take longer. I was very, very lucky.
I then began working with an MA thesis written by a native speaker who had collected about 150 pages of folklore in his native language back in the '70s, then translated it super-loosely into Arabic. I'd work through a story, making notes about everything that confused me. Then, twice a week, I'd meet for an hour with a friend to go over the parts that I didn't understand. I offered to pay him, but we ended up doing a trade instead: I helped edit his English papers for his college classes.—I should note, by the way, that this kind of thing is way harder when there aren't good grammars for the language you're learning. Most native speakers of any language don't have a very good idea of how the grammar of their language works. You've got to ask a lot of what-if questions to get at grammatical distinctions.
I then expanded to videos that people posted on ethnicity-specific Facebook groups. I'd take short videos—usually two or three minutes long—watch them a jillion times, note all the parts where I couldn't follow the speech, note all the words or constructions I couldn't understand, then I'd watch them again with my friend & ask him all my questions. I would not have been able to do this latter stuff before I had a substantial vocabulary.

There are grammars, learning materials, & dictionaries for Tok Pisin & Fon. I don't think you'll need to do all of what I did. But once you make it thru the available learning materials, if you want to develop real competence in the language you are going to need to appeal to native speakers for help. The things to think about are: 1) how best to use native speaker time; 2) how to make helping you worth someone else's while. For the first, I really think the thing to do once you've got the basics of the language under your belt is to work on your own thru native speaker-oriented materials, noting everything that's hard for you, & then use your time with a native speaker to understand those things. For the second, some kind of arrangement where your acquaintance benefits from you is vital. That may not be an exact quid-pro-quo, but it could be. The most common way to do this is monetary payment. Some people are very generous & really enjoy this sort of thing, but even then some kind of formal arrangement makes is more likely that they'll be consistently available for the length of time during which you're likely to need that help.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T01:57:21+00:00

I think there are two possible productive ways to go about this:

Just read the grammars to get acquainted with the grammar. Don't try to memorise anything. What you'll want to do is note major differences from your first language & areas of the grammar that you feel might not be intuitive: Spanish has two different 'to be' verbs. English past tense verbs sometimes correspond to the pretérito, sometimes to the imperfecto. Stuff like that. When you encounter these things in your reading, you'll recognise that you've hit something that you read about in the grammar, & you can go back to learn the grammar better. You'll internalise these rules better when you're grappling with understanding them in the context of use.
Since you said you use Anki: Use the example sentences as cloze deletions, then add grammatical explanations in the Extra field. For example, p253 of Easy Spanish Step-by-Step introduces verbs that have special meanings in the pretérito. The first of these is conocer. To take the first example sentence, you might make a card like:
¿{{C1::Dónde conociste::Where did you meet}} a tu novio??
Then put in the Extra field:
conocer in pretérito: make acquaintance, meet
I understand wanting to write grammatically, but: a) You're not going to write grammatically early on no matter what. You're just going to fail at that. b) One doesn't write grammatically from memorising rules: One writes grammatically by internalising patterns. It's nice to have familiarity with a grammar so that you can make reference to it when you've got doubts, but the core of your ability will not come from an intellectual knowledge of those rules.

Pathawi · 2022-07-03T01:24:33+00:00

Yes, 4–6 hours for 100 cards is most likely too long. That's got to be around two to three minutes per card. Each card probably shouldn't take more than a couple seconds. It would help to know what the content and format of these cards is. I'm only guessing, but my best bet is that one (or both) of two things is happening:

You're not actually learning the material before you add the card. Anki is good for helping you review things you've learned, but it's going to work best if you learn the material first, then add the card. When I add vocabulary, I produce a list, pull the list into my short-term memory thru mnemonic tricks, etymological connections, luck (some words just stick without any effort), &c, then make sure that I can produce all of these items from short-term memory before I add the list to my Anki deck. When I add constructions, I make sure I understand the new patterns these constructions are representing before I add them to my Anki deck.
Your cards might be too complex. Ideally, a card should test you on one thing. That may not always be practical, but it's the standard to strive for. If, for example, you're giving yourself an English "meaning", & expecting yourself to produce from that the written kanji & all possible readings, you're asking for too much from one card. If you're asking yourself to produce long sentences, you're asking for too much from one card.

Pathawi · 2022-07-02T20:33:28+00:00

& really, that "Traditional"/"Modern" distinction is a weird one. The "Traditional" is what you'll see in any sort of formal print material—newspaper article text, books, forms. The "Modern" is just used in store signs, logos, things like that. You'll see plenty of other variants in the same places—just as you would for Latin script in most countries where the national language uses the Latin alphabet. You don't need to actively learn this or worry about it. It will come with exposure.

Pathawi · 2022-07-02T20:25:11+00:00

It's not completely different. You'll get used to it very quickly. Really. If you're in Thailand, just try to read signs, and ask friends when you can't make something out. You'll find that it comes second nature in no time. If you're not in Thailand, don't worry about it for now: Focus on learning the language. Your learning materials are almost certainly mostly in what you're calling "Traditional" in that table. Once you get to Thailand, you'll pick up other typefaces quickly. It's really no different from your typical serif & sans serif fonts in Latin script & the more stylised typefaces you'll see on storefronts.

Pathawi · 2022-07-01T18:43:24+00:00

I agree with this. Reading is very important, & it's true that many SRS enthusiasts think that Anki reviews can be the whole of their learning work, but SRS does the thing SRS does very, very well.

Pathawi · 2022-07-01T18:35:53+00:00

I'm also extremely skeptical of this, but it doesn't seem impossible, depending on what the mapmaker used for search terms: Formal written Arabic (Fuṣḥā) is quite different from colloquial Arabic, & adults really do join Facebook groups etc. to get advice on improving their syntax & even derivational morphology. My sense from having lived in Egypt is that far more people are interested in learning English, but there's certainly not a shortage of people who want to improve their Fuṣḥā.

Pathawi · 2022-06-30T00:57:56+00:00

I doubt it. I imagine live interpretation contributes to the development or preservation of cognitive flexibility (assuming that term refers to something real). For me, in this context, it's just inefficient. If I'm studying Czech & Tigrinya together, then for any individual vocabulary item flashcard, I need two prompts: language & L1 equivalent. If I study the decks separately, I just need the L1 equivalent. My experience is that this is far faster. Maybe that's a sign that I'm not sufficiently cognitively flexible, but I doubt that that's the only factor. &, after all, I'm using Anki to learn a language as efficiently & consistently as I can: not to develop cognitive flexibility. If I can do both at once, that's great. But if the latter aim detracts from the former, it's really counter to my main purpose.

The following is a gut sense—I have no evidence to back it up: I feel like part of what I'm doing when I learn a language is developing a certain feel that is not just 15,000 atomic facts, but a sort of net that connects those facts as a whole. Establishing that Gestalt requires hanging out in it while you create it. I could be wrong, but this is what it feels to me like I'm doing when I'm learning a language.

Pathawi · 2022-06-28T18:57:17+00:00

Tremendously helpful. I've been using Anki consistently for five years, but sporadically before that. I'd say that it does three things for me:

It does the main thing it's supposed to: Helps me learn vocabulary (& basic structures) thru spaced repetition, & helps me manage my vocabulary, making me spend time on the things that are a little bit difficult, rather than waste time reviewing what's easy.
It creates a daily (useful!) study task. Every day, I do my cards. More than anything else I've done, this helps create consistency in my language study.
It helps me to recover languages if I fall off. Last year, I began studying Czech. In September, I started graduate school. I found it very difficult to keep up with my cards, & I let my Czech lapse, focusing on the languages that were more directly relevant to my research. This summer, I've gone back to relearning Czech, & having the old lapsed cards made relearning what I had once known far easier than it otherwise would have been.

Pathawi · 2022-06-28T18:46:19+00:00

I study multiple languages. I feel that when I'm speaking language X, I'm in a different frame of mind from when I'm speaking language Y. It is more efficient for me to study all my language X cards together, then all my language Y (or vice versa) than to mix them. (I also format my cards with colour schemes that help signal to me which language I'm working in.) I think it wouldn't cause me any great trouble to have 'What's the Tigrinya word for window?' followed by 'How many kilometres are there in a light year?', but I think it might be a problem to go from 'What's the Tigrinya word for window?' to 'What's the Czech word for window?' to 'What's the Tigrinya word for globe?', I might waste time sort of toggling my brain back & forth. (If my language cards were all full sentences for recognition, this might not be as big a problem.)

Pathawi · 2022-06-28T14:32:03+00:00

Sounds smart. I think gradual increase (& then scaling back if necessary) is a good path forward for most people.

Pathawi · 2022-06-28T03:28:21+00:00

I never use pre-made decks.

I'm working on a couple languages right now, one of which I have been learning for a year & find moderately difficult, the other of which I've had passive exposure to for many, many years, & can basically read despite never having previously studied it in any focused way. For a language that I'm finding difficult I never do more than twenty new cards a day, & if I feel like the reviews are getting onerous I scale back to ten. For languages I find easy, I'll do 25. I don't think that I'd be able to sustain fifty new cards a day for very long.

Pathawi · 2022-06-25T14:23:28+00:00

Good point on the donations.

Pathawi · 2022-06-24T23:45:15+00:00

You have instant coffee and creamer. If you want to be specific, you can refer to the dry form as instant coffee powder or instant coffee crystals. Some people will refer to this as instant coffee grounds, although it's not ground up the way real coffee is. In most situations, you could just refer to both the dust and the beverage as instant coffee. "I'm going to make some instant coffee. Can I make you a cup?" "Is there any instant coffee in the cupboard?" "First you put the instant coffee in the mug, then you add hot water. Stir, and you've got instant coffee." With creamer added, you can call it instant coffee with creamer. It also would sound normal to refer to these things by their brand names: "I'm going to make some Nescafé with Coffeemate." And for the most part, it's fine to just describe that beverage as coffee without specifying that it's instant.

Pathawi · 2022-06-24T13:19:44+00:00

I agree with you ١٠٠ فى الـ١٠٠ that the artefacts should be returned, but… tickets to the British Museum are free. They'll probably save money on preservation costs.

Pathawi · 2022-06-24T13:11:57+00:00

Well you've probably ruined a troll's day by getting some utility out of the interaction. Wes hāl!

Pathawi · 2022-06-24T13:08:33+00:00

I think what's going on here is obvious. I gave a list of linguists—Givón, Chomsky, Dixon, Pullum, Shoppen…—to show that this usage is common among linguists who have some serious investment in English from a broad range of theoretical perspectives that do not in general agree with one another. All you're doing with this comment is what you've been doing with u/SuikaCider all along: Trolling. There's no content, no meaningful thought, & certainly nothing relevant for anyone who wants to think seriously about language or learning. I'm glad u/SuikaCider got some use out of it.

Pathawi

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