Why Language Learners Hate Anki

[Music] you've probably heard some statistic like that the first 600 words of a language make up 90 of the language or some crap like that and whatever it actually is doesn't even matter it's almost always touted as good news sure it's good news if you're trying to pretend that you speak languages that you don't or if you're okay with trying to find a simpler way of expressing almost every idea that you will ever have i mean i don't consider myself a poet but ask yourself honestly could you write and record this video at this speed in your target language didn't think so so assuming that you don't want to sound like a nine-year-old it's not good news it's bad news it means that even if you're immersing in a language for four hours a day there are still many words that a native speaker will know but which is an adult learner it would be almost impossible to get the exposure necessary to acquire those words in short this requires direct intervention [Music] and if you're anything like me you just can't make a habit of spaced repetition any spaced repetition whether it's anki quizlet memorize physical flash cards gold lists whatever the hell those are even just a notebook or a google doc it doesn't matter you never go more than a week using the thing every day so at this point it's not spaced repetition it's just a spaced waste of time the problem with all of those things is that they need to be used frequently for an extended period of time in order to work although just writing it down helps you'll say oh really in an ordinary novel there'll be between one and three words per page that i'm not familiar with that's like one to two percent of words and if for you it's more like five percent of words you might envy the position i'm in but remember this is unique words so let's assume we're talking about 400 unique words per book and let's be generous and say that if i read that book and then read another three books half of those words will appear frequently enough that i'll naturally acquire their meanings and that is outrageously optimistic and it assumes i'm reading close to a book a day but even so in those four books i've now seen 1600 unique words 800 of which will be lost on me and then completely forgotten meaning that the next time i see them in maybe six months time my understanding of those 800 words won't have improved and that is best case scenario no you need repeated exposure to words that don't occur frequently enough for you to get that repeated exposure naturally and it's not that you don't think the srs works you may firmly believe that it does work but that's not even the problem the problem is that for whatever reason you simply don't do it and i've figured out why option because some people just really hate anki and they're they're never going to not hate anki and so see i've believed in the srs for some time now and in that time i've tried everything anki notebooks physical flash cards random scribbles in workbooks and even just reading so much that i hoped to never have to use an srs and all of them only brought with them more problems for everyone that they solved like physical flashcards they worked for a time but i kept wanting to add increasingly complex review intervals which is kind of dumb when a computer can do that for you like am i learning swedish or reinventing the wheel and don't think that i hated anki just because i used vanilla ronky that is just plain disgusting white ariel narrow black size 6 font gross pleb anki no i had it set up properly so that at least i was looking at a decent font in a decent size and color and i've installed the add-ons that really just do what it should do by default and i've got the editor so that you can edit cards as you go like compared to vanilla ranki it's actually a pretty smooth setup but i've still never done the one thing that you really need to do with anki which is use it if you're happy just not using any kind of deliberate vocabulary building system then don't let me tell you what to do but don't try telling me that the point of learning a language is just to have fun and enjoy it i can't enjoy it when there are two words on every page that i don't know if that wouldn't bother you then you and i are simply bothered by different things anki is the simplest solution to my problem and i don't even hate it not once it's been cleaned up a bit and finally i realized that the problem wasn't that i hated anki the problem was that i was scared of it i realized that a couple of small flaws in my thinking were compounding to make anki seem like a deep dark pit a bottomless pit that to be spending time in was to be digging deeper and worse a pit where there were strict rules about what and what not to do i basically turned anki into my idea of hell [Music] if used in the way that a lot of people do use it technically anki is a bottomless pit say you come across 21 new pieces of language a day and add all of them but you keep your new cards seen per day set to 10 which is actually a lot and will start taking you more than an hour a day after a few months plus the time you spend adding cards if you were to keep that up for a year you'd then have 4 000 unseen cards despite having probably spent 500 hours on anki of course you could stop making cards but what counts here is the impression you'll get particularly in the first few months every day you see more cards you add more cards but if all that happens to cards that you know is that it goes longer before you see them again will this ever end as long as you're adding even one more card than your card scene you will literally never complete the deck [Music] of course if you're spending an hour a day in what feels like a bottomless pit it'd better be helping right you see because the srs is so counter to what many of us feel like doing on top of it feeling like it'll never end we can unwittingly give ourselves the idea that in order for it to be effective it needs to be used in a very particular way we don't want to use it incorrectly because then it will be pointless as well as endless sure both of these flaws of thinking might be simple enough to clear up once they're said out loud but that's just it until now they've only been vague feelings of discomfort not succinctly stated frames of mind that when placed neatly next to one another present an obvious solution i call the solution a 390 deck if you want to know where that exact number came from you'll have to check the original extended version of this video on patreon but a 390 deck is a deck of 390 cards completed at just two new cards a day which takes just over six months obviously you could make it a bit more than that but the point is to set a hard limit that is very achievable one that you can clearly see the end of in the near future with a 390 deck if you add just 13 cards a day for a month you're done adding cards and seeing only two new cards a day means that your reps should never exceed about 10 minutes a day again you can set it just a little bit higher and you may want to just in the first month so that you're not seeing the same cards over and over again but the point is to make it so achievable that it takes almost no time to do the other key feature of a 390 deck is that the cards can be whatever you feel is helpful you don't need to worry about whether you should be making monolingual or bilingual cards or whether they should have audio or pictures or anything it doesn't matter flash cards just remind you that a word or phrase exists until the next time you come across it it would even provide some benefit just to see words with no definition now you might be thinking that this doesn't solve the original problem because native speakers know thousands more words than we do not just 400 more that's true but the point of a 390 deck is to get someone who has had the same vague discomfort about an srs to just start using it in an unimposing way for just long enough that they start to feel the benefit for anyone who is going to try this i would not advocate thinking about what happens after the 390 deck starting and completing the deck is what's important but the ideal outcome is that as you make it a habit you start to enjoy it and reap the rewards if you don't think there can be a reward in learning so few words let's imagine that 100 of the learned words might account for a quarter of the previously unknown vocab in a book so what would have been 400 unknown words has now become 300 but due to the newfound comprehension of previously veiled meaning your overall comprehension your perception and connection to the entire story will significantly increase meaning that those remaining unknown words are just that little bit clearer in other words learning those 400 words will have a much greater result than just those words a 390 deck is large enough that you really should see a difference in your comprehension but also small enough that you can treat it like a trial if halfway through you don't think it makes a difference then you've spent a few hours learning that rather than hundreds of hours on the other hand if you complete the deck and you're down for more you can either just start another 390 deck to keep it simple or you can increase it very slightly to three cards a day for a whole year which is called a 109.5 deck if you recognized any of the sentiments that i expressed in the first half of the video then don't over do it a 109.5 deck is as much as i would recommend taking on because even that will add up to longer sessions towards the end of the year but also think of the difference it would make so remember if you want to see a very different version of this video from before it got youtubified it is available on my patreon let me know in the comments what your position on the srs is whether you love it or hate it i hope i've been able to help you with it and obviously subscribe [Music] wait that was actually more dramatic than i imagined

Channel: Days and Words

Views: 174,129

Keywords: language app reviews, best language learning apps, how to learn a foreign language, how to use anki to learn a language, how to learn a language with anki, matt vs japan, mattvsjapan, anki, ajatt, anki for learning english, anki learning japanese, anki duolingo, duolingo for japanese, duolingo for chinese, anki for chinese, anki chinese flashcards, how to use anki app, refold language learning, refold matt vs japan, does anki work, anki for language learning, how to set up anki

Id: KzNizwynP3o

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021