How I Use Anki
Writing about my experience with Memrise and Duolingo compared with Anki made me think about the different ways I use them. As I mentioned before my recall of words learned with the first two apps is mostly confined to when I'm actually using the app. Because of this I keep changing my mind as to whether they are at all useful.
But the words I'm learning with Anki are easier for me to recall in real life away from my phone or computer. Now my Anki deck is very simple, I have not added any images or mnemonics. But it's important to know that I'm using Anki in combination with the book of 625 words. And I'm only adding them page by page as I work through the book. Currently I'm on page 8 covering 48 words.
Every day I look at the images that I'm working on and recall the relevant words. And every couple of days I add a new image. As well as that I bring to mind real memories, feelings and thoughts when I'm reviewing and recalling. For example I think of the real dogs I've known when I recall the word собака.
Later in the day when I use Anki I bring the images from the book and my memories to mind as I search for the right word. I'm trying to make it so that my knowledge of the words is not only triggered by the way it's spelled. But that I'm strengthening the connection between the word and mental images, memories and feelings.
I think I'll create a new deck with only images because that would be quite efficient. There are 88 images in total (each image is a scene that covers multiple words).
What brought you to make recall cards? If the input hypothesis is to be believed, the role of the SRS should only be to make your immersion more comprehensible, not to teach you how to produce the language. If you switch your cards from recall to recognition, you could learn more words per day and with a higher retention, because they are easier, making your immersion material more comprehensible quicker.
ReplyDeleteHi,
DeleteWhat do you mean by 'recall' vs 'recognition'?
Since this post I've changed how I use Anki. At the moment I am loading an image from the 625 words book and remembering the 5 to 7 relevant words for each 'scene'. I'm not sure whether to continue with individual words (no images or mnemonics) per card.
I've stopped using Duolingo and Memrise completely.
Thanks for leaving a comment btw, I hope to grow a community where Russian learners can help each other.
How long have you been learning Russian and what methods do you use?
I think I understand what you mean now.
DeleteRecall = Being able to say the word when relevant.
Recognition = Being able to remember/understand when hearing it or reading it.
I guess this is partly to satisfy my ego, to feel like I'm doing something actively rather than just focussing 100% on input. The way I'm doing it now feels like it's a 50/50 split between recall and recognition.
You're giving me something to think about though.
I would say that I'm recognising and recalling the words I'm learning in the current matter more readily. Recognising more while watching videos or listening to streams and recalling words when I'm in real life.
Whereas the words I was learning to recognise while reading them in the apps (Anki, Memrise and Duolingo) did not seem to be recognised when listening to speech. They were confined to the app as far as I'm aware.
The way I see it it's a relatively small commitment to have recall and recognition of 625 words. After that I will reevaluate my approach.
I want to try and avoid the pronunciation issues that people have who focus heavily on reading over listening.
What are your experiences?
Yes, that's what I meant. I think that by focusing on recognition only you'll progress faster. Unless you live in Russia, there's no need to practice recollection now: once you've seen the words hundreds of times in your immersion, you'll be able to recollect them anyway. The phenomenon you are experiencing that you can only recognize words in your apps is totally real, it's called context-dependent memorization, but it's not as big of an issue as you think because you can only learn words in your immersion anyway. Even when you memorize the meaning of a word, your not really understanding the Russian nuance, but only a rough translation. In my eyes the point of Anki is to prime your brain to notice these words around, so that you can acquire their nuance faster. After seeing a word that you could only recognize in Anki 2 or 3 times in the wild, it will stick, because you needed that context around it. That has been my experience.
DeleteAs you said, for your first 625 words it doesn't really matter. Are you planning to do sentence mining after that? Are you aware of the new Migaku browser extension?
I'm not studying Russian, I've been learning Japanese for 10 months through immersion, but I'm researching all things language learning related. I make my Anki cards with the MIA (now Migaku) Anki add-ons, on average 12 a day. They are all recognition 1T sentence cards with word definition and word audio on the back. I think you can add audio too if you use the Migaku Dictionary add-on set up with Forvo, since it supports Russian.
I plan on switching to audio cards (audio sentence on the front, word definition on the back) in 3 months or so. Right now I'm focusing on reading. I think it's more efficient to focus on reading first and on listening later. Right now I'm doing 70% reading and 30% listening.
Sorry for this wall of text, feel free to ask more questions
Ok, that's interesting. Definitely something for me to think bout. In any case it doesn't seem like it will do harm to focus on this word list first for recall and recognition.
DeleteI've heard about sentence mining, it seems interesting. I've also thought about using https://ai.glossika.com which teaches language through whole sentences. I've seen some good reviews of it and it's been recommended for people that have some vocabulary and reading ability. I'll also look into LingQ.
The reason why I'm not reading much at the moment is that I want to avoid picking up bad pronunciation habits. But after speaking with someone else I wonder if a good compromise would be reading official subtitles for YouTube channels. For example the channel Easy Languages and Easy Russian feature official subtitles for all the languages that are spoken in their videos.
I think a good accent (or at least not a horribly bad one) is important to give confidence when speaking later on. I've seen people trying to speak English and quickly losing confidence when they're not sure if they're saying the correct words or just pronouncing them in the wrong way.
I will definitely check out Migaku, thanks for that!
Are you doing any shodowing or such things to make sure your pronunciations is good?
Don't worry about the wall of text, I really appreciate the tips you are giving me!
I haven't used Glossika or LingQ, only sentence mining from graded readers and content made for native speakers including subtitles and books. Once you know 1500 words it becomes totally doable. I've heard people saying that the theory behind LingQ is solid but it's not worth the money because you could do something similar on your own. Still worth checking out though.
DeleteRegarding pronunciation, I don't intent to practice it until I can comprehend the language. Since language is imitation, until I can mostly understand the language it doesn't make sense to try to speak or write, because I don't have anything to imitate. I'll worry about output once my comprehension is very high. That's what I did for English (I'm Italian) and it worked out.
You can totally read subtitles, in fact before I could read raw text, I used to split my immersion half in unsubbed content and half in subbed content. Now that I can read much better I don't use subs very often, but as I said all of my cards have native audio. I do one hour of listening to unsubbed content everyday, I think that should prevent my pronunciation from degrading to much due to subvocalization.
I also think that there's a difference between pronouncing something wrong and just having an accent. If I pronounce "bullet" as "ballet" it's a mistake, but if I say "bullet" with an Italian accent, or with a London accent instead of an American one, it's just an accent. I thought about doing shadowing for my English, but I realized that I don't have any interest in being mistaken for a native speaker. In fact I quite like my accent, I think it contains a lot of character and it's much better than the accents of other Italian people who didn't learn English through immersion. I think that in the end languages are just a mean to an end, which is communication. As long as I can understand everything and express myself in an articulate way, everything else is minutia.
I stumbled upon two Russian dictionaries for Kindle on the Migaku Discord server, one bilingual and one monolingual, they might come in handy to you if you'll ever read novels on a kindle: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/zwaqti5kwq81e/Russian+dictionaries+(mobi
I totally get where you're coming from. I was raised bilingually and I have an accent in both languages!
DeleteI know how I could 'fix' my accents. But like you, I don't want to because it makes me who I am.
Also, I agree with you. For me learning Russian is about being able to communicate, not pass a test or make people believe I'm native.
Thanks again for sharing your experience and for the link!